Be Careful What You Ask For: The Goddesses Might Be Listening

MEDIA MATTERS Be Careful What You Ask For: The Goddesses Might Be Listening GRACE POORE As she stands in line, walks the dog, drives to school, makes the bedshe remembers that she is not dead. Only waitincj. And what reminds her is the phantom spirit ofher selfwho stays hidden behind her dreams as she slips in and out ofmental prisons, planned rebellions, small acts ofsabotage. AU this while she plays dead so the abuser thinks he/she owns her thoughts, controls herfeelinrjs. Agame that is so conuincincj euen shejbrcjets that she is not dead. Between the states ofhe-ing and not be-ina resides this phantom spirit, her oum desire, unjathomed power, personified racje. Somewhere behind her uoice, her eyes, her dreams, She waits. A woman, terrorized and beaten, may need to lock up her shakti so she can be whather battererforces her to be. For this woman, to acknowledge her shakti could mean acknowledging the conflict between her Selfand who she has had to become in order to survive; between who she used to be and the woman she no longer recognizes as herself. Survival becomes an act ofbalancing life and death with little control over the quality oflife with the batterer. This article is about the making ofVoices Heard Sisters Unseen, a documentary about women negotiating many interlocking barriers as they [Meridians:feminism, race, transnationalism 2002, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 78-97]©2002 by Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved. 78 try to stop violence in their intimate relationships . Soundbites from the video are interspersed throughout the article to outline some of the issues raised in the documentary.1 Also included are producer 's journal notes kept during work on Voices to map the thought process behind the video and the frustrations of fund-raising for a project that kept falling between the cracks of funders' guidelines. The article concludes with an anecdote which gives this article its title. And the title, "Be Careful What You Ask For: The Goddesses Might Be Listening," is a way that this activist videomaker makes sense of how the video got made. In 1987, I began working for the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence on the national hotline for battered women. In less than six months, I received calls from a battered woman who was deafand another who was disabled and using a wheelchair. As a hearing woman without a physical disability working for an organization that provided training from the perspective of hearing people without disabilities, the safety plans and strategies for escape that I had been taught involved physical mobility and hearing communication. Training materials did not include what deafand disabled women were put through. This meantI had no clue as to how domestic violence played itselfout in the life ofa woman whose abusive partner kept food out of her reach in order to punish her for "misbehaving" and who denied her bathroom access ifhe was upset with her. It also meant grappling for an alternative checklist ofsafetyplans because there were women who could not call a cab to get to a shelter or phone the police for assistance because their mobility and access to communication were blocked by abusive soundbite... PEGGIE REYNA: Shewasnot married to the batterer but he was her boyfriend. For more than one year he spit in her face, he hit her, he choked her, he was seen and stopped several times by hearing people who then just went on their way and did nothing. The young lady went to the police and complained and signed charges against him, and nothing was done. He was not arrested and thirty days later, that young man came to her home and they began to argue. And he pushed her. And her mother who was in the kitchen, cooking, came to him. And she had a kitchen knife in her hand. And he attacked the mother and killed the mother. And then killed the young woman. When he was attacking her mother, the records show that she was trying to call but she got no response. So because she was deafand could not get the help, she died. And because he is also deaf, they used that as...