My Name is Rachel Corrie

Taken from the writings of Rachel Corrie
Edited by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner

WHO     Rachel Corrie, twenty-three, American. (In the speech below, she is still a teenager.)

TO WHOM     The audience (see note on ‘Direct audience address’ in the introduction).

WHERE     Rachel’s bedroom. Olympia, Washington, USA.

WHEN     Some time before January 2003.

WHAT HAS JUST HAPPENED     The speech that follows comes close to the start of a play about the true-life story of Rachel Corrie. In January 2003, aged twenty-three, Rachel left home to join the International Solidarity Movement in Gaza. She was killed on 16th March 2003, when an Israeli bulldozer ran her down as she was attempting to protect a Palestinian home. The play is made up from extracts of her journals and emails. At this point in the story, Rachel is still at school.

WHAT TO CONSIDER

•	The extraordinary braveness of a young woman who is prepared to fight and die for what she believes in.
•	From an early age, Rachel was politicised. She held strong and passionate views about human rights.
•	Her trip to Russia is a seminal experience. It is after this that she develops her ‘wanderlust’.
•	The Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Take time to familiarise yourself with the arguments. It is hugely complex and, as it was for Rachel, not an easy thing to understand.
•	The play takes the form of one long monologue.

WHAT SHE WANTS

•	To introduce herself. Note how she identifies herself as the ‘outsider’.
•	To describe her need for experiences beyond the everyday.
•	To express her growing disquiet with things American.
•	To explain her restlessness.

KEYWORDS     naked     fire     belly     dirty     pretty     flawed     broken     gorgeous     awake     sob     home

NB     This play offers a number of other speeches from which to choose.

 

 

Rachel

Okay. I’m Rachel. Sometimes I wear ripped blue jeans. Sometimes I wear polyester. Sometimes I take off all my clothes and swim naked at the beach. I don’t believe in fate but my astrological sign is Aries, the ram, and my sign on the Chinese zodiac is the sheep, and the name Rachel means sheep but I’ve got a fire in my belly. It used to be such a big loud blazing fire that I couldn’t hear anybody else over it. So I talked a lot and I didn’t listen too much. Then I went to middle school where you gotta be cool and you gotta be strong and tough, and I tried real hard to be cool. But luckily, luckily I happened to get a free trip to Russia and I saw another country for the first time.

In the streets and the alleys it was an obstacle course of garbage and mud and graffiti. There was coal dust on the snow, everything was dirty. And they always said to us, ‘How do you like our dirty city?’ Oh, but it was so pretty with the little lights in the windows and the red dusk-light on the buildings. It was flawed, dirty, broken and gorgeous.

I looked backwards across the Pacific Ocean and from that distance some things back here in Olympia, Washington, USA seemed a little weird and disconcerting. But I was awake in Russia. I was awake for the first time with bug-eyes and a grin.

On the flight home from Anchorage to Seattle everything was dark. Then the sun began to rise, the water was shining, and I realised we were flying over Puget Sound. Soon we could see islands in that water, evergreen trees on those islands.

And I began to sob. I sobbed in all that radiance, in the midst of the most glorious sunrise I’d ever seen, because it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to make me glad to be home.