Invoking Kali

A common theme in my writing is vengeance for women.

The stories from real life that invade my consciousness on a daily basis, that feed my anxiety and depression, are left, for the most part, without justice. The file just grows bigger every day, and the message is repeated in an endless loop: if you are female (or dare to look like it, or act like it), you are something to be used. Even your pain and sorrow are commodities, as is every piece of your body. We like to go about our days behaving as if this isn't so. And then we catch a glimpse of the news, and we are reminded.

It's a wonder more women (and most men) aren't consumed by morbidly debilitating depression. How do we go on knowing how futile the struggle is? Some days, I don't.

On the other days, I stab and beat and kick and draw and quarter the perpetrators of injustice with tiny marks on a piece of paper (or a computer screen) like a goddess of vengeance. It isn't enough, but without it, I don't know where I'd be.

It isn't often that I have the opportunity to do something in the ugly, raw, real world from which I prefer to escape that will actually make a difference for even one woman caught in the violent machine of misogyny. But this morning, in my e-mail, an opportunity arrived.

The woman in the photos above (yes; both photos are the same woman) is Linda Loaiza.

FreeChoiceSavesLives.org offered me the opportunity to send a letter to top Venezuelan officials to demand a fair and timely trial for her torturer, the son of an influential Venezuelan who has so far been deemed beyond the law for what he did to Linda over the four months of her captivity in his apartment. A few months back, I sent a letter to the World Health Organization through FCSL and helped to end a Bush administration-engineered delay in adding drugs such as RU 486 to the WHO's List of Essential Medicines so that women around the world could have access to them. I believe my small part helped, and I hope it will help Linda, too.

There are details that I could not read, but the summary on the letter campaign page was enough to haunt me for the rest of my life.