Posted by Israeli guy on August 06, 2002 at 13:02:04:
The following is a quote from something I traced, that gave me an idea for this story. An interesting source regardless, BTW.
" ... Historians have been curiously silent on the fact that physical punishment involves touching human bodies. Historical actors, however, thought it important to distinguish not only between different types of criminals but different types of criminal bodies
...
decades after the whipping of females was outlawed in most Western jurisdictions, women continued to be executed. The 1954 committee's deliberations suggest that concerns about the visibility of the female body and its sensational exposure in the act of corporal punishment explain that paradox. The female about to be whipped was not simply an object of punishment: stripped to the waist or exposed with her skirts lifted, she was an abject, half-naked, sexualized object and the forced recipient not only of the whip but also of the male gaze. In contrast, the condemned woman stepped up to the gallows fully clothed and sometimes veiled.
As we will see, uncomfortable discussions about women's bodies exposed deeper anxieties about the civility of using criminals' bodies to imprint penal messages. Members of the 1937 and 1954 committees and the witnesses they called articulated feelings on matters that civilized people never raised in polite company. Finding the words to justify bodily punishment was difficult in the 1930s and even more challenging in the 1950s. In effect, committee members confronted the disturbing thought that sanctions meant to be salutary and didactic might actually be obscene and vaguely pornographic."
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lhr/19.2/strange.html
(ff whipping hanging)
Disobedience. I can't even tell what it really means. Is it me, others, is it meaningless ? I never went to school like white kids go. I don't know. I feel numb, empty, distanced. I don't want to live.
On the fields, down on the earth, in the few moments of rest we all, including me, get. I didn't get any water since morning, its part of the punishment. Eyelids fall heavily. Drifting.
She yelled like a trapped animal on her way to be butchered. I think that's how they saw it too. Held by men on both sides, the rope encircling the neck, the binding, the lifting, the kicking. She was so alive, so defiant, so active, as if the outcome would change. All I could do was watch her kick, and jerk for such a long time. Or was it long only because it hurt me almost as much as it hurt her ? My sister, my dear sister.
I want to cry but I can't.
They lift me off the ground, and push me to the pole on the edge of the field. I let them remove the top. My back is bare for the whip, but not only my back. Everyone is looking at my breasts. Everyone is there. The slaves, the white people, the children. They look, I close my eyes.
Whip
Master has done the first. My body shivers. I know my breasts jolted as I hear a man do that noise. I feel the blood pouring. I need some other pain to overwhelm the pain.
Whip
That noise. That noise of the master when he rapes me. I surrender to the pain of the rape. My body focuses on it now. Rape is harder than whiplash. The body feels good but ...
Whip
it is violated. As if someone pushed a finger covered in honey forcefully into my mouth. I have no body. This is not my body. They own my body ...
Whip
I can't hold the pain, its too much, I will burst. Oh please God stop it. Stop it. Just make it stop ...
Whip
I'm on the ground. Must have passed out. The cold water hard and brutal on my face as they revived me. He yells but I can't figure it out. My head falls on the ground. I dream of running away, so they'll catch me and hang me, like they did to ... and I know that it won't happen. I will live.
I want to cry but I can't
Israeli guy.