OUTDOOR READING AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
To contact the organizer of this event or get information on campus readings, write to us at info@rachelswords.org
On the third anniversary of Rachel Corrie’s killing, on March 17, 2006, the Princeton Committee on Palestine, together with a group of graduate students from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of International & Public Affairs, organized readings from those of Rachel’s journal entries and writings that had been made public and were available through the Rachel’s Words initiative. We applied for permission from the University to set up a microphone and speaker system in a central part of the campus, in the plaza outside of Princeton University’s Firestone Library. We asked for a permit to do outdoor readings on the plaza at midday in the hopes of drawing an audience of students on their lunch hour. We advertised the readings through flyers and announcements and circulated materials through university listservs concerning the controversy over the cancellation of the New York staging of My Name Is Rachel Corrie that spring. We also issued an open call for students and members of the community who would like to join in doing readings. We received permission for the event from the University and rented the audio equipment that was necessary through the university.
March 17, 2006 was a beautiful sunny Friday that suggested the arrival of spring. We set up our equipment at Firestone Plaza together with posters and written materials about Rachel Corrie’s life that we had prepared earlier in the week. The materials lay out a basic chronology of Rachel’s life and a detailed chronology of the events surrounding her death. We also had more general information about the ISM available for people to pick up. We set up at around 11.30am and began our readings at noon.
Graduate students from the Princeton Committee on Palestine began the program with a short description of Rachel’s life and death compiled from news reports. We then asked for a moment of silence in honor of Rachel’s memory. We then announced that the readings would begin. We had put together a binder with large-print copies of all of the writings that were publicly available and put them in chronological order. We initially had 10 readers assembled at noon. About two-thirds were students and one third were community members from the greater Princeton area. We continued the readings continuously, with each person doing about a 10 minute segment and then handing the binder to the next reader, from noon to 2pm. By the end of the two hours, we had had about 20 people participate in readings. Some arrived and spontaneously volunteered to read, some were from the second shift of readers who had signed up to participate. We cycled through all of the material we had approximately three times. We were happy to repeat the material in the hope that new passersby would be attracted and would be introduced to different aspects of Rachel’s words depending on when they passed through the Plaza.
We attracted an audience of those who were curious, those who had no idea who Rachel was but were moved by her words and wanted to learn more, and some who had scheduled to come to the plaza to watch the readings. We also attracted a handful of hecklers, but other members of the audience intervened to make such hecklers quiet down. We never interrupted the readings to deal with heckling and only had 2 or 3 such attempts at interruption.
At any given time we probably had an audience of about 3 dozen people, but over the course of the 2 hours the composition of the crowd shifted a lot so that we think we probably had close to two hundred people exposed to the reading in one way or another.
The readings were a moving experience for those of us who participated in the actual readings and for several members of the audience who thanked us for organizing the event. On a campus as apolitical as Princeton, I think we managed to reach some students who might never otherwise hear of Rachel’s story or the reality of the conditions that she encountered in Gaza. Her words are a powerful reminder of the hope, optimism and courage that students and young people can still bring to even the most hopelessly tangled conflicts. We hope that by exposing Princeton undergraduates to her words and her story we might inspire other young people to learn more about the plight of Palestinians and about ways that they can take action themselves and personally work towards peace and justice.
