Feminist Studies , Summer 2004 v30 i2 p483(27)

The Medea Project: mythic theater for incarcerated women. Sara L. Warner.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2004 Feminist Studies, Inc.

[S]ometimes the stories take you and fling you against a wall sometimes

PERFORMANCE ARTIST AND SOCIAL ACTIVIST

Rhodessa Jones began conducting drama workshops with incarcerated women in the late 1980s. Inspired by the success of her one-woman show based on the lives of four inmates in her class, Big Butt Girls--Hard Headed Women, Jones decided to create an ensemble with the inmates at San Francisco County jail. She used as a model Jean Trounstine's theater workshop inside Framingham, Massachusetts, Prison for Women. (1) Never one to think small, Jones envisioned a troupe that would not only write and stage original works, but one that would perform in professional theaters for public audiences. She enlisted the help of Sean Reynolds, a social worker and health educator at the jail, and together they assembled a talented collective of artists and activists to work with the inmates, but it took three years to persuade the Sheriff's Department to allow incarcerated women to participate in a public performance. In 1992, the group staged its first production, Reality Is Just Outside the Window: The Tragedy of Medea Jackson, to a standing-room-only crowd at the Theatre Artaud in San Francisco. The performance was loosely based on Euripides's Medea, and Jones dubbed their experiment the Medea Project : Theater for Incarcerated Women. (2)

The decision to use Medea stemmed from the fact that a young woman in the theater workshop, who was incarcerated for infanticide, was being ostracized and taunted by the other inmates. Jones told the women the story of Medea and Jason and asked the group to interpret it in relationship to their own lives, to consider ways in which they were like Medea, but also different. She created a series of questions to guide their exploration of the myth and asked the women to write a piece--an autobiography, poem, song, or rap--each night for homework. The participants shared their responses with the group, and these writings formed the basis of what became the script for the public performance. What the inmates in the drama workshop came to realize, says Jones, is that everyone could relate to Medea in some way: "Medea killed her children in revenge because she loved a man too much.... As women, all of us women, we all love too much. We're more than willing to give over everything to a man." The inmates identified with the story, according to Reynolds, because of the way Medea "interacted with her children, with the men in her life. That's an important issue for women who are incarcerated, as it must be for all women," black or white, gay or straight. (3) In her groundbreaking study of the Medea Project , Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women, Rena Fraden suggests that the myth resonated with the inmates because:

Fraden identifies storytelling as the link between Euripides's play, the inmates, and Jones's workshop process. She describes the Medea Project's praxis as "epic storytelling," aligning it with the revolutionary politics of Bertolt Brecht's epic theater. Fraden discusses the group's adaptation of Medea and other tales at length, referring to the process as the creation of counter-epics. Storytelling is also noted by filmmaker Larry Andrews as the central element of the Medea Project . His docudrama chronicling the group's 1999 public performance is entitled Just Telling Stories. What I believe is missing in both Fraden and Andrews's work on the Medea Project is a discussion of mythology, of the relationship between storytelling and mythmaking in the theater workshop process.

In this article I explore the mythic roots of Medea Project storytelling. Specifically, I am interested in what an activist aesthetic grounded in revisionist mythology offers the Medea Project and its participants and whether this praxis can serve as the foundation for a postmodern feminist theory. I offer here a paleomythic performance ethnography, a participant-observer's analysis of the Medea Project's 2001 spring workshop. Paleomythology is a term borrowed from Clarissa Pinkola Estes to describe the practice of bearing witness to and/or collecting intercambio cuentos, story trades. Estes distinguishes between story trades and storytelling to emphasize the reciprocity of the activity as well as the mythic aspect. Intercambio cuentos are gift exchanges that involve a considerable cost or sacrifice. "The relating of a story," according to Estes, "begins with the bringing up, hauling up of psychic content, both collective and personal. The process is a long exertion in time and energy, both intellectual and spiritual; it is in no way an idle practice." I use the term "performance ethnography" to describe my retelling (and you, the reader's listening) because the inmates' stories cannot be "studied." They are "learned" only through assimilation, through living in proximity with those who know them, live them, and teach them. As Estes notes, "a story is not just a story. In its most innate and proper sense, it is someone's life." (5)

THE DESCENT TO INNANA: A STORY TRADE

I first attended a Medea Project production in 1996, but it was not until many years later, when I had almost completed my doctoral studies on mythology and postmodern performance at Rutgers University, that I contacted Jones about working with the group. I spent four months with the Medea Project in 2001, serving as dramaturge and videographer on their sixth public performance, Can We Get There by Candlelight? Jones entrusted me with the task of selecting the myth on which Candlelight would be based. She explained that the production had to satisfy the conditions of the Rockefeller grant that was underwriting the performance. The buzz in correctional and penal administration was the concept of reentry--how to assist inmates in their reentry into society, communities, and families as functioning or rehabilitated participants once they are released. Jones wanted a myth that related to reentry, featured women, involved a journey, and explored the concept of home. Finally, Jones wanted a myth that the project had not used in a previous production.

The Medea Project had already explored the most popular Western myths that fit these criteria. After Reality Is Just Outside the Window, the group staged Food Taboos in the Land of the Dead (1994), a revision of the Demeter and Persephone myth, which journeyed "into contemporary hell to explore the victimization and criminalization of women." A Taste of Something Else: A Place at the Table (1994) dramatized the cyclical patterns of addiction and recovery through the figure of Sisyphus. Rooted in what Jones calls "the art of re-memory," Buried Fire (1996) celebrated "the trials and tribulations of the female offender's perpetual struggle to find her own voice, to reclaim herself, her own life." Taking Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale of the ugly duckling as its basis, this production explored "the incarcerated women's story of pain, degradation, self-induced alienation, and, hopefully, transformation." Pandora provided the source material for Slouching towards Armageddon: A Captive's Conversation/ Observation on Race (1999), an investigation into "the misconceived ethno-realities that cloak our culture." The production demonstrated "how traditional views, historical realities, and the interaction of these cultural stories play out in the diverse cultural reality of modern American." (6)

I assured Jones that I had the perfect myth for the next Medea Project production, the Sumerian Queen Inanna. Although relatively unknown, the myths of Inanna are among the world's oldest recorded stories, originating in ancient Sumer, now modern Iraq. Her tales were inscribed in various versions on clay tablets in cuneiform writing sometime between 1900 B.C.E. and 3500 B.C.E., possibly even earlier. Similar to the Hindu deities Kali and Devi, Inanna was conceived of as a dual goddess, one who gives life and takes it away, a goddess of love and of strife. In Inanna's most powerful tale, which tells of her death and rebirth, the greatest divine principle is female. Remarking on the historical and literary import for the West of Inanna's discovery in the twentieth century, Judy Grahn exclaimed, "Suddenly the male-female schism of Greek myth is replaced by a 'new' story; in this one, the feminine is not fractured, not dragged about in wars, not waiting, not 'all that is fair,' not killed by its own children, not cursed or reviled." Inanna is "the sinuous, breathtaking full body of the howling, spitting, untamed goddess." (7) She embodies "what so many women long for, a spirituality grounded in the reflection of a divine woman." (8) The lure of Inanna for many feminists lies in the fact that she is "never a settled and domestic wife nor mother under the patriarchy. She keeps her independence and magnetism as lover, young bride, and widow. And she's not a mother-lover to sons." (9) Persuaded by my passionate pitch, Jones agreed that Inanna would serve nicely as a foundation myth for Can We Get There by Candlelight?

I was both nervous and excited about being designated as the person to tell the myth of Inanna to the inmates when the drama workshop began. When I entered the jail lobby at 6:00 P.M. for the initial meeting, I was introduced to the Medea Project collective for the first time: Reynolds, Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe, Fe Bongolan, Nancy Johnson, Gina Dawson, Elizabeth Spackman, Renee Walker, Stephanie Johnson, Pam Peniston, Lisa Paltry, Libah Sheppard, and Angela Wilson. Most of these artists and activists have worked with the Medea Project since its genesis. The group was joined this year by five interns, myself included. Wilson is the newest member of the collective. She entered the lobby in a dramatic fashion. "I'm a nervous wreck," she shouted. "Somebody calm me down." This session marked the first time Wilson was returning to jail from the other side, as a Medea volunteer rather than as an inmate. She participated in the 1999 performance of Slouching while incarcerated, and she credits this experience with giving her the motivation she needed to change her life. A white woman originally from Iowa farm country, Wilson was an addict, prostitute, and petty thief who had abandoned her child. She now works as a counselor for the Sheriff's Department, has a scholarship at the prestigious American Conservatory Theater, and is actively involved in rebuilding a life with her son. Wilson is the Medea Project's greatest success story to-date.

After a brief meeting, we moved to the jail's clearance window where we signed the log book and traded our driver's licenses for blue visitor badges. We were then escorted by a deputy through the main gate into a locker room where we were told to place our personal effects. Jones had granted me permission to record the rehearsals for my research, but I was informed by the deputy that I could not record because video clearance and consent forms had not yet been processed. Once our belongings were stored, we were taken to the fourth floor and led down a long hall to the women's unit called E-Pod. San Francisco County jail is a relatively new facility that houses both women and men in sections called pods. The main area of the jail resembles the Starship Enterprise, employing a sleek metal design with silver blue paint and carpet, whereas the pod decor can best be described as McDonald's Playland-like. The pod is a bilevel semicircular structure. Cells are located along the curved axis of both levels and a guard station is suspended between them along the straight axis for optimal panopticon viewing. Top-level cells house two inmates behind clear glass doors. Bottom-level units house four inmates. These cells have no doors and are fully exposed to the guards and the other inhabitants of the pod. The beds are all bunk style, the kind one might choose for a child's bedroom. Bed frames are painted a bright reddish orange, a color that clashes violently with the silver blue carpet and walls. The center of the room contains a series of tables and chairs, again in bright reddish orange, which are bolted to the floor and have checkerboards painted on them. Exposed pay phones are located on support posts throughout this floor. At the end of the bottom row of cells are bathroom units, solitary confinement cells, and a kitchenette area.

By the time we made it through the various checkpoints it was well after 6:30 P.M. On entering the pod, we encountered a long line of women waiting for the guard/pharmacist to dispense medications. The rest of the inmates were in their cell spaces, and most were chatting or getting their hair braided. The claustrophobia I immediately felt in this space was intensified by the fact that the pod was filled to capacity and that there were no windows. When the guard noticed us, she called for the women participating in the Medea Project to line up. They took their time getting their shoes on and assembling, too long for Reynolds, who started barking orders for the women to move it or lose it.

Jones, Reynolds, and Spackman had come to the jail the previous week to give an overview of the Medea Project to all seventy-five inmates in E-Pod. The introductory meeting was mandatory, but the Medea Project is strictly a volunteer program, and only those women interested in the group would attend tonight's workshop. The number of participants would remain in a constant state of flux until the actual performance date, I was told, due to inmates being released, transferred, or quitting the program. Thirty-seven women had signed up for the Medea Project , but only eighteen actually lined up for rehearsal, even fewer than Jones had predicted. Many would-be participants appeared to be waiting to see who lined up before they decided whether or not to commit. Once the women were dressed, a guard escorted us down the hall to our classroom. Inmates cannot leave the pod without being fully dressed in orange khaki pants, orange T-shirt, and orange sweatshirt. They are allowed to wear their own undergarments, socks, and shoes or jail issued ones, which, of course, are orange.

Jones and Reynolds talked casually with the inmates as we walked, acknowledging people they remembered from the previous week or past years and engaging in pleasant chitchat. When we reached the classroom, which was really too small for us, the women filed in without instruction and positioned themselves in a semicircle, the shape of the pod we had just left. Jones and Reynolds seated themselves in chairs in the front of the room under the chalkboard with volunteers to their left. Reynolds called roll, and the inmates were asked to introduce themselves, which they did in the most routinized, disconnected way. The women seemed all too familiar with the group therapy model and the formula of the confessional, narrating their histories in the rhetoric of rehab and recovery, breaking from this mold only to infuse their stories with a bit of bravado and posturing necessary for survival in jail.

Two of the inmates proudly announced that they had been in past Medea Project productions, one in 1992 and the other in 1996, and they talked briefly about their experiences. Reynolds and Jones asked the women how long they would be incarcerated, that is, would they still be in jail for the production in April. Paroled inmates are encouraged to remain with the cast, but few do. One inmate blurted out that she no longer wanted to participate and asked to be escorted back to the pod, which Spackman promptly did. There was no attempt to convince or cajole the woman into staying. A young African American woman announced that she was scheduled to be released that night. Despite the fact that shelters and services are full or closed by dark, most inmates are released between 8:00 P.M. and midnight, essentially ensuring that they return to the streets. Reynolds asked the woman, Michelle, where she planned to go. (10) When Michelle said she did not know, Reynolds began a tirade. She chastised all of the inmates for not thinking of this, for not sharing information about programs, shelters, and support services while they were together in jail. Her diatribe clued me in to one of the reasons so few women participate in the Medea Project . There is no inspirational, uplifting program rhetoric here; this group plays hardball. Hoping to ease Reynolds's wrath, some women chimed in, offering information about shelters, but Michelle admitted that her plan was to return to the streets and get high. Rather than trying to convince her to change these plans, Reynolds thanked Michelle for her honesty. She told the other participants that honesty was the foundation of the Medea Project and that it was not acceptable to waste the group's time with fantasies and stories about what they were going to do. "Let's cut through the denial," Reynolds said, "let's dispense with the bull shit, right now."

A woman in the back raised her hand. She looked like five miles of bad road, a white woman, a stone butch with a mullet, no teeth, and an arm full of alternating needle tracks and rudimentary prison tattoos. When she opened her mouth I was shocked to hear such a sophisticated vocabulary. Valerie Schwartz, a forty-seven-year-old who has lived on the streets and been a heroin addict since she was fourteen, said that she respected the mission of groups like the Medea Project , but she wondered about the efficacy and the potential for damage when "we open Pandora's box." She said it is scary when the group leaves and the inmates are left in their cells all alone to deal with the trauma that is brought up. Reynolds responded first, with her trademark hard-line approach. "You have to deal," she said. "It's your shit. If you are not going to deal with it, who is?" Frustrated, Schwartz said that she has seen women commit suicide, hanging themselves from the rafters after leaving support groups. Playing off their trademark good cop/bad cop routine, Jones took a softer approach, telling Schwartz that she felt her pain and heard her concerns, but that there was no easier way to deal with these issues.

Sensing too much take and not enough give, another inmate interrupted, demanding that the Medea Project members introduce themselves. I soon learned that what separated the women on the outside from the women on the inside was for the most part circumstantial. The volunteers' histories were similar, if not the same, as the women in orange: sexual abuse, foster care, drug addiction, domestic violence, and poverty. As the project members shared their stories, a correctional officer entered the room announcing that Michelle was to be released. Jones asked for five minutes with her first. The officer agreed and waited outside. Jones had us all gather around Michelle in a circle. She told us to lift Michelle and carry her over our heads, moving slowly around the room. As we walked, Jones and Paltry sang "Amen," and instinctively other women joined in. The singing continued as Jones motioned for the group to put Michelle down inside the circle and for her to stand in the center, eyes closed, as the women gently passed her body from hand to hand. This was my first encounter with the womb circle ritual, an integral element of the Medea Project workshop process. After hugging the other inmates and the volunteers, Michelle, in tears, left with a guard. She promised to phone Jones the next morning, but she never called. No one expected her to.

It was now 8:30 P.M., thirty minutes before we were scheduled to depart. Jones announced that it was time to shift gears and get down to business, to discuss the issue of performance. She explained the workshop process to the women. We "take a myth, fairytale, story, and we build a piece interpreting the story from our own experiences." Jones then asked me to recount the myth we would be using. Although I was more than a bit nervous on the first night of my internship, I told what I believed was a compelling summary of four Inanna myths:

When I finished Reynolds turned to me and said, "Now hold on a minute, why did you refer to Ereshkigal as "the dark sister"? Why is the bad sister always a dark sister?" Caught off-guard for at least the tenth time that night, my first instinct was to say that it was part of the story; Ereshkigal is the dark sister. Reynolds countered, "Just because it is part of the story doesn't mean that it isn't racist." Groping for a more meaningful response, I reverted to abstract academic jargon, explaining that the dark sister is a figural representation of the repressed feminine that is ultimately elevated and valued in the tale. On this note Reynolds shook her head and began to moan. Wanting time to consider the issue and definitely not wanting to dig myself in any deeper, I took a deep breath, looked at Reynolds and said, "Point taken." Paltry interjected and proposed that we consider "the dark sister" an essential element as we worked on revising the myth and bringing it into contemporary times.

Jones, sensing that our time that evening had expired, gave the women their first writing assignment. She instructed the inmates to interpret the story of Inanna they had just heard in their own words, from their own experiences, using the following set of questions that she wrote on the chalkboard:

1. What was/is your call to the underworld?

2. What were your seven gates of hell? What did you give up?

3. Who is your dark sister? What lured you to her?

4. What is the wisdom of the underworld? What have you learned?

5. What do you have to do to save yourself?

6. Where do your loyalties lie? Who is loyal to you? To whom are you loyal?

Volunteers distributed photocopies of the Inanna story along with paper and pens to the women, helping the three people who could not write well copy the homework questions. There was a flurry of activity as Reynolds instructed the women to gather their belongings and line up. Several people engaged in hugs and well wishes as we walked the women back to the E-Pod. We rode the elevator down to the locker room and stood in line ourselves to trade in our visitor badges for our ID cards in relative silence. Exiting the lobby, we split up as we made our way to the parking lot or the subway station. This brought the first workshop session to a close.

Reynolds's comments about the racial implications of "the dark sister" definitely gave me pause. It was certainly in the spirit of feminist revision that I intended the term "dark sister," but Reynolds's assertion that I was not sensitive enough to the racialized discourses of mythology and psychology, especially given the context and the racial make-up of my audience in jail, indicates that my attempted subversive use of the term "dark" did not register as such, at least not with some of my listeners. (12) Her critique echoed Elizabeth Abel's insistence that we ask, "How do different critical discourses both inflect and inscribe racial fantasies? What rhetorical strategies do these discourses produce, and (how) do these strategies bear on the value of the readings they ostensibly legitimate?" Did I violate Walter Benjamin's cardinal rule of storytelling, that stories be told, "without explanation, combing the extraordinary with the ordinary" in such a way that the "psychological connection of events is not forced" on the listener or reader, and "it is left to him to interpret things the way he understands them." Should I have deleted the "dark" in "dark sister"? Should I consider this anytime I tell the tale or was this something that I should have been more conscious of given the audience at hand? According to Estes, stories are like medicine, having the power to heal as well as the power to poison. A story told "in the wrong place, wrong time, wrong amount," by the "wrong teller ... unprepared teller" or to a "person who may know some of what to do, but does not know what not to do," will "like any medicine ... not have the desired effect, or else a deleterious one." (13) What would be the implications of my storytelling on the group, on my internship, on my relationship with these women?

THE CALL OF THE UNDERWORLD AND THE SEVEN GATES OF HELL

The myth tells us that Inanna, a happy and prosperous queen, hears a call from the Great Below, but it does not tell us the nature of the call or why she is summoned. We know only that she responds to the call, that her journey is shrouded in secrecy, and that she steals away in the middle of the night without telling her husband, her subjects, or her children that she is leaving. We know too that the trip is dangerous, potentially life threatening, for Inanna provides her vizier, Ninshubur, with a set of detailed instructions to follow and people to contact in the event that she does not return. The Medea Project workshop process functions in a similar way to the archetypal scenario of the call and response. Jones and Reynolds use a mythical narrative as a call to the inmates, and the women are asked to respond by interpreting its relationship to their own lives and experiences. Initially it appeared that the majority of the inmates were as unprepared for the call as I was because when we returned to the jail for the second workshop session, the number of attendees had dwindled to nine. Of these nine, just over half came prepared with some kind of written response. A few people complained that they did not understand the exercise and therefore did not do it, but as the women talked that night about their call to the underworld and the seven gates of hell, it became clear that most of them readily identified with Inanna's journey and her sacrifices. Although Inanna, or at least my retelling of it, initially seemed to be an ill fit for the group, it turned out to be a very enabling myth for the inmates' self-exploration. As I had already begun to suspect, participating in the Medea Project , even as a volunteer, involves a journey to the underworld. The mining of personal experience as material for story-telling necessitates a descent and a face-to-face encounter with the queen of hell.

Rachael Barnes, a Native American woman of imposing stature, was awaiting transfer to a drug program and joined the Medea Project searching for "some positive outlet in jail." Recounting a litany of near death experiences, Barnes said that if she did not get out of "the life" immediately, she would surely die:

Kristie Miller, a thirty-one-year-old white woman from rural Pennsylvania, was also awaiting transfer to a drug program. She was the least hardened of all the participants. Despite a decade-long heroin addiction and the life that this entails, she had not lost any of her teeth and did not sport any visible scars. She said she had completed two years of college, earning a GPA of 3.93, before quitting school to follow the Grateful Dead. Miller wrote:

Similar to Miller and Barnes, most of the women equated the Great Below in the myth of Inanna with life on the streets. Helen Keyes, a heavily medicated, elderly African American woman, did not identify a specific call, rather she talked about her journey to the underworld as an inevitability. Keyes, whose mother and grandmother were addicts and whose stepfather operated a drug ring out of their house, said simply that by the time she was a teenager, she was already there. Schwartz said, "the lure of the underworld started calling me at a very young and very precious and tender age." Although she claims not to know why she responded to the call, Schwartz records very early in her twenty-page response paper an episode of childhood sexual abuse: "I don't know why I did a lot of the things I did as a child. I was molested and violated in kindergarten. My oldest brother left me in the basement with his friend who was about sixteen years old. He forced me to give him head." The connection between a life of crime and incest seemed all too clear for Angelique Bieleki:

The same goes for Loretta Olivencia, a young, beautiful woman of mixed racial heritage who sported two gold teeth and her boyfriend's name tattooed on her neck. Olivencia "started living in the underworld at an early age ... being molested at six made me grow up thinking sex was okay.... I was fast and wild running the streets before I was a teenager, and ... I wanted to be like my brothers, hard core always in prison." Yolanda Williams, a tough-talking African American butch, was one of the few women who pinpointed an exact moment when she heard the call to the underworld. She was an eight-year-old playing in front of her "project houses in Potrero Hill" with her cousin Anne. They were watching a pimp and a whore, Williams recalls, and "my cousin Anne said I want to be a ho and I said I wanted to be the pimp because the whore gave him all her money. The pimp had nice material things and he did not live in the PJ's [housing projects]." Although Williams claims that her call to the underworld was motivated by a desire for wealth and power, the fact that she lists incest as the first of her seven gates of hell suggests that her call was not so different from that of the other participants after all.

Although she is unsure of the exact motivation, Inanna makes a conscious decision to descend to the underworld. She is a consenting adult. There is, however, a hidden component of sexual abuse in the tale, and as I listened to these women's interpretations of the myth I regretted that I had not talked about the goddess's genealogy or included the "Huluppu-Tree" story in the summary of the myth I told the session before. Similar to the inmates, Inanna's matrilineage includes women who were sexually abused as children. In particular, her paternal grandmother, Ninlil, was brutally and repeatedly raped by Enlil when he "forc[ed] open her too small vagina," a violation that resulted in the birth of Inanna's father and her marriage to the rapist. The "Huluppu-Tree" deals with the adolescent Inanna's initiation into culture and the repression of female sexuality that this entails. (14) Both the inmates' stories and the myths of Inanna highlight a discrepancy between a call to the underworld, which implies agency and volition, and an act, one that is sexual in nature and happens against their will or without their consent, that sends them, or some part of them into exile in the underworld. Can we attribute agency to a prepubescent girl? At what point do these inmates cease to be girls? Become criminals? How and by what standards do we or can we hold them accountable for their actions? Should there be a point at which we analyze these inmates' crimes in relationship to their childhood trauma? In the tales the participants told that night, it did not appear that the descent to the underworld was a conscious decision, but it is precisely this sense of agency that Jones and Reynolds hope to foster through an exploration of their lives in relationship to mythic narratives and through their conscious choice to respond to the call of the Medea Project .

WHO IS YOUR DARK SISTER?

Despite the fact that Inanna is completely divested of her power by the time she reaches the seventh gate of hell, she does not appear to humbled by her descent. As she enters the underworld, her first impulse is a hostile and imperialistic one. Without greeting Ereshkigal, without even a mention of the funeral or of her sister's loss, Inanna attempts to capitalize on Ereshkigal's vulnerable state and to capture her throne, in much the same way that she had taken the holy laws from the inebriated Enki. But, as Diane Wolkstein notes, "all that Inanna had achieved on earth weighs against her when she meets the woman at whose expense Inanna's glories had been attained." The jealous and vengeful Ereshkigal fastens the evil eye of death on her sister Inanna and hangs her rotting corpse from a meat hook. According to Wolkstein, Ereshkigal "can be considered the prototype of the witch--unloving, unloved, abandoned, instinctual, and full of rage, greed, and desperate loneliness." She sees Ereshkigal as "the other, neglected side of Inanna," "the dark side of Inanna." (15) According to Sylvia Perera, Ereshkigal represents the abject feminine and the return of the repressed, whereas Inanna, prior to her descent, represents the perfectly initiated "daughter of the patriarchy," a woman who has internalized society's misogynistic views, one who is "badly wounded in ... relation to the feminine" and who strives "to uphold the virtues and aesthetic ideals which the patriarchal superego has presented." Inanna's journey to the underworld symbolizes for Perera her desire for wholeness and a need to reclaim the denigrated and abject aspects of the feminine. She reads Inanna's descent as a desire to "redeem what the patriarchy has often seen only as a dangerous threat and called terrible mother, dragon, or witch." (16)

This is exactly how Barnes described Ereshkigal when she named herself as her own dark sister. "I would name my sister Big Rachael because she was the one, the shit ... [who] had it all together in the underworld ... she was raped, beaten, molested, hurt, abandoned, and she had to be strong. I had to be strong--not to let no one too close.... I found out it was me who I hated for being so insecure, so hard core, not knowing how to act as a woman." Barnes's description underscores what Perera identifies as Ereshkigal's "self-spite" and what Wolkstein categorizes as the "powerful, raging sexuality, and the deep wounds accumulated from life's rejections" that define the underworld goddess. (17) Williams too believed that she was her own Ereshkigal, "I was my own dark sister. I keep me down by making wrong choices." Schwartz stated that she has been the agent of her own destruction, but that there have been many sisters who have been all to willing to assist her in her downward spiral, and she gave an example of an ex-lover who sold her to a guy for five hits of Ritalin. The guy repeatedly raped Schwartz for five hours before he let her go. Olivencia was the only participant to designate a male, her abusive boyfriend, as her dark sister.

WHAT IS THE WISDOM OF THE UNDERWORLD?

It is only after Inanna has been divested of the duties of queen, wife, and mother; has unlearned accepted modes of sexual and social conduct; and been liberated from her former relationship to her body that she can open her ear to the wisdom of the underworld. This unlearning in order to learn is painful. As Keyes noted, the wisdom of the underworld took "some long suffering" because she has gone about the process indirectly." This process requires a sacrifice, which for most women involves giving up the illusion that something or someone external to the situation can save us. Miller said that to be like Inanna and "be reborn into the light of day, I would have to leave behind my ignorance. For it was my ignorance that allowed me to give up such precious gifts without a second thought of who I would be without them." Along with her ignorance, Miller relinquished her innocence: "As Inanna chose her simple shepherd husband, or innocence, to be the one she needed to sacrifice, I choose my innocence. I am no longer a naive, young girl. That part of my life I willingly sacrifice." What Miller is willing to sacrifice, in fact must sacrifice if she is to be successful in her journey to recovery, is the image of herself as the innocent victim.

Olivencia came to a similar conclusion when she realized that she must sacrifice the person she believed she loved more than anyone in the world to save herself. She told the group that every time she tried to complete this part of the assignment she got sidetracked. "Whenever I started to write, I got flashes about my childhood," Olivencia said. Frustrated, she finally stopped trying to complete the assignment and wrote a letter to her mother instead, confessing that for years she had been dishonest with her. From the time she was six, Olivencia had been sexually abused by her stepfather, Ray, and although her mother asked her several times during her adolescence if Ray had ever "messed with her," Olivenica always denied it because Ray had threatened to hurt both of them if she ever told anyone the truth. For the first time, Olivencia made the connection between childhood sexual abuse and her habit of sleeping under the bed and in the bathroom closet with having sex at twelve-years-old, shoplifting, doing drugs, being in a ten-year relationship with an abusive man, and landing in and out of jail more times than she could count. If Olivencia's mother suspected Ray of molesting her daughter, surely some part of her knew that he was. Every time Olivencia's mother danced that rhetorical dance with her daughter, that "I'll ask, but you don't tell" tango, she communicated with acute clarity that daughters are the sacrificial victims in our family rituals. The day Olivencia wrote that letter to her mother, she sacrificed the illusion of love and protection her mother represented.

WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO DO TO SAVE YOURSELF?

Most of the inmates focused their attention on the first four questions Jones assigned. So few people attempted to address the questions "What do you have to do to save yourself?" and "Where do your loyalties lie?" that Jones reassigned these topics. Even though the myth clearly states that Inanna must sacrifice her dependence on men as a condition of her return from the underworld, many women found it impossible to narrate a story in which they were the agents of their own salvation, and they willingly gave over this position of power to men: to pastors, fathers, boyfriends, lovers, and/or pimps. According to Perera, this stems from a desire to "avoid the pain of bearing their own renewal, their own separate being and uniqueness." (18) It is also the case that our culture does not afford women, especially poor women, traumatized women, and women of color many opportunities to articulate themselves by themselves and/or for themselves, as separate and unique beings. I would argue that Jones's final two questions were the most difficult for the women to answer precisely because the narrative discourses at their disposal cannot entertain these questions. Mythology, particularly the ancient myth of the powerful queen Inanna, offers women a different language, a different set of discursive strategies, in which to interpellate themselves to themselves and to the world. Just as Inanna must unlearn the structures of thought and civilization to hear the call and imagine another possibility for existence, so too must the women in jail be encouraged to divest themselves of the narrative frameworks that limit rather than expand on their possibilities for forging new ontologies.

Most women were not able to respond to this question in the affirmative, that is they could not state with any degree of specificity what they should do to save themselves, but could say only what they should stop doing. They could describe the descent to the underworld in copious detail because they had been there, were in fact dwelling there, but they could not describe the ascent because they had not yet lived that part of the myth. Many participants said simply that if they did not change their ways they would die. Schwartz said that if she knew what she had to do to save herself she would not be here in jail answering these questions. The problem is "regaining my desire to live again ... just finding the will, the desire, the need is what keeps coming and going" in Schwartz's life. She stressed the fact that it is hard to be optimistic about the Medea Project , or anything really, when one is facing the possibility of ten years in prison, and that if she did feel a desire for change, she would have "to repress this and most feelings like it" to "survive mentally, emotionally, survive going back" to prison. Learning how to negotiate the wisdom of the underworld, she said "would help me implement a plan on how to save myself with better odds."

WHERE DO YOUR LOYALTIES LIE? WHO IS LOYAL TO YOU? TO WHOM ARE YOU LOYAL?

Once she is reborn, Inanna's first desire is to leave the underworld and return home, but she can do so only on one condition, that she send someone to the Great Below to take her place. After her descent, Inanna is loyal only to those who have been loyal to her, namely Ninshubur, her children, and herself. Dumuzi was not loyal, and without a second thought Inanna fixes the evil eye of death on her former lover and sends him to the underworld as her surrogate. The issue of loyalty was not as clear-cut for the inmates. More than anything, I was moved by the echoing silence that ensued when Jones called for volunteers to respond to this question. Of the six original questions related to the myth of Inanna, this was by far the most difficult for the participants to address. At this stage in the process the women had not yet sacrificed their innocence or traded in their cloak of victimhood for a mantle of responsibility. Without a sense of agency, the only kinds of relationships that are possible are ones based on dependencies. So, how could they say where their loyalties lie? If the women wrote anything on the topic, it generally took no more than one or two lines on a sheet of paper. Although the majority of the participants had listed a relationship with a man as one of the ways they were planning to save themselves, no one seemed capable of morphing that fantasy into an actual allegiance or loyalty. No one named a man, not a brother, father, lover, or pimp, as someone to whom they were loyal or who had been loyal to them. Most of the women named their mothers, saying that they were grateful to their mothers for continuing to love them despite all of the hell they had put them through and thanked them for taking care of their children while they were incarcerated or living on the streets. Although the majority of inmates were mothers, not one of them named their children as persons to whom they had loyalties, an observation both Jones and Reynolds made that night.

THE MYTH OF THE REAL

Jones missed three of the eight weeks of the workshop because she was starring in the Vagina Monologues. Reynolds and Cooper-Anifowoshe conducted the sessions in Jones's absence. These sessions followed the same format, with one important difference. Neither Reynolds nor Cooper-Anifowoshe made any direct reference to the Inanna story. Although the questions they assigned for homework were related to elements of the myth, the connections remained implicit rather than explicit. This decision proved to be very productive on the one hand, but very problematic on the other. The purpose of the writing assignments is really twofold. They are designed to encourage participants to examine the material and social conditions that result in their incarceration and to assist the inmates in the creation of material that can be crafted into scripts for the public performance. The decision to stray from the myth to engage with the "reality" of the women's lives resulted in Jones scrambling for script material when she returned. Perhaps more importantly, it unearthed, in unexpected ways, how fully imbricated mythology is in "the real world."

The first topic Reynolds asked the women to consider was home: What is home? Who lives there? What are the sights, smells, sounds, and tastes of home? Given the graphic depictions of familial abuse and neglect that the participants had already offered, I braced myself for more of the same with this topic. I was completely taken aback by the responses. Most women's narratives described in tremendous detail not actual, but fantasy homes. Participant after participant shared stories about homes that exist only on Nick at Night reruns of The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie. Apron-appareled mothers serving freshly baked bread populated these sitcom-inspired domiciles. Olivencia, the woman who hid in closets and slept under her bed to hide from her stepfather's sexual advances, described home this way:

Most people echoed Olivencia's depiction of home as a safe place, a haven. Schwartz said, "Home to me is a sanctuary in some ways. Comfort, security, warmth, laughter, love, music, freedom/privacy, definitely a comfort zone.... Violence rarely jumps wherever I call home." Miller described home as "a memory of security and happiness." Home, she continued, is "a feeling sort of like childhood nostalgia, but not necessarily requiring actual childhood memories. It is anywhere that a comfortable feeling of security is recalled by nostalgic memories ... that remind me of once upon a time" (emphasis mine).

Miller's once upon a time is situated in the temporality of myth, of the myth of the American dream replete with a house surrounded by a white picket fence. Every participant in the workshop described home as the place they wished they had grown up in as a child, the home they believe some lucky girl somewhere actually did grow up in. These descriptions of idealized homes are paradigmatic examples of the potential of myth to be interpreted in conservative, restrictive, and limiting ways. It is precisely this type of thinking and these types of social constructs that the Medea Project seeks to deconstruct. Reynolds joked that these places sounded fabulous, "like heaven, not home," with "the birds and the butterflies," and she wanted to know when she could move in. On a more serious note she asked, "Who is going to make the muffins and bake all that bread? And, where are you going to get the money to buy all that nice stuff and not work, but sit around all day all safe and happy?"

Reynolds believes that the majority of women who are incarcerated will return again and again to the prison system because jail is one of the only places in their lives where they have found stability and security. She remarked on the number of women who refer to their cells as their homes, saying things like, "I forgot my paper in my house" or "let me run home and get my assignment." Barnes, who averaged six to ten months in jail per year for more than twenty years admitted that prison felt more like home than almost anywhere she had ever lived. She talked about the families that inmates form in jail. "You get a mom, a dad, a brother, a son, uncle, nephew, nieces, and we're all the same sex, that's the cool part." Barnes joked that returning to jail was like going back to visit your parents and staying in your old room. You go back, she said, and everything is just like you left it, the table and chair, the bed. You see the same people most of the time too. It is like you never left. Reynolds believes that the system both endorses and encourages this kind of thinking. Deputies, for example, do not refer to jail cells as inmates' houses, but as their home. They enact the role of the authorial parent and treat inmates as their dependent children. Deputies often say things such as, "you will do such and such while you are in my house" or "you will not do such and such under my roof." Inmates are encouraged to be dependent in jail and are generally punished if they are not. Their entire day is planned for them, and they cannot even use the restroom without being granted permission. How does this prepare women to return to life on the outside, for reentry into the larger social system?

Reynolds's second assignment was to write about realistic and/or negative images of home. Either home was a difficult concept for the participants to engage with, or the lack of a mythic framework resulted in a void the women found difficult to fill, or both. Schwartz's complaint about the assignment is revealing. "Damn, I hate you for making me go there. Man I done stashed this shit away a long time ago. I crammed it down, taped it, made it iron clad and welded it shut." Whereas mythical mothers ruled the roost in the majority of the first responses to home, wicked queens and despotic kings reigned supreme in this assignment.

HANGING ON THE MEATHOOK

When Jones completed her run of the Vagina Monologues, she had only three weeks to transform the workshop material into a public performance. Medea Project productions consist of a series of performance pieces based on inmates' responses to the foundation myth. The myth is recounted to the audience during the intervals between performance segments by a narrator, usually Jones and/or Reynolds. The myth provides a framework for the inmates' self-exploration, and it lends some coherence to the content of the stories the women tell about themselves. Jones's extended absence and the lack of attention given to the myth in the workshop sessions directed by Reynolds and Cooper-Anifowoshe, coupled with a high turnover rate of participants, resulted in the group working frantically to assemble a script. In addition, the production was supposed to focus on the problem of reentry, and thus far no one in the group had succeeded in writing a single story about the ascent from the underworld or the return home. As Jones listened to the inmates' responses to the final question Reynolds assigned, "what was your lowest low?" she made connections between the women's narratives and the story of Inanna that she thought would expedite the process.

Jones asked the participants to think about the Queen Inanna hanging on the meat hook in the underground lair of Ereshkigal. Inanna reaches her "lowest low" when she is impaled on the meat hook and left to rot. She has been maimed and her flesh is mangled, Jones reminds the group, and Inanna has to decide if she is going to live or die. "I fear that that's where a lot of us are. We are busy deteriorating," continued Jones. "The real question is do you want to live or die. It is as simple as that." Tell me right now, Jones demanded, "How are you going to get down from that meat hook. What do you have to do to save yourself?" When no one responded, Jones staged quite a tantrum. She told the women that she was furious with them for not being able to answer a simple question, a question she asked them on the very first night of the workshop. Tell yourselves that you are taking the reins of your own life, Jones urged the women, that you are not wearing orange anymore. Tell yourselves, "I'm leaving the underworld. I'm headed back to the world. I'm going to be a queen. I'm going to live like a queen." That is what the Medea Project is about. It "is about women saving their own lives through the creative process. I'm not going to pretend," continued Jones, "that it is going to happen tomorrow, but that's the goal." Inanna is on the hook for a long time, but she saves herself, "that's what Inanna is about ... going into the underworld and returning." "You're more than an inmate," Jones told the participants, "more than a crack whore, more than a number, and that's what we are trying to get back to."

After several minutes of ranting and raving, Jones took a decidedly different approach with the women. She instructed the group to lie on the floor in a circle with their eyes closed and their heads touching. Once everyone was settled, Jones led the participants in a guided meditation:

Find the names, Jones told the women, and whisper them. Slowly fill up the room with the names. As the participants said the names of their loved ones, Jones repeated them. "I hear mama. I hear grandma ... Jengo, Josa." Let the names out, Jones coaxed, let the sound build. "Imagine that it is like smoke climbing out of the underworld." The voices grew louder as Jones continued to repeat the names she heard. Some women started to moan; others began to cry. Jones paced at the edge of the circle just as Ninshubur paced at the mouth of the gates of hell. The vizier could not save Inanna, but she was instrumental in creating the conditions that enabled the queen's return. Jones's meditation invited the participants to embrace the Ereshkigal within themselves and to empathize with the people they left behind when they responded to the call of the underworld. In the myth, it is this empathetic identification that alleviates the suffering of the underworld goddess and moves her to release Inanna from the meat hook. What the participants could not see in the myth, how to save themselves, Jones enacted for them.

Jones's interpretation of Inanna's ascent and her use of this story at a critical juncture in the workshop supports Estes's theory about the power of myth. A myth, she says, "shows us the way out, down, or up, and for our trouble, cuts us fine wide doors in previously blank walls, openings that lead to the dreamland, that lead to love and learning." This is part of the radical potential of mythology, but as Jones and Reynolds know, there is no guarantee that these stories will translate into real world options for the inmates in the Medea Project . In fact, most of the women who begin the journey with Jones and her crew get lost somewhere along the way. The overwhelming majority of participants do not make it to the public performance. This is due in part to the chaotic atmosphere of jail and the constant coming and going of the women serving short sentences or awaiting transfer to another facility. It is also because most of the women are not prepared for the journey or do not have the support and resources they would need to attempt an ascent. But, even those inmates who participate in the workshop for a very brief period of time have the opportunity to tell their story, possibly for the first time in their lives." In many cultures," notes Estes, "stories are considered to be written like un tatuaje del destino, a light tattoo on the skin of the one who has lived them," or in the case of the women I met at San Francisco County jail, very long and deep scars. Estes maintains that the telling and retelling of the stories that have marked us like un tatuaje del destino are "tangible ways to soften old scar tissue, balm old wounds, and envision anew." (19) It is precisely this kind of "good medicine" that the Medea Project tries to administer through the storytelling ritual, through intercambio cuentos with incarcerated women--to transform their underworld scars into warrior marks.

CAN WE GET THERE BY CANDLELIGHT?

The public performance of Candlelight centered on Inanna's call to the underworld, the descent through the seven gates of hell, and the time spent rotting on the meat hook. Only the formerly incarcerated participant, Wilson, created a performance segment about the ascent from the underworld and the return home, and this was only because Jones pushed her to do it. As someone who is very much in the process of recovery, Wilson found this to be both a difficult and a painful assignment. Candlelight did not produce any Inannas, did not reform any inmates or pave the way for their reentry into society. Does this mean that the myth of Inanna was a poor choice for the Medea Project or that the program itself is ineffective in its efforts to combat recidivism? It really depends on one's perspective. For me, the efficacy of the Medea Project lies not in its success, but in its failure.

Mythology occupies a liminal space. It exists in the realm Drucilla Cornell calls the imaginary domain, "the space of the 'as if' in which we imagine who we might be if we made ourselves our own end and claimed ourselves as our own person." (20) What the inmates' engagement with the myth of Inanna reveals is that the struggle for agency, the struggle for "who we might be," is directly related to the limit of imagination. The Medea Project's mythical encounters rarely result in the participants' achievement of agency. How can the inmates enact what they cannot yet imagine? How can anyone? If a mythical encounter reveals the limit of imagination, then the process of mythic revision provides the means to circumvent or extend the limit of imagination.

Storytelling for the Medea Project is, as Fraden has noted, the beginning of a different drama--a way to imagine, if not live out, a new life. What Fraden categorizes as epic storytelling, I argue is actually mythic storytelling. More than creating and producing counter-epics, the Medea Project stages a mythical encounter. Unlike other forms of storytelling such as autobiography, confession, and testimony, mythology does not seek to inform or disclose a truth, and consequently, it provides an alternative to mimesis as a discursive and political strategy. If storytelling, as Benjamin suggests, transforms the listener into a storyteller, then what affect does a Medea Project performance, which I regrettably do not have time to analyze in detail here, have on an audience? According to Estes's theory of intercambio cuentos, the audience becomes both a witness to and a participant in the gift exchange. The audience was literally moved to tears by the performance of Candelight. Although it is possible that the weeping was simply a response to the very powerful stories the participants performed, it might be that the tears had nothing at all to do with catharsis. Perhaps the audience's tears represent their inability to do anything but cry in the face of the injustices dramatized on stage. Perhaps they are an indication of the audience's inability to imagine a world in which women did not have such stories to tell. By inviting the audience to participate in the mythical encounter, Medea Project's performances reveal that it is not only the inmates whose imaginations are limited.

The question I posed at the beginning of this article remains: can the praxis of the Medea Project serve as the basis for a postmodern feminist theory? I believe the answer is yes, although I have no clear idea what forms this might take. This paleomythic performance ethnography is an attempt to enact what I cannot yet imagine.

NOTES

I am grateful to Rhodessa Jones and Sean Reynolds for the opportunity to work with the Medea Project and to the participants for sharing their stories with me. I thank Alicia Ostriker, Elin Diamond, Drucilla Cornell, and Rena Fraden for their encouragement and critical insight into both this article and the longer work from which it is drawn. Tiffany Ana Lopez's careful and sensitive reading has also contributed much to this piece.

1. Jean Trounstine, Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power of Drama in a Women's Prison (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001).

2. The Medea Project is one of many community outreach programs conducted by the arts organization, Cultural Odyssey, which was founded in 1979 by Idris Ackamoor. Jones joined the organization in 1983. A grant from the California Arts Council in 1987 provided funding for the theater workshop at San Francisco County Jail that gave rise to the Medea Project .

3. These quotes are from the performance (see Open the Gate: Reality Is Just Outside the Window, VHS, dir. Kathy Katz, Cultural Odyssey, 1992).

4. Rena Fraden, Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 48.

5. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995), 470, 467, 469-70. My approach to the Medea Project has also been influenced by the work of Ruth Behar, in particular The Vulnerable Obsever: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997) and her Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).

6. Rhodessa Jones, "Director's Notes," Food Taboos in the Land of the Dead, Lorraine Hansberry Theater, San Francisco, 1 Apr. 1993; Jones, "Director's Notes," Buried Fire, Lorraine Hansberry Theater, San Francisco, 10 Jan. 1996; Jones, "Director's Notes," Slouching towards Armageddon: A Captive's Conversation/Observation on Race, Lorraine Hansberry Theater, San Francisco, 21 Jan. 1999.

7. Judy Grahn, foreword to Inanna: Lady of Largest Heart, by Betty De Shong Meador (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), xv, xi. For an account of the discovery and translation of Sumerian texts, see Samuel Noah Kramer, Sumerian Mythology: A Study of the Spiritual and Literary Achievement in the Third Millennium (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961).

8. Meador, 9.

9. Sylvia Brinton Perera, Descent to Inanna: A Way of Initiation for Women (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1981), 18.

10. The issue of whether or not to name human subjects is an important topic of debate in feminist studies, especially when the subjects involve incarcerated populations. This is an issue of safety, but it is also an issue of dignity. It is precisely for this reason that Jones actively encourages the inmates to use their given names in the workshop, public performances, and playbill. The women are free to refuse, and a few each year do. Both Fraden and Andrews have followed Jones's model and cited the names of the inmates (who sign the consent forms) in their work on the Medea Project , as have I. Michelle is not given a last name here because she was not part of the group long enough for me to record it.

11. Adapted from Samuel Noah Kramer and Diane Wolkstein, Inanna Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer (New York: Harper & Row, 1983).

12. In addition to Grahn, Meador, Perera, and Wolkstein, see Marija Gimbutas, rpt. ed., The Language of the Goddess (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995); Marcia Stark and Gynne Sterne, The Dark Goddess: Dancing with the Shadow (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1993); and Elinor Dickson and Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness (Boston: Shambala, 1977).

13. Elizabeth Abel, "Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation" in Identities, ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 249; Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov," Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 89, 471.

14. Kramer and Wolkstein, 141, 9, 136-46.

15. Ibid., 158, 160.

16. Perera, 11, 7.

17. Perera, 23; Kramer and Wolkstein, 160.

18. Perera, 78.

19. Estes, 470, 469, 13.