Tales of Passion—TED Conference

Click here to see the video of the TED speech.

In her TED-Talk, Isabel discusses passion and speaks in praise of women whose grit and selflessness have transformed the meaning of modern feminism. TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) is a global conference dedicated to the dissemination of “Ideas Worth Spreading.” Isabel spoke at the March 2007 TED Conference in Monterey, California.

It is scary to be here among the smartest of the smart.

I am here to tell a few tales of PASSION.

There is a Jewish saying that I love:

Question: What is truer than truth?

Answer: The story.

As a storyteller I want to convey something truer than truth about our common humanity. All stories interest me and some haunt me until I end up writing them. Certain themes keep coming back: justice, loyalty, violence, love, death, politics and social issues, and freedom. I am aware of the mystery around us, so I also write about coincidences, premonitions, dreams, emotions, the power of nature, magic.

In the last twenty-five years I have published a few books, but I lived in anonymity until February 2006, when I carried the Olympic flag in the Winter Olympics in Italy. That made me a celebrity. Now people recognize me in Macy’s and my grandchildren think that I am cool. Allow me to tell you about my four minutes of fame.

One of the organizers of the Opening Ceremony called me and said I had been selected to be one of the flag-bearers. I replied that surely this was a case of mistaken identity, because I am as far as you can get from being an athlete. Actually, I wasn’t even sure that I could manage to get around the stadium without a walker. I was told that this was no laughing matter. This would be the first time that only women would carry the Olympic flag: five women representing five continents and three Olympic gold-medal winners. My first question was, naturally, what was I supposed to wear. “A uniform” she said, and asked for my measurements. My measurements!! I had a vision of myself in a fluffy anorak looking like the Michelin Man.

By the middle of February I found myself in Turin, where enthusiastic crowds cheered when any of the eighty Olympic teams was in the street. Those athletes had sacrificed everything to compete in the games. They all deserved to win, but there is the element of luck. A speck of snow, an inch of ice, or the force of the wind can determine the result of a race or a game. However, what matters the most, more than training or luck, is the heart. Only a fearless and determined heart will get the gold medal. It is all about passion. The streets of Turin were covered with red posters announcing the slogan of the Olympics: PASSION LIVES HERE.

Isn’t this always true? Heart is what drives us forward and determines our fate. That is what I need for the characters in my books: a PASSIONATE heart. I need mavericks, dissidents, outsiders, adventurers and rebels who ask questions, bend the rules, and take risks. Nice people with common sense do not make interesting characters. They only make good former spouses.

In the Green Room of the Stadium I met the other flag-bearers: three athletes and the actresses Susan Sarandon and Sofia Loren. Also, two women with PASSIONATE hearts: Wangari Maathai, the Nobel Peace Prize winner from Kenya, who has planted thirty million trees and by doing so has changed the soil and the weather in some places in Africa—not to mention the economic conditions in the villages. And Somaly Mam, a Cambodian activist who fights PASSIONATELY against child prostitution. When she was fourteen years old, her grandfather sold her to a brothel. She told us of little girls raped by men who believe that having sex with a very young virgin will cure them of AIDS, and of brothels where children are forced to receive fifteen clients per day, and if they rebel they are tortured with electricity.

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In the Green Room I received my uniform. It was not the kind of outfit I normally wear, but it was far from the Michelin Man suit I had anticipated. Not bad, really. I looked like a refrigerator but so did most of the flag-bearers, except Sofia Loren, the universal symbol of beauty and passion.

Sofia is over seventy and she looks great. She is sexy, slim, and tall, with a deep tan. How can she be tanned and have no wrinkles? When asked in a TV interview how could she look so good, she replied: “Posture. My back is always straight and I don’t make old people’s noises.” So there you have some free advice from one of the most beautiful women on Earth: no grunting, no coughing, no wheezing, no talking to yourself, no farting. Well, she didn’t say that exactly.

At some point, around midnight, we were summoned to the wings of the stadium. The loudspeakers announced the Olympic flag and the music started.

Sofia Loren was right in front of me. She is a foot taller than I am, not counting the poofy hair. She walked elegantly, like a giraffe on the African savannah, holding the flag on her shoulder. I jogged behind on my tiptoes holding the flag on my extended arm, so that my head was actually under the damn flag. All the cameras were on Sofia, of course. That was fortunate for me, because in most press photos I appear too, although often between Sofia’s legs, a place where most men would love to be.

The best four minutes of my entire life were those in the Olympic Stadium. My husband is offended when I say this, although I have explained to him that what we do together in private usually takes less than four minutes, so he shouldn’t take it personally. I have all the press clippings of those four magnificent minutes because I don’t want to forget them when old age destroys my brain cells. I want to carry in my heart forever the key word of the Olympics: PASSION.

So here is a tale of passion:

The year is 1998. The place is a prison camp for Tutsi refugees in Congo. (By the way, 80 percent of all refugees and displaced people in the world are women and girls.) We can call this place in Congo a death camp because those that are not killed will die of disease and starvation. The protagonists of this story are a young woman, Rose Mapendo, and her children. She is pregnant and a widow; soldiers forced her to watch as her husband was tortured and killed. Somehow she manages to keep her seven children alive, and a few months later she gives birth to premature twins, two tiny little boys. She cuts the umbilical cord with a stick and ties it with her own hair. She names the twins after the camp’s commanders, to gain their favor, and feeds them with black tea because her milk cannot sustain them. When the soldiers burst into her cell to rape her oldest daughter, she grabs hold of her and refuses to let go even when they hold a gun to her head. Somehow the family survives for sixteen months and then, by extraordinary luck and the PASSIONATE heart of a young American boy, Sasha Charnoff, who managed to put her in a U.S. rescue plane, Rose Mapendo and her nine children end up in Phoenix, Arizona, where they are now living and thriving.

Mapendo in Swahili means “great love.”

The protagonists of my books are strong and passionate women like Rose Mapendo. I don’t make them up; there is no need for that. I look around and I see them everywhere. I have worked with women and for women all my life. I know them well.

I was born in ancient times, at the end of the world, into a patriarchal, Catholic, and conservative family. No wonder by age five I was a raging feminist, although the term had not reached Chile yet and nobody knew what the heck was wrong with me. I would soon find out that there was a high price to pay for my freedom and for questioning the patriarchy, but I was happy to pay it because for every blow that I received, I was able to deliver two.

Once, when my daughter Paula was in her twenties, she said to me that feminism was dated, that I should move on. We had a memorable fight. Feminism is dated? Yes, for privileged women like my daughter and all of us here, but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world who are still forced into premature marriage, prostitution, forced labor. They have children that they don’t want or they can’t feed. They have no control over their bodies or their lives. They have no education and no freedom. They are raped, beaten up, and sometimes killed with impunity.

For most Western young women of today, being called a feminist is an insult. Feminism has never been sexy, but let me assure you that it never stopped me from flirting and I have seldom suffered from a lack of men. Feminism is not dead—by no means. It has evolved. If you don’t like the term, change it, for Goddess’ sake! Call it Aphrodite or Venus or Bimbo if you want. The name doesn’t matter as long as we understand what it is about and support it.

Here is another tale of passion, a sad one.

The place is a small women’s clinic in a village in Bangladesh. The year is 2005. Jenny is a young American dental hygienist who has gone to the clinic as a volunteer during a three-week vacation. She is prepared to clean teeth but when she gets there she finds out that there are no doctors or dentists; the clinic is just a hut full of flies. Outside there is a line of women who have waited several hours to be treated. The first patient is in excruciating pain because she has several rotten molars. Jenny realizes that the only solution is to pull out the bad teeth. She is not licensed for that, she has never done it, she risks a lot, and she is terrified. She doesn’t even have the proper instruments, but fortunately she has brought some Novocain. Jenny has a brave and passionate heart. She murmurs a prayer and she goes ahead with the operation. At the end, the relieved patient kisses her hands. That day the hygienist pulls out many more teeth. The next morning, when she comes again to the so-called clinic, her first patient is waiting for her with her husband. The woman’s face looks like a watermelon; it’s so swollen that you can’t even see her eyes. The husband, furious, threatens to kill the American. Jenny is horrified at what she has done but then the translator explains that the patient’s condition has nothing to do with the operation. The day before, her husband beat her up because she was not home in time to prepare dinner for him.

Millions of women live like this today. They are the poorest of the poor.

Although women do two thirds of the world’s labor, they own less than 1 percent of the world’s assets. They are paid less than men for the same work—if they are paid at all—and they remain vulnerable because they have no economic independence and they are constantly threatened by exploitation, violence, and abuse.

It is a fact that giving women education, work, the ability to control their own income, and inherit and own property benefits the society. If a woman is empowered, her children and her family will be better off. If families prosper, the village prospers and, eventually, so does the whole country. When Wangari Maathai goes to a village in Kenya, she talks to the women and explains that the land is barren because the trees have been cut and sold. She gets the women to plant new trees and water them, drop by drop. In a matter of five or six years they have a forest, the soil is enriched, and the village is saved.

The poorest and most backward societies are always those that put women down. Yet this obvious truth is ignored by governments and also by philanthropy: for every dollar given to women’s programs, twenty dollars are given to men’s programs.

Women are 51 percent of humankind. Empowering them will change everything, I can promise you that. Women working together, linked, informed, and educated, can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.

In any war today most of the casualties are civilians, mainly women and children. They are collateral damage. In times of peace, the profits go mainly to men.

Men run the world, and look at the mess we have! What kind of world do we want? This is a fundamental question that many women are asking. Does it make sense to participate in the existing world order? We want a world where life is preserved and the quality of life is enriched for everybody, not only for the privileged.

In January I saw an exhibit of Fernando Botero’s paintings at the UC Berkeley Library. No museum or gallery in the United States, except for the New York gallery that carries Botero’s work, has dared to show the paintings because the theme is the Abu Ghraib prison. They are huge paintings of torture and abuse of power in the voluminous Botero style. I have not been able to get those images out of my mind.

What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power and the power to abuse. In our species, the alpha males define reality and force the rest of the pack to accept that reality and follow their rules. The rules change all the time, but they always benefit them. And in this case the trickle-down effect, which does not work in economics, works perfectly. Abuse trickles down from the top of the ladder to the bottom. Women and children, especially the poor, are at the bottom. Even the most destitute of men have someone they can abuse: a woman or a child.

I am fed up with the power that a few exert over the many through gender, income, race, and class. I believe that the time is ripe to make fundamental changes in our civilization. We are part of the most powerful and influential empire in history! We can do it. But for real change we need feminine energy in the management of the world. We need a critical number of women in positions of power and we need to nurture the feminine energy in men. I am talking about men with young minds, of course. Old guys are hopeless; we have to wait for them to die off.

Yes, I would love to have Sofia Loren’s long legs and legendary breasts, but given a choice I would rather have the warrior hearts of Wangari Maathai, Somaly Mam, Jenny, and Rose Mapendo. I want to make this world good. Not better, but to make it good. Why not? It is possible. Look around—all this knowledge, energy, talent, and technology! Let’s get off our fannies, roll up our sleeves and get to work PASSIONATELY in creating an almost perfect world.