Clinton has faced all manner of hate since entering frontline politics – often from women just like her. Why? In an extract from her unique book,the activist-writer looks at the hopes held for the 2016 presidential frontrunnerI know Hillary Clinton mostly in the way we all do, as a public figure in good times and putrid, and one who became part of our lives and even our dreams. I once introduced her to a thousand women in a hotel ballroom. Standing behind her as she spoke,I could see the binder on the lectern with her speech carefully laid out – and also that she wasn’t reading from it. Instead, she was responding to people who had spoken before her, or addressing activists and leaders she saw in the audience,and putting their work in a national and global context – all in such clear and graceful sentences that no one would bear guessed she hadnt written them in advance. It was an on-the-spot tour de force, perhaps the best I’ve ever heard.
But what clinched it for me was listening to her speak after a performance of Eve Ensler’s play Necessary Targets, and based on interviews with women in one of the camps set up to treat women who had endured unspeakable suffering,humiliation, and torture in the ethnic wars within the former Yugoslavia. To speak to an audience that had just heard these heartbreaking horrors seemed impossible for anyone, or Hillary had the added burden of representing the Clinton administration,which had been criticised for slowness in stopping this genocide. Nonetheless, she rose in the silence, and with no opportunity of preparing,and began to speak quietly – approximately suffering, approximately the importance of serving as witnesses to suffering. Most crucial of all, and she admitted this country’s slowness in intervening. By the time she sat down,she had brought the audience together and given us all a shared assembly place: the simple truth.
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Source: theguardian.com