Good afternoon.
(Audience) Good afternoon.
Let's like take two, okay?
(Laughter)
Good afternoon.
(Audience) Good afternoon.
It's really good to see y'all.
I heard they're running a little under,
so I'm just going to be greedy and take the extra time.
And I apologize in advance for my appearance.
You're catching me on a disheveled travel day.
By sheer coincidence,
I accepted this engagement months ago,
before I knew that this week was actually the week of publication for my new book.
So I've been trotting all over the place, essentially putting out fires,
while talking, incidentally, about the book,
and this is just what I look like when I travel.
So the theme today was supposed to be "a sense of wonder,"
and I really don't have any idea what I'm going to say.
I prepared some remarks, and they were solid.
You know, I could probably have turned them in in graduate school
and gotten that A that I was always so determined to get.
But I don't have any interest in saying it.
For whatever reason, the exercise was about writing it,
and I have a great woman in my life named Tennie McCarty.
She is my grandmother of choice.
I have a family of chance.
God has a sense of humor.
And I also have, today, a family of choice.
And Tennie McCarty, whom I call Mennie -
it's her grandmammy name -
has taught me many, many things, one of which is,
"What comes from the head goes straight over the head.
But what comes from the heart goes straight to the heart."
So screw the remarks - coming from the heart.
A lot of people, when they think of me, Ashley Judd,
wonder, "What the hell happened to her?"
(Laughter)
I semi-retired in 2004.
I did a little picture now and then,
but then they'd see me in something like "Tooth Fairy" and say,
"I wonder what happened to her - she's gained a lot of weight."
Well, my financial planner wondered about the decision that I made too
when I walked away from everything
when, it turns out, I was actually one of the highest paid women
in the history of Hollywood -
probably not adjusting for inflation, because Mary Pickford was a big star.
What happened was I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.
I had no idea what was wrong with me,
but I knew it all looked real good on the outside,
but on the inside, I hurt.
And I had really no "reason" to hurt,
but as it turns out, as I've come to realize,
that I came from a dysfunctional family system
which at times didn't work very well,
and the kinds of things that happened,
that happen in dysfunctional family systems
happen to all of us.
But my symptoms, if you will, looked different.
For example, I could be irritable and unreasonable without even knowing it.
But fortunately, some folks identified in me
that I had been affected by alcoholism and other isms,
and they extended me the same hope and help
that had been so freely given to them.
But what's so weird about all of this
is that in 2004, when I semi-retired and I started traveling the world
doing feminist social justice work,
public health and human rights work,
I wanted so earnestly to be useful to my fellows.
I wanted to be of service,
and yet I was trying to give away something that I didn't yet have.
So I kind of had it backwards.
My first trip was to Cambodia.
I was very open-minded and very willing
yet wholly unprepared for what I was about to witness.
The great Mu Sochua,
who has since that time been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize,
had pulled her colleague aside and said,
"Let's take this bright light, this star from Hollywood,
into the darkest corner of hell,"
and that's exactly what those women did.
They took me to the child brothels of Svay Pak.
And I didn't know what to do
except sit down
and open my mind
and open my heart and open my arms.
And when the first sex slave came over to me, and I said,
"What would you like for me to know about you?"
And he began to weep and cry and tell me his story,
and then I said,
"How did you get that crazy scar on your face?"
And he said, "Well, the pimps, when they were breaking me in,
had a dog maul my face while they were raping me."
And all of a sudden, however improbably,
I had been entrusted -
entrusted -
with this man's story
and of the other many things that Mennie has taught me
is at the end of our lives, all we have is our story.
And I've been given permission by people all over the world -
in slums and refugee camps,
in hospices and makeshift schools,
in clinics in buildings
which in this country would be condemned structures -
to share their stories with you.
In fact, they have insisted that that's what I do.
And about that, I have a sense of wonder.
And they don't tell me their stories because they know me from Hollywood.
They associate Hollywood with archetypal words like "Mickey Mouse."
It's pretty irrelevant to them.
But I walk in the door or through the little curtain
where a lot of the sex slaves in their initial phase of being broken in
are brought in and kept and detained,
and something happens.
They know that they're being witnessed.
They know that they're being validated.
And even physics tell us
that something, when it perceives it is being watched, it changes.
And all of a sudden, orphans who are hungry and lethargic
and maybe have diarrheal disease from unsafe drinking water
and have parasites,
they sit up a little straighter.
And however shyly, they begin to smile.
And they even reach out their hands,
and they begin to trust.
And about that, I have a sense of wonder.
The first orphan I met was a precious girl named Ook Shraylock,
and she was unlike other orphans in that she was really exuberant.
I think - the story at least I've made up in my head -
is that she had her parents long enough to have experienced some nurturing,
and so she had that template,
she had that feeling in her body of what it's like to be held
and to be mirthful and to have fun and to really love somebody.
And she gave me the greatest gift I have ever been given
because she let me love her.
And I held her in my arms,
and when it was about time for me to go and she clung a little tighter,
and she'd let me know,
she'd just give me these subtle signals in her body
when she wanted me to rock her.
I realized that the night before, the very night before I had met her,
I had had a dream about my mamaw and my papaw,
my beloved paternal grandparents.
And in that dream, my mamaw, who was always my safe person
and is the reason,
God as my witness,
I am alive today,
had come to me,
and she was so real in the dream,
it was as she was in life.
Every little hair in her eyebrows,
the sweet, little - just everything.
You know those dreams where they're so real?
And she had held me, and she had said,
"The answer is in the book."
What a beautifully enigmatic and highly suggestive thing
for this wonderful woman to have told me in my dream.
And so holding this girl, I told her about my dream
and suggested that it's possible for us to renurture ourselves,
that when we have been loved,
we can, through our imagination, vicariously conjure those sensations
and remind ourselves of our very preciousness,
our intrinsic sense of worth
and remember that to somebody, at some time, we mattered.
And then I told her I would never forget her.
I did not give her false hope.
I said, "I don't know if I'll ever see you again,
but I will tell your story."
And that I have this strange platform,
given to me in a culture and in a media that I don't even pretend to understand,
in which I could bring to you her story
is something about which I wonder a lot.
And when I get too caught up in my head,
I remember what Mennie said:
"What comes from the head goes over the head."
And I make that recommitment to take the most difficult journey I ever take,
the one that is more harrowing as the roads in Congo,
the one to here, my heart.
I do a lot of horizontal travel, and it takes planning.
There's the passports and the visa and the bureaucracy,
all the inoculations,
making sure that everything is set up on the ground, that it's safe.
But there's nothing more important than the vertical journey,
and it is this one here
that enables all the other traveling to happen and to have meaning,
for it is from this place, ultimately,
that meaning is constructed and that change happens.
Where's the timer?
How am I doing?
(Man) Great.
Well, I know I'm doing great, but how much time do I have?
(Laughter)
You walked right into that, pal.
I have seven more minutes?
Wooh! I'm just getting started.
(Laughter)
So that first day, when I was in Svay Pak,
for my next trip
I went to the Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh,
and I saw, briefly
and only to the level which a person of privilege like I can absorb it,
what it would have been like to live in a genocidal and murderous time
under the lunatic Pol Pot.
And a man who had survived that era, who was a doctor, told me
that for the duration of the Khmer Rouge, he pretended to be an illiterate peasant
because the educated classes were all massacred.
And he talked about what an anguishing choice that was for him
because he could be sitting or standing
alongside one whose life he could have saved,
but it would have potentially cost him his own
if he had betrayed his education.
And I said, "What ... did you ..."
I mean, what do you say to someone
who's describing going through a regime like that?
And he said, "I used to take rocks
and on the ground spell out S-O-S
and hope that the Americans flying overhead would see the SOS
and help us."
We were busy bombing Laos [inaudible].
So when I went that night to the American ambassador's residence
to make the remarks and meet the high-ranking ministers of government,
I said to him, "Where were we?
Why did the United States allow, at times even contribute to this?"
And he was a really lovely guy,
rather honest fellow and diplomatic.
He said, "We were in rectal defilade."
(Laughter)
When I got back to my hotel room, I was so astounded and shattered.
I didn't have anywhere in my brain to put this information;
I was so flooded.
And my heart was just absolutely broken.
I mean, remember, I came into the work with kind of a broken heart to begin with.
There was a reason why I was attracted to trauma.
There was a reason why I intuited
I had a very strange capacity for emotional extremes.
How many of you want to go to refugee camps for your next vacation?
It is my idea of fun in a perverse way.
So back at my hotel room,
I remember being like -
spinning in these little circles, not even knowing where to turn,
so I did what I do best
because I'm compulsive about the internet,
and I checked my email.
And I had an email from a friend here in town, Cathy Lewis.
She's a remarkable chef, and she was asking me about the food.
Very innocent, travel-type questions,
and, you know, she had some concern
about American franchising pushing out local, cultural institutions,
and she said, "Oh, gosh. Is there any Starbucks yet?"
And I was just aggressive.
(Laughter)
And I said, "No, there's not any Starbucks yet.
There's just intergenerational trauma,
sexual exploitation,
agonizing deaths of children through starvation,
some really screwed up immigration policies
from the United States
where we're sending survivors of the Khmer Rouge's children -
we're deporting them back to a country that they don't know,
because of little, stupid immigration things.
And the next thing I knew, she wrote me back, and she said,
"I am praying for you."
And she asked my permission to send that diary to other friends and family
who would support me spiritually
while I continued to take this improbable journey.
And the next day and the next week
and the next country -
And all of a sudden
I'd been to 13 countries around the world,
I'd been to Congo and Rwanda multiple times,
and I had written 650 pages of those diaries.
And that is the book that was published this week.
And in those diaries, I tell many stories -
because that's really all that they are
is a way for me to have received,
like a sacrament,
an exploited and disempowered person's story
and celebrate with you
not only their narrative of trauma
but to tell you how beautiful they are
and how resilient, how creative,
and the ingenuity of the poor is mind-blowing.
Such a woman is Kika.
I met Kika recently when I was in eastern Congo.
She had crawled to the Panzi Clinic in Bukavu.
She sat very straight.
She was a fierce kind of a tender woman.
She would often dissociate,
but when she was present, she was magical.
And I said, "How did you get here?"
And she said, "Well, I crawled."
I didn't think I was hearing her correctly,
so I said, "What would you like for me to know about your story?"
And she said, "Well, I was fetching water one day,
and I was attacked by armed militia
who rove the area exploiting my country's vast mineral wealth."
Minerals, by the way,
in the very computer that I used to type up my remarks for today.
She said,
"When they attacked me, I screamed,
and I screamed loudly enough that my brother heard me and came running.
And when he got there, they heckled him and said,
"Oh, ha. Now that you're here, rape your sister."
And he said, "I will not."
And they said, "Oh yes, you will.
Rape your sister."
And he said, "I cannot.
She is like my mother."
So they stabbed him to death with their bayonets in front of Kika,
gang-raped her multiple times.
And when the villagers came after it was over,
they carried their bodies - his dead and hers broken -
back to the hut.
But after two weeks,
Kika smelled so bad from her internal injuries
that they said,
"We're sorry, Kika, but you've got to go."
And that was when she, with her 11-year-old son,
began to crawl to the Panzi Clinic.
It took her a month.
And I said, "Crawl?"
And she said,
pedaling the air, showing me how she crawled.
And I when I said, "Kika, how have you done this?
How have you done this?"
she would just bend imperceptibly at the waist
when she talked about her brother
and used her cloth from the kitchen to silently mop her tears.
And she said,
"When I arrived at Panzi and I was nearly dead,
they did not abandon me.
And when I did not get well, they did not abandon me.
And when I could not go home
because my area is instable and my trauma too bad,
they did not abandon me.
And when I did get a little better, they found me a job in the kitchen,
and they did not abandon me."
And I told her that day,
"Kika, in my own way, however small,
with God as my witness,
I will not abandon you."
There are simple, cost-effective, grassroots programs
operated within local contexts by survivors like Kika
that disrupt cycles of poverty and violence.
They make a difference,
and I have an enormous sense of awe and wonder
about the people who persevere when the world seems so senseless.
It is hard work; it is grueling.
And there have been times when I was debilitated with grief.
But when I remember Kika and Ook Shreylock,
and I connect between my head and my heart
and take my own vertical journey
and show up at places like this on sunny spring days
with people like you,
who could be out enjoying
everything that middle Tennessee has to offer on the ninth of May
but instead share with me in the sacred narratives of these people.
I feel a sense of wonder about that too.
And now you know,
and with knowing comes responsibility.
When you walk out of here, you have a choice:
Will you abandon Kika?
Or will you allow yourself to be vulnerable enough
to have witnessed, to have seen, to have validated?
It is the birthright of every child to be listened to.
Will you allow yourself to be recruited to her welfare?
Because that's the risk that comes with having a sense of wonder
and being willing to witness and to validate.
Thanks for letting me share with you today.
I appreciate your time.
(Applause)