Thank you so much.
It's really scary to be here
among the smartest of the smart.
(Laughter)
I'm here to tell you
a few tales of passion.
There's a Jewish saying that I love:
What is truer than truth?
Answer: the story.
I'm a storyteller.
I want to convey something
that is 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 up:
justice, loyalty, violence,
death, political and social issues,
freedom.
I'm aware of the mystery around us,
so I write about
coincidences, premonitions,
emotions, dreams,
the power of nature, magic.
In the last 20 years,
I have published a few books,
but I have lived in anonymity
until February of 2006,
when I carried the Olympic flag
in the Winter Olympics in Italy.
That made me a celebrity.
(Laughter)
Now people recognize me in Macy's,
and my grandchildren think that I'm cool.
(Laughter)
Allow me to tell you about
my four minutes of fame.
One of the organizers
of the Olympic ceremony,
of the opening ceremony,
called me and said that I had been
selected to be one of the flag bearers.
I replied that surely,
this was a case of mistaken identity,
because I'm as far as you can get
from being an athlete.
Actually, I wasn't even sure
that I could go around the stadium
without a walker.
(Laughter)
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 going to wear?
(Laughter)
"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.
(Laughter)
By the middle of February,
I found myself in Turin,
where enthusiastic crowds cheered
when any of the 80 Olympic
teams was in the street.
Those athletes had sacrificed everything
to compete in the games.
They all deserved to win,
but there's the element of luck.
A speck of snow, an inch of ice,
the force of the wind
can determine the result
of a race or a game.
However, what matters 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 it always true?
Heart is what drives us
and determines our fate.
That is what I need
for my characters in my books:
a passionate heart.
I need mavericks, dissidents,
adventurers, outsiders and rebels,
who ask questions,
bend the rules and take risks.
People like all of you in this room.
Nice people with common sense
do not make interesting characters.
(Laughter)
They only make good former spouses.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
In the greenroom of the stadium,
I met the other flag bearers:
three athletes and the actresses
Susan Sarandon and Sophia Loren.
Also, two women with passionate hearts:
Wangari Maathai,
the Nobel Prize winner from Kenya
who has planted 30 million trees,
and by doing so, she has changed the soil,
the weather, in some places in Africa,
and of course, the economic
conditions in many villages;
and Somaly Mam,
a Cambodian activist who fights
passionately against child prostitution.
When she was 14 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 from AIDS,
and of brothels where children are forced
to receive 15 clients per day,
and if they rebel,
they are tortured with electricity.
In the greenroom, I received my uniform.
It was not the kind of outfit
that I normally wear,
but it was far from the Michelin Man suit
that I had anticipated.
Not bad, really.
I looked like a refrigerator.
(Laughter)
But so did most of the flag bearers,
except Sophia Loren,
the universal symbol
of beauty and passion.
Sophia is over 70 and she looks great.
She's sexy, slim and tall,
with a deep tan.
Now, how can you have a deep tan
and have no wrinkles?
I don't know.
When asked in a TV interview
how could she look so good,
she replied, "Posture."
(Laughter)
"My back is always straight,
and I don't make old people's noises."
(Laughter)
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 yourselves, no farting.
(Laughter)
Well, she didn't say that, exactly.
(Laughter)
At some point around midnight,
we were summoned
to the wings of the stadium,
and the loudspeakers announced
the Olympic flag,
and the music started --
by the way, the same music
that starts here, the "Aida" march.
Sophia Loren was right in front of me.
She's a foot taller than I am,
not counting the poofy hair.
(Laughter)
She walked elegantly,
like a giraffe on the African savanna,
holding the flag on her shoulder.
I jogged behind --
(Laughter)
on my tiptoes, holding the flag
on my extended arm,
so that my head was actually
under the damn flag.
(Laughter)
All the cameras were,
of course, on Sophia.
That was fortunate for me,
because in most press photos,
I appear too --
although, often between Sophia's legs --
(Laughter)
a place where most men would love to be.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
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 in private
usually takes less than four minutes --
(Laughter)
so he shouldn't take it personally.
(Laughter)
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's 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 who are not killed
will die of disease or starvation.
The protagonists of this story
are a young woman, Rose Mapendo,
and her children.
She's pregnant and a widow.
Soldiers had 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 in 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 16 months,
and then, by extraordinary luck
and the passionate heart
of a young American man, Sasha Chanoff,
who manages to put her
in a US rescue plane,
Rose Mapendo and her nine children
end up in Phoenix, Arizona,
where they're 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's 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,
in a patriarchal Catholic
and conservative family.
No wonder that by age five,
I was a raging feminist --
although the term
had not reached Chile yet,
so nobody knew what the heck
was wrong with me.
(Laughter)
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.
(Laughter)
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 today,
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 cannot 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 lack of men.
(Laughter)
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" or whatever you want.
The name doesn't matter,
as long as we understand
what it is about, and we support it.
So here's another tale of passion,
and this is 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 her three-week vacation.
She's prepared to clean teeth,
but when she gets there,
she finds out that there are
no doctors, no dentists,
and 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's not licensed for that;
she has never done it.
She risks a lot and she's terrified.
She doesn't even have
the proper instruments,
but fortunately, she has brought
some novocaine.
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 is so swollen
that you can't even see the 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 one percent
of the world's assets.
They are paid less than men
for the same work, if they're 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,
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.
Wangari Maathai
goes to a village in Kenya.
She talks with the women
and explains that the land is barren
because they have cut and sold the trees.
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 a women's program,
20 dollars are given to men's programs.
Women are 51 percent of humankind.
Empowering them will change everything,
more than technology
and design and entertainment.
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.
Men run the world,
and look at the mess we have.
What kind of world do we want?
This is a fundamental question
that most of us 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
or my heart.
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 the 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'm fed up with the power
that a few exert over the many
through gender, income, race and class.
I think that the time is ripe
to make fundamental changes
in our civilization.
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'm talking about men
with young minds, of course.
Old guys are hopeless;
we have to wait for them to die off.
(Laughter)
Yes, I would love to have
Sophia 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 in this room --
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.
Thank you.
(Applause and cheers)