Isabel Allende: Tales of passion

【微信公众号：Raz英语学习俱乐部（微信号Razkids）同步推送每日TED文稿和音频，关注Raz分级读物、TED学习系列、海外自由行/夏令营】 Isabel Allende writes stories of passion. Her novels and memoirs, including The House of the Spirits and Eva Luna, tell the stories of women and men who live with passionate commitment — to love, to their world, to an ideal. *Why you should listen As a novelist and memoirist, Isabel Allende writes of passionate lives, including her own. Born into a Chilean family with political ties, she went into exile in the United States in the 1970s—an event that, she believes, created her as a writer. Her voice blends sweeping narrative with touches of magical realism; her stories are romantic, in the very best sense of the word. Her novels include The House of the Spirits, Eva Luna and The Stories of Eva Luna, and her latest, Maya&`&s Notebook and Ripper. And don&`&t forget her adventure trilogy for young readers— City of the Beasts, Kingdom of the Golden Dragon and Forest of the Pygmies. As a memoirist, she has written about her vision of her lost Chile, in My Invented Country, and movingly tells the story of her life to her own daughter, in Paula. Her book Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses memorably linked two sections of the bookstore that don&`&t see much crossover: Erotica and Cookbooks. Just as vital is her community work: The Isabel Allende Foundation works with nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area and Chile to empower and protect women and girls—understanding that empowering women is the only true route to social and economic justice. *Transcript Thank you so much. It&`&s really scary to be here among the smartest of the smart. 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. 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 green room 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 prizewinner 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 five, 15 clients per day, and if they rebel, they are tortured with electricity. In the green room 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. 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 savannah, 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. 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 have 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 U.S. 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. More transcript please see: http://www.ted.com/talks/isabel_allende_tells_tales_of_passion/transcript?language=en