An interview in Artist Weekly
An interview with Hagit Vardi, author of She Wasn’t Damaged, on poems she didn’t discover she could write until her 60s
Weighted Blanket: A collaboration between Lev Hasharon Mental Health Center and the Shenkar Fashion Design School.
She Wasn't Damaged was used as background to the exhibited items. It was also recited and commented on during the exhibit opening event.
"Sexual trauma is an experience characterized by the inability to put it into words. It is repressed from one's conscious mind, blurred and inaccessible. And when you do have a verbal description of events already, it largely misses the transpiring multiple layers. The words do not adequately transmit the pounding of the heart, the loss of breath, the confusion, anxiety, guilt, shame, anger, fear and everything else…
Hagit Vardi's poems achieve the impossible. She concocts words succinctly, almost dryly; words that revive dark moments. Her unique language is deceptive, for only at the end of each poem does one arrives at the full impact of recognition, when it becomes clear she has managed to capture not only the moment but the reader too."
Shmuel Hirschmann, MD, MPA, Director of Lev HaSharon Mental Health Center