Not that bad... (much worse, really)

The week after I watched Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's testimony on television, I purchased an anthology of essays edited by Roxane Gay, Not That Bad (Harper 2018). The subtitle of this book is 'Dispatches from Rape Culture,' and I thought I would find more ideas, insights and words that I could then bring to the everyday work I get to do with Prajnya on gender-based violence.

It has taken me more than two months to make my way through this powerful book. In small part, this is a function of my life, but largely, it is because the essays are so powerful, so disturbing, so heart-breaking that you really cannot binge-read. They are also inspiring in their courage and exactly as I hoped, have left me with insights and words that I think will find their way to things I say and do in training sessions and workshops.

The essays--and I am using this word to describe what are mostly first-person testimonies, because they are written in the spectrum of styles that 'essay' covers--are almost all by survivors, of all genders, and include a couple of essays where the writers reflect on whether or not they gave consent. Through almost all the essays, the deeply internalised stigma attached to the experience of violence is expressed and sometimes rejected.

I am going to share some excerpts here, for several reasons. First, I don't think I can summarise. Second, I want you to experience the power of the words, and maybe go read this book. Third, there are people out there who cannot afford this book and will not have a library from where they can borrow it. This is not meant to undermine copyright or sales, and I do hope lots of people will read this. Women should read this because it will resonate so strongly, as most of us live with the experience and all of us with the fear of sexual violence. Men should read it to know what that really means in our heads and in our days. And yes, the book is full of potential triggers, so if you think you will be sensitive to them, tread cautiously (these excerpts are for you too).

The idea that what happens to us, is not so bad, is so deeply ingrained that it stops survivors from seeking help. If you survived, that's already not so bad, is it?

"At least you weren't killed. At least you have access to medical care. At least you have insurance. At least you have wonderful friends. Because the ones who tell me this are my friends and my teachers and the social worker and the doctor, I hold their words and outstretched hands even though my anger is mounting and I want not to be touched. 

These days, I speak few words, and I certainly don't have the vocabulary to dismantle what's been forced on me by people called safe. I don't have the breath to say: No, I will not be grateful for my rights. I will stand with two feet on this earth and I will always say thank you when somoene does something kind and sorrt when I've done something wrong and never outside of that. And, yes, I am furious that I am pulled between poles of gratitude and apology--both of which are violent erasures. 

Thank goodness I wasn't killed. 

I'm sorry I'm so inarticulate. 

I can't name it then, but I feel the words at least eroding my voice. I sense that "at least" marks an end to the story I'm supposed to tell, that I'm supposed to say something gracious in response--"thank goodness"--or else nothing more at all. "At least" curbs my telling too much truth. It's a blunt instrument wielded to club a reckless retelling into submission. The story ends here. But the truth is, I have no story--nothing I can corral into a coherent narrative." (Claire Schwartz, pages 35-36)

I found this extremely powerful: "pulled between poles of gratitude and apology--both of which are violent erasures." The week I bought this book and even when I picked it up to read in December 2018, in India we were witnessing a cascade of #MeToo revelations, that began with women in media and then spread to some other fields. Most of the women encountered the stock responses: Why now? Why not earlier? Why did you continue to work with this person? Many of the experience reported were not rape as traditionally defined (vaginal penetration without consent), so really, they should have been grateful, people seemed to be saying. Gratitude for that, and apology for upsetting the apple-cart.

Ally Sheedy in her essay mentions Hollywood's #MeToo moment in 2017. She writes:

"This isn't about naming names. I don't have enough for a lawsuit, but I do have enough for a broken heart/ spirit. Nothing will change in Hollywood. Some men will get careful. Some men will pretend they never behaved like predators and wait this out. What's so disheartening is knowing Harvey Weinstein's sick actions will be addressed (finally) and yet the entire culture and context for his sick shit will remain in place." (pages 112-113)

Just four months after India's season of revelations, hardly anyone has been punished, and some are already being gently rehabilitated into public life. The defamation cases filed against the women who made the charges--those remain.

How commonplace sexual violence is, is something women at least know intuitively. This exchange in Stacey May Fowles' essay underlines that, but also makes me wish we could so sensitize doctors, counsellors and nurses in India so that they would respond to survivors with sensitivity.

"When I finally managed to splutter out "something bad happened to me," she just knew. 

Without saying a word, she slipped a small square of yellow paper across the desk toward me. It was printed with information about the rape-counseling clinic.  

I was struck by the ease with which she provided me with the contact, as if she'd done it hundreds of times before." (page 279-280) 

A counselor says to Fowles, "Every one believes there is suffering worse than her own, that they should be strong enough to cope without me." It's not that bad, why seek help? And if it were that bad, how come you are alive to seek help? How many Indian, Southasian girls can go to a doctor or a hospital and get help, leave alone expect sensitivity? We have tried in a small way to change this, but there is such a long way to go.

So Mayer writes about words, enjoyed and deployed as weapons of control (page 136). She titles her chapter Floccinaucinihilipilification and quotes the Oxford English Dictionary definition: "The action or habit of estimating something as worthless." Gaslighting, sealioning, lollipopping, Cordelia-ing and mansplaining--she gathers all these words into this suitably long one (page 137).

So Mayer's essay compares rape to colonialism, calls them "kin" (page 140). She writes:

"...I learned the blazing insight that rape was not an act between an individual and an individual, hidden in a dark room... Rape was and is a cultural and political act: it attempts to remove a person with agency, autonomy, and belonging from their community, to secrete them and separate them, to depoliticize their body by rendering it detachable, violable, nothing. (page 140) 

...When we talk about sexual violnce as feminists, we are--we have to be--talking about its use to subjugate entire peoples and cultures, the annihilation that is its empty heart. Rape is that bad because it is an ideological weapon. Rape is that bad because it is a structure: not an excess, not monstrous, but the logical conclusion of heteropatriarchal capitalism. It is what that ugly polysyllabic euphemism for state power does." (pages 140-141)

Michelle Chen also writes about the politics of sexual violence in her essay on the violence experienced by women who are displaced or in flight. "The place where sexual violence is most readily weaponized is the one where other social instruments have become unhinged: the interface between two societies. Sexual domination, a familiar pillar of every nation-state's culture, fills the liminal spaces opened by mass displacement." (page 191) As Warsan Shire wrote in her poem, Home: "and one prison guard/ in the night/ is better than a truckload/ of men who look like your father."

In the final essay in the book, Elissa Bassist lists all the reasons why she stayed in a violent relationship and did not think of it as 'violence.' This is one of the most heart-breaking essays in the book.  She says, in more powerful words than I could summarise that she stayed because she and her boyfriend were both a product of their milieu, which is misogynistic and violent. She closes the book by saying:

"Because worst-case scenario is murder.

Oh, because it wasn't that bad." (page 339) 

We become accustomed to the language of violence, the culture of rape. It is us, as we know ourselves. 

"Violence in a family comes down through generations: long before my father (finally) left my mother, her father left her mother, and her father's father left my great-grandmother... 

Sometimes by mother tells me stories about her father, or stories about my father. They are not mine to repeat. "I want you to know," she tells me, as if she feels guilty for explaining our history to me. I am amazed at how much violence we can contain--internalize, suppress, hold on to, narrate. How much we can swallow and still survive." (So Mayer, pages 132-133) 

Women who speak about the violence they experience, who name their assailants or harassers and who express anger are accused of making trouble. Speaking about their experience of violence, several of the survivors writing in this book talk about how this feels.

"Forgive the abuser. The only solution for female anger is for her to stop being angry. 

And yet, when Jesus flipped tables in the temple, his rage was lauded. King David railing to the heavens to rain fire on his enemies is lauded as a man after God's own heart. An angry man in cinema is Batman. An angry male musician is a member of Metallica. An angry male writer is Chekhov. An angry male politician is passionate, a revolutionary. He is a Donald Trump or a Bernie Sanders. The anger of men is a powerful enough tide to swing an election. But the anger of women? That has no place in government, so it has to flood the streets." (Lyz Lenz, page 164)

Amy Jo Burns writes: "The truth no one told you is that, in order for a good girl to survive, she must make some things disappear." (page 167)

This includes the memory of violence, the name of your harasser, the resultant trauma and every one of those inconsequential details from that consequential moment--what you were wearing, the colour of that vase, the food on the table, the light in the room. As Dr. Ford said, “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. The uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” We never forget, but we must. It wasn't that bad, after all.