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. 

#nosgbv Dignity and violence

Yesterday, a short video made its public appearance. It ostensibly showed the late Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, J Jayalalithaa, as she lay in her hospital bed,  sipping juice and watching TV. Her clothes were in disarray, as ours get when we are relaxing, thinking we are alone.

This suggests that the video was shot without her knowledge, and shot by someone who did not care about her sense of dignity or her privacy. It was shot without her consent.

The video was meant,  we are told,  to convince voters that she was well taken care of and to tip the balance in favor of the Shashikala faction. In fact, it tells us that these were people who did not and do not care about JJ and what she would want. She was and is an instrument for them. But that is a different discussion.

Suppose this were not a hospitalized leader but a young woman changing clothes or a teenager in the shower. What would we call this video? There are penalties in the law for shooting photos and videos without consent. It is a violation of rights,  privacy and the law. A crime.

The law uses old fashioned language like 'outraging modesty'  and we are wont to smile. But what else is a video like this and who is going to file an FIR on behalf of a leader who fiercely guarded her privacy and public persona?

Last night, CNN India played the video over and over. What is the penalty for that?

We will not ask. We use and lose the leaders we claim to idolize. Like we do all other human beings.

If this is the fate of someone who was so powerful, what can the truly powerless expect? How meaningless are the memes that dominated 2017 for the elite? Consent? #metoo?

Where do we begin to change thinking about respecting each other, about rights, about borders, about privacy?

#nosgbv Note to Self

"I write myself a note each day,

and I place it in my hat.

The wind comes by, the hat blows high

but that not the end of that

For ’round and ’round the world it goes

it lands here right behind myself,

I pick it up, and I read the note,

which is merely to remind myself

I’m Hans Christian Andersen,

Andersen, that’s me!" (Frank Loesser, c. 1952)

I heard this song in my teens, as part of an album of Danny Kaye songs, and have loved this idea of reminding oneself of who one is. Too much of our intrinsic self is altered by the world around us. Physical and sexual violence are not the only ways in which one can be diminished. One is also diminished and damaged by the ways of the world.

For instance, a crawling infant picks up an odd-shaped, bright colourd object lying within reach. She puts it in her mouth. Someone calls out, "Girls don't play with cars!" She does not know she's a girl, she does not know it's a car. It's handy. It's bright and attractive. It has an interesting shape and texture. It may have a good taste, or better yet, make for a good bite. But now we've begun to place limits on her curiosity. At fifteen, when she would rather play a game than read the news, we will reverse our instructions, and say to her, "You must show an interest in the world." In both instances, we will expect that curiosity to follow set patterns. She should show an interest in these questions and not those. With a little bit of luck (to borrow from another song), she will pay attention neither at eight months nor at fifteen years.

There is also our running commentary on physical appearance. Who the baby looks like; is the toddler tall for her age or not; does the boy have girlish eyelashes; is the girl too active for her own good--even little children are not spared. Puberty unleashes the worst in us. "Better take care of those pimples or you'll be scarred for life." "15 and still such a girlish voice?" And this before people move on to temperament and skill-sets--can she cook yet? why are you letting him choose a subject without job prospects? I want to say that we are changing, but I suspect that is still largely an affirmation. 

By the time we reach our 20s, what is left of that infant--blithely unaware of gender, curious about everything, accepting of everyone? Gone. Long gone. Doesn't matter. 

What matters is what is left within us. We are full of do's and don'ts, taboos and inhibitions. We convince ourselves of what we cannot do, for one reason or another. So many of us do not feel entitled to dream. We would like, very politely, a good job, a decent partner who is not too abusive and a good life. We would love more, love to have it all, but in our station, our dreams must be drawn within the borders of a limited space on the universal canvas. 

By the time we reach the middle years, it's hard to find ourselves--our truest selves, our best selves--in the middle of this mess of strictures and strings. And so today, as part of #LetterboxResistance, Prajnya's 16 Days Campaign activity of the day, I want to write myself a note--an aide-memoire. 

Dear Self,

Clear the clutter. 

Cut the crap.

Throw out the don't's.

Be ruthless with should's.

Sort out the do's,

and discard what you won't use.

Dust off the cobwebs

of duty and fear.

Find your true self,

bright, unafraid

and full of heart.

And hold on tight,

that's the hard part.

Through storms 

and fires and wars

that wage, stay still,

glow steady,

refuse to be caged.

From, Your Shadow.  

#nosgbv Sounds of Silence

"And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share...
No one dare
disturb the sounds of silence."

I have been listening to this Simon and Garfunkel classic most of my life. But yesterday, as I listened during my evening walk, ahead of writing about the impossibility of speaking up about everything that happens, I was struck by how apt it was. "No one dare disturb the sounds of silence."

I too have been reading about the controversy over Padmavati, and have retweeted a couple of articles and posts I agree with, but have not said anything. Of course, I have views on this but I have not aired them, for many reasons. Today, I am wondering if they are reasons or excuses, and I have to conclude that maybe they are both.

You wake up in the morning and turn on any news source or pick up an old-fashioned newspaper, and there is a barrage of information that you can barely process. If you let one grab your attention and start to respond, you do little else in the day. And I tell myself, I run an organisation that works on gender violence awareness day in and out. Surely, my time is best spent doing my work. A hundred philosophical aphorisms support my view from Voltaire's 'Il faut cultiver son jardin' to a refrain of many Tamil spiritual teachers, 'Chumma iru.'

But someone threatens to behead a woman and I have nothing to say.... how do we reach that point?

It's not just the threat to an actress for doing her job. It is that entire flood of news, each item of which is devastating to someone's life and symptomatic of horrible, inhumane traits deeply embedded in our society. Like the incident my mother read about yesterday, where a five year old boy followed a girl of his age to the bathroom, forcibly pulled down her underwear and raped her by inserting a pencil up her vagina. What is the reaction you can have to something like that? My first thought is that he is learning this from the adults around him. Violent abuse is a widespread habit and normalized in many households. Who is doing this to whom within his line of vision?

And just where do you begin to fix such a horrible world?

Decades of hard work by the women's movement and the exigencies of filling up 24/7 news have brought us to a point when in a day, we hear not about one or two or even three incidents like this but several and then one or two are chosen for their dramatic values and replayed to us over and over. We tune out in order to function.

The result is that we normalize cruelty and inhumane behaviour over time. For instance, when Gauri Lankesh was killed, we had actually created enough room for people to say, "But you know these were her views." The point surely was, no matter what her views and your disagreement with them, it was wrong to kill or hurt her. But we have missed that point completely.

With Padmavati, we are debating historicity and freedom of expression and all of these are very important, but the bottomline is surely: since when have we come to accept violence as the normal language of disagreement between people? Since when is it normal for us to be distracted by relative trivia (was she real or not?) and governments to remain silent about physical threats? And then, if the government was to use my own logic, then it could arguably say, "If I took a position on everything that happened, who would introduce demonetisation or collect your garbage?"

When do we speak and when do we let something go? This is a really hard decision. This blogpost is not about my sharing an epiphany on this question but simply working my way through it by writing.

First of all, as I said, it is hard to react to everything that happens--one does not know everything that happens, one cannot be in responsive/reactive mode all the time, one wants to think things through... that said, when do I decide that it is time to say something? When does an issue feel critical enough that it is important for me to speak?

Second, do I have something constructive to add? Usually, no, and that is one reason I stay silent. My tweet or my blogspot would add nothing that is not already being said. On some issues, I stay out all through. On others, I voice my support by signing a petition that makes sense to me. On a few others, I say something by placing it in a broader context, historical or comparative, which is what I am trained to do. But then, in the face of escalating violence, is being selective important or should one just push back all the time?

I don't know much about most things that happen. I know a little but "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," as many school autographs reminded me. Should I wait to learn, should I leave it to experts to lead or should I say, at this moment, it is the heft that counts--all hands to the deck, all voices into the chorus that must push back this silence.

Finally, we are quiet because we don't think it will make a difference what we say. This is the silence that breaks my heart. Where do we go from here? We abdicate our right to protest because we don't think it makes a difference. Governments--this one, any one--are not going to pay us any attention. We are schizophrenic about buying into everything the government tells us but not trusting that it will pay us any attention. Why are we investing so much in a government that we cannot hold to account? My mind says to me now, "Don't go down that road today. Don't digress." Yes, but it is also part of the problem, no? Citizens are quiet when citizens are helpless and when citizens secretly agree. I don't know which one scares me more.

There is the silence of the hive or of ants as they go about their work. And there is the silence of those that will not speak because they are in denial. Which one is mine? I am realising I have to ask this question every single moment of the day if my own silence is not to be read as tacit consent.

I genuinely don't know.


Postscript (added 25.11.17)

The best comments on the Padmavati question have come from this cartoonist:

https://twitter.com/CartoonistSan/status/932823465366732800
https://twitter.com/ShashiTharoor/status/825412746963333120