I don't want to say what will hurt you to hear
In my previous Sapphire blog, I discuss how Sapphire says things in a more direct, raw way than I do. Why do I do that? Why do I still read about rape? Why is it important to talk about rape? And even more importantly, why would the world want Sapphire and writers everywhere NOT to talk about it? |
I sugar coat the truth because survivors are taught. No one really wants to know. If you love someone it hurts to be confronted with their pain. I fictionalize rape, because I have learned as a survivor part of surviving is the message that people think differently about you when they know you were once victimized. Part of being a victim is knowing that briefly watching a clip from the movie Sleepers, Precious, or any rape scene woven into an HBO series, will cause nightmares. Bone chilling, waking up screaming night terrors, remembering the smell of dirty sheets, or the objects that surround the breaking of innocence. |
Part of being a survivor is knowing that you must not ever allow silence to be an approval or condemnation of a child. In fact that sounds like a controlling value:
Sapphire is gratuitously raw in her work. I want to edit her. I want to tell her it isn't fair to write this way. It isn't fair to mentally rape your audience, when she writes things like "A train with razor blades for wheels is riding my asshole." I want to make her sound nice. I would write something more distant perhaps like "a ripping pain, caught in a guttural squelched fear. Human elasticity torn to the point, that anyone might open or close that door that was once only a way out." I want to tell her to let her audience imagine a dirty set of sheets, rather than the rape she is telling. But then even knowing that my editing of her work is really just minimizing her expression. Why do I do that? Why does society want to sensor victims? I think it is complicated here are some of the reasons I suppose:
* It hurts to hear human suffering of Sapphire's magnitude
* If we hear it we feel compelled to do something, for girls like Sapphire
* We aren't really sure that the telling of violence will help the victim
* Sapphire could be lying (not my thoughts but an idea people might have)
* If we have empathy for a Sapphire, we have to experience what she went through
* We too feel powerless to change victimization, it happens in private- perhaps it should stay in private
* It hurts to hear human suffering of Sapphire's magnitude
* If we hear it we feel compelled to do something, for girls like Sapphire
* We aren't really sure that the telling of violence will help the victim
* Sapphire could be lying (not my thoughts but an idea people might have)
* If we have empathy for a Sapphire, we have to experience what she went through
* We too feel powerless to change victimization, it happens in private- perhaps it should stay in private
So why write about Rape?
Writers write the stories they know advocating for a change. Rape victims are silenced first by the abuser. Second, by the world. But Silence of that magnitude only perpetuates the silence of those abused.
This is a true story about friendship that runs deeper than blood. This is my story and that of the only three friends in my life that truly mattered. Two of them were killers who never made it past the age of 30. The other's a non-practicing attorney living with the pain of his past - too afraid to let it go, never confronting its horror. I'm the only one who can speak for them, and the children we were. ~from Sleepers