It is the trouble with the sexual victimization, the place where victims learn no one really wants to know your story. I mean we do right? We want to know the gory details of some other person's rape from the place where it doesn't actually infect us, make us not able to sleep at night, question our own loved ones' safety. When we think of a loved one we think, maybe it would be better not to know.
Because, it hurts to know someone else's pain. As I write this, I know, that someone will think, I'd want to be there for my friend, so that they could have a shoulder to cry on. Yet, it is a painful- awkward intimacy that comes with victim-hood.
image used under creative commons from: Speaktheblog | In Speak, we see Melinda's struggle to tell her story. It is a story many women know. It is a necessary story to be told. This is a place where fiction creates a narrative better told than non-fiction. Melinda's story is a narrative truth, it will hurt you to keep your story silent. It will poison you and keep you from the living. The vindication of course is in the scene where Melinda takes a pen to the bathroom stall. |
However, what happens next is the embodiment of why we must write about rape. Girls add on their own stories. In addressing the rape of a fictional character, Laurie Halse Anderson is allowing her readers to tell their own stories. She is placing the metaphoric pen in their hand and showing them the way to their own metaphoric bathroom stall sounding board.
Rape is graffiti scarring the soul, like that on the stall, like carvings on a tree. The victim can watch that scar move, but it is there still carved on the bark of her soul.
But really SHHHH....
The moment where she loses me. While I loved the story, there is a moment I am totally lost with Speak. Where Melinda starts talking, I spent my own time with silence. And I know it doesn't come out, exactly. There is a resistance to communication met with rape that Anderson's work does not cover. The curiosity is lost when we open up another's hurt, and that hurt will hurt the listener. In talking about rape, we give voice to a victim. But hearing about rape, means sharing in the abuse of another, it means witnessing something, it means empathy, not just compassion. In acknowledging rape, we acknowledge a world where we all allow rape to happen, and we all allow rapists to exist. Our societal evil, creates the vacuum of silence for girls, boys, women and men, like Melinda.
Should we let our children read about rape?
We want our children to hold on to innocence. It is a natural reaction. Keep them young, tell them fairy-tales, better they believe in castles, princes and tiaras, than the cold bitter realities of life. However, 1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 men will be sexually assaulted before the age of 18. (Finkelhor et al., 1990.) This means that your daughter, or one of her 3 best friends will likely be sexually assaulted. Your son, or one of the boys he rides bikes with will be victimized, too. I don't pretend to know the right age to let your children read rape stories, I know I hope to keep my children innocent as long as possible. But keeping them innocent also keeps them ignorant. Before they go on their first date, or sneak their first party (god forbid), knowing there are really good-looking, cool-seeming people, who rape, might help avoid those issues. I personally would rather my children lose their innocence because of literary pursuits than painful life experiences. |