Dec 8, 2022
These discourses of heterosexuality oppress us in the sense that they prevent us from speaking unless we speak in their terms.
— "The Straight Mind," Monique Wittig
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These discourses of heterosexuality oppress us in the sense that they prevent us from speaking unless we speak in their terms.
— "The Straight Mind," Monique Wittig
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Everyone is talking about A Little Life right now, which means it's time to share one of my own A Little Life anecdotes.
When I went to see the Ivo van Hove stage version a man and woman, likely a couple, were seated near me. At intermission I witnessed the woman in a vociferous whisper express her disgust and discomfort with the material and subject matter. The man seemed to be attempting to be understanding, but clearly did not fully agree. She insisted on leaving; he went with her, but with a regretful look.
Our world is not “of the living.” Our world is a space where the living and the dead meet—a world of cemeteries, memorial sites, and documents. The reading of these names is a pact between the living and the dead. Likewise, the space of superliterature holds the dead by not letting them go into nonexistence. [...] When the survivors of the fire-village massacres recounted the stories of their communities to Ales Adamovich and his cowriters, the two traditions—oral storytelling and literary war prose—merged into a document of history that, unlike history as it usually goes, is local, personal; a history where one single death is the end of one world, where the names of ahistorical people and places are preserved in the dignity of black ink on the white page, where justice is served through reading, seeing, remembering.
Valzhyna Mort, "Read and See: Ales Adamovich and Literature Out of Fire"
hello! i was wondering—and it very well may be that you have little advice on the matter or don't wish to discuss it, which I would very much understand—how you or others you may know cope with disbelief (whether direct or oblique) about your (traumatic) experiences? I am losing my mind a little bit over every interaction in which someone is skeptical of the existence of particular forms of abuse, some of which I have directly experienced. this might be a very big ask, and I apologise if that is the case!
This indeed a very big ask, but I don't mind receiving it. I'm very sorry that this is something you are having to grapple with - it's been a pervasive experience in my life, in many different forms (both direct and oblique, as you articulate it), and it's such a painful one, and so very common.
I do have thoughts about what helps me cope with it, though it is of course very much not a completed thing for me. I am also publishing this in the hopes that others may add thoughts about works for them.
This might sound overly simplistic or obvious, but I think what has helped for me has pretty much always come down to a combination of different forms of taking steps to relieve my aloneness and simultaneously creating internal and external separation from the disbelief, and working to balance those two tasks.
Relieving aloneness can be tricky because sometimes the steps we take to reach for that end up reinforcing it - other survivors can certainly have just as strong assumptions and defenses around experiences of trauma different from the ones they personally have experienced, and I've ended up in a lot of painful situations by leaning too readily into closeness with another survivor in the assumption that they would be able to tolerate the knowledge of my experiences.
But, at the same time, experiencing a thread of shared experience, even if it's only around a particular detail of or reaction to an experience, has been crucial for me. Reading survivor memoirs or other nonfiction about violence and letting myself connect to the points of similarity, even alongside the areas of difference. Leaning into relational closeness with other people who can truly tolerate knowing the truth of my experiences, regardless of whether or not they share any aspect of them. Feeling deeply about my own experiences with myself, without minimizing them. The more deeply I can take in those experiences of connection, the less existentially threatening others' disbelief feels.
And then, on the other hand, there's a sort of an internal shift I have needed to make (not that it's finished yet!) to sort of...take myself out of the whole dialogic nexus of belief and disbelief as much as possible. I have the freedom to do this because I have not ever and am not pursuing any kind of redress or systems involvement that is dependent on being believed; for someone who is, this is thorny in a different way.
But for myself, I can decide that I don't care about plausibility or believability or statistical likelihood or proof; for people determined to disbelieve, no amount of proof or telling my story coherently would be enough anyway. (Understanding others' disbelief as a psychological defense against the intolerability of knowing doesn't excuse it, but it does make it easier to set aside and not take in.) For many survivors, I know that understanding their experiences of violence within a broader social context as part of larger dynamics of oppression is central to their healing; for me, it's most important to hold them simply as my own experiences, specific and personal and meaning what they do to me and not bearing the rhetorical weight of being illustrations of social phenomena (so much disbelief circles around an experience of violence being ideologically/politically/rhetorically inconvenient).
Practically speaking, when people express disbelief about the existence of certain types of violence in the world in which they live, or behave in ways that obliquely imply such disbelief, I treat that as a communication which factors into what kinds of closeness I attempt or don't with them. I have boundaries around this for myself. I don't argue with people about whether types of violence are real, and if someone tries I will extricate myself from that interaction. On a very concrete level here on tumblr, if someone repeatedly makes jokes about acts of violence which treat those acts as abstract hypotheticals rather than things that happen in the world, I often quietly unfollow them (I most often end up doing this about torture jokes); this is a much more minor thing than someone actually expressing skepticism, but I've found it's where I want one of my boundaries to be.
I've been thinking a lot recently about the internal shift of that separation which I've been trying to describe here; I think I'm in the midst of a new wave of it right now, and am feeling out some more extreme edges of it for myself which are less relevant to your question. But there's a part of it which, difficult to describe as it is, I hope can be helpful. This piece about embracing one's own unbelievability, and about holding specificity. But it has to come alongside connection with others, for me at least, or else it's desperately lonely.
This is probably incoherent because I think I am in the early stages of a migraine and am otherwise pretty out of it, but I am having another wave of violence as metaphor/analogic substantiation feelings and I'm trying to be vague here because a lot of this circles back to work stuff but trying to articulate some of it.
Something about the societal separation often made between art that represents or contends with violence, and the systemic handling of violence in the world, which is often so sectioned-off, so sterile, the available vocabulary and narratives around it so formulaic and limited.
Reading something about Hamlet right now and thinking about the enormous amount of time people have spent engaging with that text, and how, at the same time, the immensity and complexity of the text itself is commensurate with the immensity and complexity of choosing to taking a life, of known a life has being taken, which is much of the material of the play. When we say Hamlet is about an experience of family and alienation to which anyone can relate we're not wrong, but we're ignoring that some may read/hear/speak 'to be or not to be' and think about, specifically, what it means to make that choice. Thinking about when I went alone to see a production of Titus a few months ago which - mostly - treated the violence seriously and felt so invigorated by it.
How this is not about ownership over a text, about personal experience determining who a text 'belongs' to, because a rich enough text is capacious enough to hold everything, but rather about how much we lose when we draw that line, when we give one kind of attention to literature and another to life, when we can think about Othello and Achilles and Richard III in one way and then, when it comes to the present world, we're locked in into the language of the court and the consulting room and the self-help book and the gaze of the reporter. How I don't want to section myself off, how I want to afford my own experiences the dignity and weight of deserving such vast artistic contention, and I want so much for others who live lives in intimacy with various kinds of catastrophic violence as well. So often this is reached for by making works of art smaller, making them mean only one thing, by subjecting them to the psychological or sociological frame and proffering them within didacticism, but what feels important other me is the opposite, is saying each human life and consciousness has in it all the richness to warrant such contemplation.
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The first sensations are fluttering, deep beneath the wounds. Tiny creatures beating their wings, making my stomach lift and fall. That's him, I think, and my pulse sends tingling waves to the ends of my fingers and toes and the roots of my hair. Very quickly the fluttering becomes a scraping, which eases its way along my bones and my veins. I moan a long, low note that does not change, and the vibration helps a little. He is pulling. Though his body does not move, he is drawing something within me, slow and hard. I fall to my side on the pallet. I fold into myself and arch out again, rubbing my cheek on the rough blanket. He is knotting, snipping, burning ends until they crumple like spent wicks. My vision is clouding. He blurs in the light and the gold swims up and around him. I clench my eyes shut and see nothing but orange-tinted darkness, but it does not matter: he is everywhere, inside and out. All the pain is one. Take me, I think, and it does, in a surge of deeper darkness.
Caitlin Sweet, The Pattern Scars
The four girls looked at Ojebeta as if they had just seen her. All Ojebeta saw was a group of girls who behaved so quietly, as if frightened for their lives. She did not know then that she too, Obejeta the only daughter of Umeadi, who had been encouraged to trust everybody, so say what she felt like saying, to shout when she felt like doing so, would start behaving like these girls who so reminded her of the wooden dolls in front of the chi shrine at home in Ibuza.
Buchi Emecheta, The Slave Girl