In Solidarity with My Sister Survivors

To commemorate the Be Bold Be Red campaign from Document the Silence, I'm re-posting "I Survived a Rape," which originally appeared in April on this blog.



I Survived a Rape

I need to be really crystal about this--I’m in no way, shape, or form advocating people getting raped as a character-building experience or a coveted experience, period. People who rape and commit other forms of sexualized violence leave living corpses, and it takes a very, very long time for survivors to regain a remote resemblance of humanity. It’s too steep of a price to pay for some fool who thinks it’s a good idea to forcibly and/or coercively take that humanity via sexual means. Period.

With that said, this is a reconstructed comment I wrote on Racialicious in reaction to Melissa Lacewell-Harris’s reflections about Black women and the deafening—and destructive—silence surrounding Black-on-Black sexualized violence. It's reconstructed because a technical difficulty caused some posts and a lot of comments to be lost.


*Trigger warning*

I was raped when I was five years old. By a cousin of some neighborhood kids I played with. Twice, on two separate occasions. The second time, in a garage behind their house and with their watching through the windows and smiling, my mom saw me escape from the scene. She gave me this damning look, like it was my fault even before I could tell her what happened. And I didn’t tell her until eleven years later.

When I told my mom, it was late, by the light of the television set—the darkness reflected the shame and the silence I felt for that long.

“Remember the kids I played with when I was a kid? And remember that day when you saw me coming out of the garage? I was dragged in there, and I was raped. In fact, I was raped twice two different times.”

There. I said it.

My mom cried. I couldn’t. And I couldn’t for a long time: not when I went through counseling, not when I wrote a short story about it in my undergrad years (it was therapeutic, but drivel writing-wise).

When I finally cried about it about 3 years ago, I was in the middle of Buddhist chanting. I prayed not only for that damaged little girl who couldn’t tell her mom out of shame and the scarred woman I grew up to be, but I also prayed for my rapist. Yes, for him and in gratitude for that horrible event: the rape gave backbone to my belief that, contrary to the vicious contempt with which my rapist treated me, I deserve to be on this earth in my Black female body on my own terms and stand up that right to exist against anyone who even wishes to hint otherwise.

That backbone, however, developed into a portable fortress, buttressed by the silence and mortared by my own fear and contempt for all Black men based on the examples of the few: my rapist, my emotionally and financially irresponsible father, my chauvanist ex-stepfather, the ex-lover who took off his condom and tried to lie to me about it. The Black kids I went to school with showed their own contempt for my dark skin, especially the boys. The myriad variations of The Violent Black Male stereotype fortified my feelings.

My mom and my favorite aunt, who grew up as sharecroppers' daughters in Jim Crow Mississippi, thought it was their racial duty to encourage me to have The Middle-Class Chocolate Life: Black husband, Black children, Black neighborhood, Black friends. So, I dated some Black men, but I felt like I had to in order to prove that I was "down with the race" (so much for my own terms!) moreso than having actual feelings for them. It was an attraction I had to intellectualize than heart-thumpingly feel because all I was really feeling with and around them was knee-jerk terror. Not you, not again...

Rightly and wrongly, I sought women-only situations to counteract my terror. I loved the time before my mom married my ex-stepfather, when it was only my mom, my aunt, and I. I embraced mostly females for friendships. I found feminism, and particularly womanism, which, as bell hooks says, gave me the theory to explain the wounds. Having worked at women-supporting businesses and non-profits, however, I realized that sisterhood ain’t all that powerful, let alone salvation.

I knew I had to begin dismantling my fortress and, for my own sake, I wanted to do so...but it served for so long as part of my identity--of rape survivor--that I wasn't sure with what I'd replace it. My tears during that chanting session was mourning for that loss of identity as well as tears of forgiveness for the men who adversely affected my life and for myself for doing the best I could with, ultimately, a self-destructive defense mechanism. The realization knocked away the categorical dichotomies I held for too, too long in my quest to heal—“women” as inherently good, “Black men” as inherently some people at which to turn up my nose or refuse to consider as friends, feminist allies, and fanciers. It also released me from seeing surviving rape as an identity to an action. I ceased to be a “rape survivor” and am becoming a woman who survived a rape.

Nowadays, I’m heartened when I hear of some Black men creating safe spaces with and for Black women to speak their truth about Black-on-Black sexualized violence the way activists Kevin Powell and Quentin Walcott did for filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons and the audience who participated in the after-showing Q&A discussion. It enables me to take down another brick.

--###--

What I found most inspiring is the love from TCS readers after posting it. My gurl Lisa from Black Women, Blow the Trumpet, quoted part of a poem:

"I will not die an unlived life
I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire
I choose to inhabit my days
To allow my living to open me
To make me less afraid
More accessible
To loosen my heart
Until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise..."
~ Dawna Markova

One commenter found my post 3 months after it originally posted. From Super Hussy:

I came to this post over three months after it was published and I sincerely thank you for it. I was already on my own path to public revelation, but you, and my fifth wedding anniversary, inspired me to put it out there.

Again, thank you.

My response:

@ Super Hussy--

Hey, luvie, welcome to my blog. And I love your online name!:)

I'm so glad and humbled that my post inspired you to open up about your own experience. To quote Whoopi Goldberg in Girl, Interrupted,"Put it down. Put it away. Put it in your notebook. But get it out of yourself, away, so you can't curl up with it anymore." That's the best gift you can give to yourself on your wedding anniversary--and your birthday.

Congrats on making it 5 years, friend!

--Abrazos,
AJ

Photo Credit: Virginia University Images