The Mother of All Questions Read online

  In his book Love and War: How Militarism Shapes Sexuality and Romance, Tom Digby argues that ours is a militarized society in which men are pressured in a thousand ways to take on the mores and skills of soldiers. A soldier surrounded by the deaths of others and the possibility of his own mangling and death shuts down. So do many survivors of atrocities, individual and collective, atrocities often committed by those who shut down in order to perpetrate atrocities. Robert Jay Lifton described this emotional numbness as Death in Life, the title of his book on Hiroshima survivors. He argues that they survived the horror by shutting down, but that remaining shut down meant being the walking dead, the unalive. This brings us back to hooks’s critique of men’s “acts of psychic self-mutilation.” Maybe the question is what it means to be alive, and how to be fully alive.

  Soldiers are trained to wither away empathy in order to make them killing machines; it dispatches them to do their work in war; it sends them home with trauma that is itself often unspeakable. David Morris, in The Evil Hours, his remarkable book on trauma, notes, “Part of trauma’s corrosive power lies in its ability to destroy narrative, and . . . stories, written and spoken, have tremendous healing power for both the teller and the listener. Normal, nontraumatic memories are owned and integrated into the ongoing story of the self. These are, in a sense, like domesticated animals, amenable to control, tractable. In contrast, the traumatic memory stands apart, like a feral dog, snarling, wild, and unpredictable.”

  Morris notes that rape victims and soldiers have much in common. Trauma disrupts the narrative of a life because it shatters memory into shards that will not be recognized as a credible story, sometimes even by the teller—thus some survivors of rape and other atrocities emerge with fractured stories that are seen as signs of their unbelievability, unreliability, untrustworthiness. Thus rape is an act that seeks to shatter the self and its narrative, sometimes followed by legal proceedings that require the self to reassemble as a coherent narrative (but not too coherent: successful testimony must be neither too clinically cool nor too emotionally overloaded). A friend who works in the field says that many women report sexual assault for altruistic reasons: to prevent it from happening to someone else. Sometimes they come forward to support the testimony of someone who’s spoken out first. Speaking up is, in other words, often an act of empathy.

  Morris continues, “Despite the fact that rape is the most common and most injurious form of trauma, the bulk of PTSD research is directed toward war trauma and veterans. Most of what we know about PTSD comes from studying men.” There is, in other words, a silence about who suffers this affliction that further silences women. Silences build atop silences, a city of silence that wars against stories. A host of citizens silencing themselves to be accepted by the silenced. People meeting as caricatures of human beings, offering their silence to each other, their ability to avoid connection. Dams and seawalls built against the stories, which sometimes break through and flood the city.

  III: Silence: The Cages

  There are those who are literally silent.

  “Who, if I cried out, would hear me,” begins Rainer Maria Rilke’s first Duino Elegy, and there are those who hear no one, not even themselves, who have repressed, forgotten, buried the knowledge and thereby buried themselves. When we look for silence we constantly find the dead. Who would hear them? Only people who would punish them further. Sarah Chang wrote of watching child pornography as part of her job as a prosecutor of sexual abuse crimes against children. She noted their silence.

  In video after video, I witnessed silent suffering. I later learned that this is a typical reaction of young abuse victims. Psychiatrists say the silence conveys their sense of helplessness, which also manifests as a reluctance to report the incidents and their tendency to accommodate their abusers. If children do disclose their abuse, their reports are often ambivalent, sometimes followed by a complete retraction and a return to silence.

  She speaks of one victim whose brother threatened to kill her if she screamed. Maya Angelou was mute for five years after she was raped, at age seven.

  In his childhood, Barry Lopez was raped repeatedly over a period of years by a family friend. He writes of his rapist,

  He told me, calmly but emphatically, that he was a doctor, that I needed treatment, and that we were not going to be adding to Mother’s worries by telling her about my problem. From time to time, often on the drive back to my home, Shier would remind me that if I were ever to tell anyone, if the treatments were to stop, he would have no choice but to have me committed to an institution. . . . It would be best, I thought, if I just continued to be the brave boy he said I was.

  He was silenced for years, and when he spoke up in his mid-teens, his stepfather wavered and then decided not to believe him. Half a century passed before he spoke publicly of his ordeal and its traumas.

  When the mouth may not speak, the body sometimes reveals: silent testimony.

  Kelly Sundberg wrote about her violent ex-husband and her shifting relationship to that violence:

  Two years after we moved, I started graduate school and finally made some friends, but it was hard to spend time with them. I had to lie: I shut my arm in the door. I tripped on a rug and hit my face on the table. I don’t know where that bruise came from. I think I did it in my sleep. I think I’m anemic. I just bruise so easily.

  Once, Caleb said to me, “You probably wish that someone would figure out where those bruises are coming from. You probably wish someone knew, so that things could change.” He said it with such sadness.

  He only hit me in the face once. A red bruise bloomed across my cheek, and my eye was split and oozing. Afterwards, we both sat on the bathroom floor, exhausted. “You made me hit you in the face,” he said mournfully. “Now everyone is going to know.”

  She had been silent. But her face told. The truth was a menace to her husband, her marriage, the comfort and assumptions of those around her. Sundberg broke the silence and wrote about it in a widely acclaimed essay that served as an invitation to others to tell their own stories about violence from spouses and parents. A solo voice became a chorus.

  One disturbing aspect of abuse and harassment is the idea that it’s not the crime that’s the betrayal but the testimony about the crime. You’re not supposed to tell. Abusers often assume this privilege that demands the silence of the abused, that a nonreciprocal protection be in place. Others often impose it as well, portraying the victims as choosing to ruin a career or a family, as though the assailant did not make that choice himself.

  There are voices raised in the absence of listeners.

  In 2015, a Stanford University student sexually assaulted an unconscious woman. The woman testified at his trial, “I tried to push it out of my mind, but it was so heavy I didn’t talk, I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t interact with anyone. After work, I would drive to a secluded place to scream. . . .” She had somehow absorbed the idea that her trauma and fury did not belong, that her screams should not be heard. But then she was heard around the world. She wrote a letter to her assailant that, after she read it aloud in court and it was entered in the court record, became, in June 2016, perhaps the most widely viewed first-person account of rape and its aftermath ever. She regained the voice taken away from her and with it rehumanized her dehumanized self. She spoke words that built a cage around him, erected a monument to his casual malice, words that will likely follow him all his life. Her voice was her power.

  She broke the silence (though she didn’t break the shame and fear that often keeps rape victims anonymous). She spoke of him and his evasions and lies with fury and outrage, but she ended with tenderness: “To girls everywhere, I am with you. On nights when you feel alone, I am with you. When people doubt or dismiss you, I am with you. I fought every day for you. So never stop fighting, I believe you. . . . you can’t be silenced.” I am with you is the voice of empathy, the words that say we are not separate from each other.

  But there are those who
scream in vain.

  The famous case of Kitty Genovese, raped and stabbed to death by a stranger, while people in the surrounding apartments ignored her screams, was turned into a mythic example of bystander indifference. Catherine Pelonero revisited the case in 2014. In a review of her book, Peter C. Baker pointed out:

  The same month that Genovese was murdered, Pelonero points out, United Press International ran a story about a judge in Cleveland who had ruled that “it’s all right for a husband to give his wife a black eye and knock out one of her teeth if she stays out too late.” Pelonero also quotes more extensively the many witnesses who explicitly justified their inaction in terms of expectations about women and their place in the world. “I figured it was a lovers’ quarrel, that her man had knocked her down. So my wife and I went back to bed.”

  Baker comments,

  The story was retold again and again by college professors and pundits, almost always in such a way that it was never specifically about violence against women, or the complex latticework of legal and cultural arrangements that allows such violence to flourish. Instead, it became a classic tale of human “nature”—and like most such tales, it has almost nothing to say about the fine grain of human practice or experience.

  In other words, the story was noise filled with silence about the real causes of Genovese’s death and that of many other women.

  Along with those who are accused of lying, imagining, making things up out of malice, confusion, or madness, there are people who are believed but told their suffering and rights are of no consequence.

  Many years before, my mother had approached a policeman to tell him that her husband, my father, was beating her. The officer gave her some platitudinous advice—I think it was about cooking nice dinners—and made it clear that this was one kind of assault to which the law was indifferent. There was no use to speaking up. In her 1976 book on domestic violence, when the silence around the subject was just being broken, the great lesbian-rights activist Del Martin wrote, “These women bear the brutality of their husband in silence because they have no one to turn to and nowhere to go.”‡ Feminism changed the laws. But turning to the police, who have their own high incidence of domestic violence and limited tools to make restraining orders mean anything, is a strategy that often fails.

  There are people who speak and are believed, and the consequence is that they disappear.

  There is somewhere to go in many communities, the secret sanctuaries that are women’s shelters, places into which women disappear as a result of violence, losing their home and quite literally their place in the world as a result of their partner’s violence. Many women are refugees in their own country; many women are forced to disappear from their own homes and lives and take up secret lives in secret locations. Battered women’s shelters, as they were then called, sprang up in the 1970s. They exist by the thousands in North America and Britain, if not on a scale to receive all the victims of domestic violence. My mother volunteered at one for years after her divorce. She did the accounting.

  And there are people who speak up and are silenced under the law.

  “The Little Mermaid” is a story written by Hans Christian Andersen, a man who was queer in many senses, the awkward, immense, sexually ambiguous illegitimate son of a peasant woman, who became the darling of aristocrats. It is a tale of how a mermaid trades her voice for a chance at life on earth. She comes out of the sea with legs, without words. Like the silenced heroine of Andersen’s “The Wild Swans,” she must not, she cannot advocate for herself. In 2011, when Nafissatou Diallo, a room cleaner at an upscale hotel in Manhattan, was sexually assaulted by the head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, she was vilified and discredited in the media, and the prosecutors backed down from the case, but she won a civil suit against Strauss-Kahn. The price, as with so many of these cases, was silence.

  The Center for Public Integrity reported in 2009, “But while the vast majority of students who are sexually assaulted remain silent—just over 95 percent, according to a study funded by the research arm of the U.S. Justice Department—those who come forward can encounter mystifying disciplinary proceedings, secretive school administrations, and off-the-record negotiations.” At the University of Virginia, accusers were told that they had to remain silent about all aspects of their cases and risked penalties for disobedience, until the federal government intervened. And Buzzfeed reported in 2015, “A Bard College graduate filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Department of Education this week, saying she wasn’t permitted to discuss her alleged rape with a school official until she signed an agreement preventing her from discussing the assault” elsewhere.

  In 2013, ten of the thirty-seven students and alumni who filed a lawsuit against Occidental College received cash payments but were barred from participating in the campus group, the Occidental Sexual Assault Coalition, that organized the campaign that resulted in the federal investigation. They were paid to be silent. Criminology professor Danielle Dirks told the Los Angeles Times that requiring “the women to remain silent and not to participate in campus activism could have a chilling effect at Occidental. Part of the reason so many women have come forward is because other assault survivors have been able to speak openly about their treatment.”

  What does it mean when what’s supposed to be victory includes the imposition of silence? Or should we call it reimposition?

  There are other ways victims are silenced: by being ridiculed, threatened, discredited, ostracized.

  Rebecca Donner recently broke her own silence with an essay in the online magazine Guernica about being raped by her uncle when she was a teen, about how she was unable to speak and just nodded to her mother’s questions, about how her family both blamed her for what happened and refused to believe it had happened, the familiar cognitive dissonance of victim-blaming. “I was told to get over what happened. I was told to remain silent. And until now, I’ve kept my mouth shut like a good girl.” There are a million stories like this with their own sad details but the same pattern of denial and silencing.

  Shame is a great silencer.

  Silence is a burden that belongs or belonged to most of us, though some are more loaded with it than others, and some have become experts and geniuses in how to shove it aside, drop it, disown it. Elizabeth Smart, who at fourteen was kidnapped from her Salt Lake City home and raped for a period of months, said that the abstinence-only sex education she was given taught her that she was worthless and contaminated if she had sex before marriage. “And that’s how easy it is to feel you no longer have worth. Your life no longer has value.” That sense of worthlessness helped keep her captive, hopeless, with a sense that she had no good life to go back to. The campus antirape movement arose, in part, out of young survivors’ refusal to be shamed into silence, and then to refuse shame altogether as at least a stance if not a psychic state.

  So is politeness.

  What we call politeness often means training that other people’s comfort matters more. You should not disturb it, and you are in the wrong to do so, whatever is happening. I heard a short story read on the radio decades ago that stayed with me, a first-person narrative of a woman being groped on the New York subway, who was trying to figure out how to remove herself without implying the groper was in the wrong or offending him. It was a wry incident about how deeply ingrained are the instructions on being polite, comforting, pleasant, and unthreatening and how they can interfere with survival. I remember an incident in my early twenties where I was being menaced by a terrifying man on the street in the middle of the night, and I think of how it did not occur to me to flag down cars, make a ruckus, all the things that I would do when I was older and more confident about my assessments and my rights and less afraid to make a scene. Politeness, self-doubt, internal silencing can make younger women better targets. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum began graduate school at Harvard in 1969; she recalled recently that when her advisor “reached over to touch her breasts . . . she gently pu
shed him away, careful not to embarrass him.”

  Silence is also a legal status of powerlessness.

  In 2015, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg brought up a 1982 Supreme Court case while hearing the case for same-sex marriage rights. “Marriage today is not what it was under the common law tradition, under the civil law tradition,” said Ginsburg when Justices Roberts and Kennedy began to fret about whether the court had a right to challenge centuries of tradition. “Marriage was a relationship of a dominant male to a subordinate female,” she explained. “That ended as a result of this court’s decision in 1982 when Louisiana’s Head and Master Rule was struck down.”

  Ginsburg, the second woman ever to serve on the Supreme Court, was referencing Louisiana’s “head and master” law, which gave a husband unfettered right to dispose of jointly owned property without his wife’s knowledge or consent. The test case involved a husband who mortgaged the house his wife had purchased with her earnings, to defend himself against charges of molesting their daughter. She had no voice in the disposal of her home, her earnings, the course of her life; what should have been hers or theirs was his alone.

  Individuals and societies serve power and the powerful by refusing to speak and bear witness.

  When witnesses refuse to speak up, they consent to another’s loss of rights, agency, bodily integrity, or life. Silence protects violence. Whole societies can be silent—and as with the Armenian genocide in Turkey, speaking about crimes can be made dangerous or illegal. The writer Orhan Pamuk was charged with “insulting Turkish identity” and forced to flee the country for speaking of a crime written out of textbooks and the official record.