LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

and most days I didn’t feel like I made any sense at all unless I was writing. On the page, I didn’t have to pretend to be “together”; all my brokenness and fragments, questions and desires jumbled together in one place. I was trying to figure out my relationship to words, as much as I was trying to get out of my body and onto the page everything my stepfather had done. In the process of writing, I both discovered and created the story of my life. I met my (new) story and (new) self on the pages of those blank notebooks.

      My stepfather attempted to sever me from words. He worked to render words—up to and including the words yes and no—meaningless. Maybe that’s not exactly right. What he wanted was for words to mean only what he wanted them to mean, and as soon as I thought I understood what meaning he wanted me to make, using the words he’d defined, he changed the rules. It was like living inside an Orwellian Newspeak generator. From my stepfather I’d learned that words don’t have to do or mean what the dictionary says. I was required to say Yes to my stepfather every time he wanted access to my body, even when what lived inside my mouth and skin, and could not be spoken, was No. He dismissed the word No. I learned that No could have no meaning at all.

      Having to say one thing while meaning another, over and over again, drives us more than a little crazy, forces us to question how we can possibly communicate. What do words actually do? What good is language if it can be so easily stripped from its moorings, its connection to the real and lived experiential world?

      Twenty-four years and thousands of pages later, I still don’t fully trust that words will do what I ask them to.

      An experience of trauma—either long-term or instantaneous—rocks us out of our familiar relationship with words, as it rocks us out of our familiar relationship with everything else in our lives. Part of what makes an experience traumatic is that we are without sufficient language to convey to others what has happened to us. We are at a loss for words. Words fail us. We clutch for clichés, or we clam up and let someone else do the talking. We are a verbal species, we humans, and it is terrifying to be without the words for something important in our lives. Even when we are able to matter-of-factly communicate the violence we’ve experienced, if the people around us don’t respond to our words as we would expect or anticipate, as when a parent gets angry with us when we disclose abuse, or pretends the abuse was no big deal, or acts as though we haven’t said anything at all, we can feel crazy. At a fundamental level, we wonder if our words have any impact. Are we not saying what we think we are saying? Do people really not care? We may wonder if what we are doing when we are speaking is the same thing that other people seem to do when they speak.

      We who, as young people or adults, survive sexual or other violence are also taught, paradoxically, that our words are too powerful. My stepfather was hurt and disappointed when I resisted his advances—his suffering was my fault. He told me all the ways I would harm my mother if she found out what he was doing to me; her anguish would be my fault for telling, not his fault for sexually abusing me. I learned how dangerous a misspoken word or slip of the tongue could be.

      I spent years with a sense of impotence and fear around my speech: maybe what I say is unhearable, is actually incomprehensible; maybe I’m still not working this language thing right.

      When I was finally able to write about my stepfather’s violence, just a few months before I would start the process of untangling myself from his web of control, I detailed every damn bullshit threat that he’d made, took it apart, raged at it, questioned it, turned it over to see the impotence on the other side. I wrote down everything he did and forced me to keep silent about or to rename. The actions he called “teaching” or “lovemaking” or “sex” or “help,” for instance, I called by their true name: rape. I began to undo his occupation of my very mouth. He had infiltrated even my words with his violence, and after he was gone from my physical body and everyday life, I had the distance I needed to roll out my words on the page and risk examining the wounds, and begin to discover how to put myself back together again.

      •§•

      We want to get back into “right relationship” with our own words—meaning, we want to feel a sense of agency with and through language. Our words do have power, though not in the destructive sense that our perpetrators, families, or communities often claim. The story we tell about our words also has power. For years, I repeated to myself what my stepfather had trained me to believe (and what society and media reinforced)—that I didn’t deserve to speak, that no one would listen to me or care even if they could hear me, that my words didn’t matter. Writing practice is what finally broke into and through those lies. Writing brought me, and so many of the writers I know and have written with, into a different relationship with words, language, stories, and with the words, the language and stories used against us.

      So this is what writing practice can help us accomplish: finding right—and even playful—relationship with creativity and language. We are writing about our lives, and while we deserve for our lives to be received seriously, we also deserve laughter, silliness, and play. Through laughter, we find breath. Through play, we reconnect with our intuitive, creative being, what Black lesbian feminist author Audre Lorde describes as the “yes within ourselves.” We get to have that yes, our yes, back, as well as our no, and have them mean exactly what we want them to this time.

      •§•

      My dictionary says the word heal means, first, “to make a person or injury healthy and whole.” A later definition: “to repair or rectify something that causes discord and animosity.”

      Is healing more than the cessation of bleeding? More than simply having the bone set, wound scab over and begin to physically mend? When we talk about healing from sexual violence, I often hear the language of psychic wounds: the wounding of our trust, our relationship with instinct and memory, the scarring of our sexuality, our sense of being able to be safe around other people or in the world, even within ourselves. How do those injuries find succor, when there’s nothing to set in a cast or suture up? How do we heal the stories of brokenness, heal the belief that we’re no longer whole, that we are unfixable?

      Many authors have written about the transformative power of creativity. Pat Schneider, in Writing Alone and With Others, reminds her readers that when we write, we are writers, and that through writing, we can “begin at any time to be free.” Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way encourages a “recovery” of and through creative expression. Live Through This, edited by Sabrina Chapadjiev, is a collection of essays by artists and writers who’ve battled deeply self-destructive urges using creativity and artistic expression. Social psychologist James Pennebaker, in his book Opening Up, reports on the results of his studies with college students at the University of Texas at Austin, which revealed that “excessive holding back of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can place people at risk for both major and minor diseases,” whereas “confronting our deepest thoughts and feelings can have remarkable short- and long-term health benefits.” Dr. Pennebaker found that those students who wrote deeply and expressively about one of their most difficult life experiences for just twenty minutes a day, for four consecutive days (and only for those four days), subsequently received better grades in their classes, showed an improved immune system (as evidenced by fewer visits to the campus infirmary), and reported that they felt happier and less depressed. What we hold inside us impacts every aspect of our lives. Writing about that which has been inhibited (unshared or unexamined) can not only free up the mind to higher levels of thinking, but can also improve our physical health.

      The creation of art enacts release and transformation; exposure to art invites different ways of thinking, feeling, and being into the rooms of ourselves. Creative practice reengages us with our deep instinctual self, with the life-flow of our erotic self, which is our whole, embodied and empowered self. Creative practice can be a suture, a cleansing of the wound, a soothing of the inflammation, and a manifestation of the scar.

      •§•

      Art makes (a) way. Art reveals what’s possible—enacts possibility. A brave and engaged poet once commented, in one of my writing workshops, “You can say things in poems you don’t really say in casual conversation.” We heal when we transform a wounding—either physically, through the body’s regenerative capacity, or psychologically, though an alteration

Скачать книгу