Being a Survivor of Sexual Violence is a Way of Knowing The World – 2

When I started counseling to come to terms with the fact that I am a survivor of childhood sexual violence, one of the first questions my therapist asked me after I sat down in his office was, “On a scale of one to ten, how angry would you say you are?”

“Probably seven or eight,” I answered.

“Try eleven,” he said, and I knew without even thinking about it that he was right. Then he asked me if I worked out. “Yes,” I said.

“You look it,” was his matter-of-fact response, but his next question surprised me. “Do you know why I’m not scared to be alone with you in this very small room, even though you’re big enough to hurt me in a serious way?”

I looked around his office. It was very small. “No,” I answered.

“Because I don’t think you’re crazy,” he said, and I don’t know precisely why, but something in his body language, the tone of his voice, the way he looked at me when he spoke, something communicated to me that I could believe him. Not that I needed anyone to tell me I wasn’t crazy–I was already sure of that–but it mattered a lot to me that I could believe him when he said he didn’t think I was. It wasn’t simply that I felt I could trust him. It was also, and perhaps more importantly, that I understood he trusted me, and that feeling did more than just give me permission to say the things I needed to say for my therapy to begin and to be successful. It helped me see myself as authorized to do so—in the sense that I knew he took me to be, and so I could begin to see myself as, the authority on my own experience.

It took a long time before I felt like I could claim that authority publicly as a writer. Yes, I’d written and published the poems in The Silence of Men, and, yes, the promotional copy announced to the world that I was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, but I never publicly connected my identity as a survivor to my identity as a writer until 2008, when I was interviewed by The Jackson Heights Poetry Festival (JHPF).

Much of what I said about being a survivor and its connection to my writing got edited out of the final video, but what they kept in does get to the core of the matter. Writing poetry was not just how I found my voice; it was how I proved to myself that I had a voice, that what I said in that voice was real and deserving of an audience, even if the only person in that audience was me. I do regret using the word cliche to describe the idea that abusers steal their victims’ voices, but I did so because in the circles where I spend most of my time–and I realize that I am very fortunate in this–the truth of that idea is taken for granted, and so it is sometimes given a kind of short-shrift as well-intentioned people move past it to address deeper and perhaps less obviously visible issues.

In reality, of course, the vast majority of survivors do not live in such circles, which makes it all the more important for those of us who are able to speak out to do so. By way of example, about a year after JHPF first posted this interview to their now-defunct YouTube channel, a former student of mine sent me an email. She’d found the video while browsing the web for poetry-related information and watching it had inspired her to share two pieces of information that she had shared with no one else: first, that someone had sodomized her a few year earlier and that she’d been dealing with it by trying to pretend it had never happened and, second, that she suspected her ex-husband of molesting their three-year-old daughter when the girl was in his house. I responded in all the ways you might expect, urging her to seek therapy for herself and to do what she needed to determine whether or not her suspicions about her ex-husband were true. I don’t remember that I ever heard from her again, however, so I have no idea what the outcome was.

What I do know is that if I hadn’t told the truth about myself in the JHPF interview, my student might never have spoken up in the first place, abandoning herself to who knows how many more years of shame and silence and, if her ex-husband was indeed molesting their daughter, surrendering her child into the hands of an abuser. Hearing my voice, in other words, helped her find hers, and there is absolutely nothing cliche about that. Simply to end there, however, would be to leave unacknowledged the fact–which you cannot know from watching the video–that none of the questions I was asked in that interview addressed the relationship between my work as a poet and who I am as a survivor. I insisted on making that connection because it has become increasingly important to me to speak out about who I am even in contexts where sexual abuse is not the agreed upon topic of conversation.

A few years after the JHPF interview, I did the same thing in the more extended interview Melissa Studdard did with me for Tiferet Talk.

I remember debating with myself about whether or not it would be “too much” to turn what was supposed to be a conversation about my work as a poet into a platform to speak about myself as a survivor, but in the end I asked myself, How could I not? Being a survivor is always already a part of my daily life. It informs who I am as a teacher, a lover, a father, a husband, a friend; it shapes the way I understand politics, the economy, my workplace, the movies I watch, the books I read, and, obviously, the poems and essays I write. Equally to the point, because I am a survivor, the daily lives of the people who are part of my life are also always already touched by the violations I experienced–or, more precisely, by the consequences and repercussions of those violations. To pretend otherwise, to behave as if I exist as a survivor, as if people only need to engage with me as a survivor, in those spaces specifically set aside to make survivors visible–such as conferences, seminars, talk show episodes, and so on–would be to accept someone else’s definition of where and when and even why my experience can and should have meaning. It would be to surrender precisely the authority to which my therapist’s question helped me lay claim.

That, I simply refuse to do.

Cross-posted.

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