A Memory a Monologue a Rant and a Prayer Read online

Take them off.

  Bigger, please don’t do this. No. NO!

  Slowly. Slowly. Yeah, like that.

  Your legs and hands do what he says because his dagger splits your tongue. #32 smashes the spit out of you, stomps your thighs open & then bangs something molded and ugly into your flesh on the crimson crochet mat his girlfriend gave you for Kwanzaa.

  You/overestimated/the/groceries/you/could/carry.

  And now you’re carrying much more as Bigger’s dry thrusting holds your limp body prisoner with all of the charisma that is a knife. And my mind/won’t/die.

  Blueberry Hill

  Christine House

  Before I knew much of anything, I knew that I was defined by what was between my legs. I didn’t know what it was for. I didn’t know what it could do or what the men of the world seemed to want with it. But I knew they wanted it. There was never a mistake about that.

  In the beginning I thought it was funny. In the beginning I was flattered. All these boys, listening to me. Laughing at my jokes. All the attention. I was the center of their circle. They flirted. I flirted. I was free to do that, and it was fun. The air was warm that late-summer night. The stars were bright and beautiful. I was giddy, if not drunk. The mood was light. I was young. I was carefree. I was out. I was on.

  Then their hands were on me. They were still flirting. They were still laughing. I tried to keep the mood light. Not overreact. Not make a big deal out of nothing. But their hands were on me. I tried to laugh as I brushed them away. Just laugh. Just a joke, just having fun. But they were not laughing at the joke—they were laughing at me. I was the joke. And I was not having fun.

  Then it wasn’t flattering. Then it was humiliating. I realized a moment too late. The mood had shifted so suddenly. That once-warm summer air become thick and hot as their bodies encircled mine. Their hands, so many hands, were everywhere, over my jeans, over my shirt, around my waist. I was being lifted. Effortlessly lifted and carried away easily by the largest of them. Carried through the woods, away from those not part of this group. Away from anyone who might care to stop them. Carried until I was dropped without regard onto the ground.

  In a small clearing. I was on my back. I could see the stars. They were still bright, still beautiful, and totally indifferent to the fact that everything else about the night had changed.

  Again I was the center of the circle. This time, I did not want to be. I was not giddy. I was not drunk. I was scared. I was disappointed. I was embarrassed.

  And then I was almost resigned to what I knew was going to happen. At least now it made sense—their attention, their flirting. At least now it was in a familiar context. They didn’t actually like me. They only wanted to use me. This, at least, feels familiar. It’s not like I hadn’t had sex I didn’t want to have before. It is easier not to fight. It is easier to just let it happen. It is easier, safer, and less horrible if I just convince myself that it doesn’t mean anything. It is not important. If I could just pretend, inside and out, not to mind … I would be okay. You can’t rape the willing.

  But that was only a brief thought, because as I glanced around me at the huge, drunk, stupid men surrounding me, I knew: There is no surviving this. Not for me. There is no coming back from this one. I had been used before. I got over it. I was damaged already, but this. This was different. There were too many of them. They were too big. Had I really let my life get this out of control? This time I had something out there to look forward to. Plans I had made. My second year of college about to start. A semester in London. I had to go. I had to survive this. Face it. You put yourself here. This is the end of the road you chose. You were asking for it. You deserve this. Endure it. Get through it. Get over it.

  But I knew. In my soul I knew that I would not get over this. I felt the regret of knowing my life would end this night. These boys, these very large, very drunk, very stupid young boys would have their way with me—discard me and move on. I would not move on. I would not get over this. My life will end here. It is like that moment when the roller coaster starts and you know there is no turning back. Whatever is to happen is out of your control, and you have no choice but to proceed.

  I decided then that if my life ended in these woods, it would not be because I couldn’t emotionally survive being gang-raped. That was too weak. If my life ended here in these woods, it would be because I fought to the death not to be gang-raped. That was a death I could live with (so to speak).

  This cannot happen. Get off the roller coaster. Do whatever you need to do. Reverse the clock. Stop time. This will NOT happen. There is no other option.

  Decision made. It is simple now.

  I fought. Like I had never fought before. In fact, I had never fought before. I kicked. I punched. I scratched. I bit. I spat. I pulled hair. Only twice was I coordinated enough to land a strike where it really counted. In the place that drove them. But still I fought. I fought and I fought and I fought. Inside my mind there was something screaming. It was loud. So loud. Like a trapped, enraged animal. So loud. I could hear it like thunder or a train roaring through a tunnel. Loud. Blood rushing, heart pounding, mind screaming. And I fought. Arms swinging, legs kicking. And I fought. But only a few of them fought back. My terror, my frantic, lunatic-like flaying had seemed to wake the rest back to reality. One of them said something about this being disgusting and walked away. The others stayed to watch. It was dark. It was loud. I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Random words. “Bitch,” “slut.” Original things like that.

  Then someone said … clear as day … someone said, “Stop it. Just leave her alone. She isn’t worth this effort.”

  And this was heard.

  One sentence heard above all the yelling, all the noise. One sentence heard. I wasn’t worth it. One sentence heard. And it was over. That was all it took. Just one of them said “Stop”—and they did. They walked away. All of them. They walked away.

  One of them stopped, turned back toward me. My heart stopped with him. I thought, “Here we go again,” but he walked slowly toward me, put his hand over mine, and pulled me to my feet. He helped me up. He glanced at me quickly, then at the ground, and walked away shaking his head. In the brief moment when he looked at me, I saw in his eyes something that really confused me. I saw fear.

  I laughed. I laughed and I laughed and I laughed.

  And that was when the pain started.

  I was covered in bruises. All over my legs. Up the sides of my body. Mostly over my thighs and upper arms. I had fingerprints around my arms. My lip was cut. My hip was dislocated. Although I wouldn’t know that until the next day, when the inability to walk would force me to go to a health clinic in town. I made up a story. I never told my mother. I never told my friends. I never told anyone. Until later … much later.

  I never told anyone until I realized that the story was not about something horrible and shameful that had happened to me. The story was one of liberation. The story was about the moment in my life when I decided I would take control of it. It is the story of how I came to own my body. My will. My life.

  My Two Selves

  Patricia Bosworth

  THIS IS A STORY TOLD TO ME BY MY ADOPTED DAUGHTER, MARA, WHO IS NOW A TEACHER; SHE’S ALSO A SINGLE MOTHER AND A FORMER BATTERED WOMAN.

  I was once a woman split in two. I was eighteen when my boyfriend began beating me, and I created another self that floated above me like a balloon whenever I was assaulted. This other self enabled me to survive.

  Recently a therapist told me what I’d done was to disassociate. This made it possible for me to cope with the abuse and also keep the abuse and the coping outside my ordinary awareness.

  The beatings went on for close to ten years. We had two children, and I lived in a trancelike state much of the time—refusing to believe—to admit to the violence that was part of my everyday existence. Whenever the brutality or the pain became so huge, I’d usually escape into my other self.

  Then, one morning before I went off to work,
my boyfriend and I got into an argument. I don’t remember whether it was because the coffee wasn’t hot enough or I’d forgotten to buy him a fresh pack of cigarettes, but suddenly he threw me across the room. My head hit the kitchen wall so hard that I saw stars and tasted blood in my mouth.

  Was that what finally knocked some fucking sense into my brain? Because a voice inside me—my other self—cried out, You don’t have to take this anymore! This is not your fault! You don’t deserve this!

  My other self grabbed a heavy frying pan off the stove and bashed my boyfriend’s face with it. The blow stunned him; he fell onto the floor, and I picked up my pocketbook and swept my two kids into my arms (the youngest was only four months) and ran out the door and down the street and never looked back. I left everything—clothes, books, furniture, TV … I knew if I stayed, the violence would start all over again, and I was sick of it.

  The next thing I knew, I was getting off a Greyhound bus in Newark, New Jersey. For a while I lived in a shelter with my kids, and I worked in a McDonald’s and joined a battered woman’s group.

  In the group we told our stories over and over to one another. We had to dredge up the awful images to make the memories come alive for us. The memories were terrible—our stories were all similar—and we stopped feeling so alone.

  I look at that group as the turning point in my life. I’ll never forget the shock of recognition when I realized that the strength I saw in the other women who’d survived so much violence was also in me.

  Today I no longer rely on the other self that floated above my head like a balloon. It’s sort of merged with the whole me. I have few illusions and I do have hope. I feel fuller and more alive.

  Are you surprised?

  The Massacre

  Marie Howe

  It happens, like everything else, in time.

  Someone hides in the bushes. Someone watches from the roof.

  The men play with the sobbing women, tearing their dresses.

  Where is the kingdom of heaven? Within that woman pushed from man to man?

  Within each of the three or four men?

  Last night watching my daughter sleep I felt my own

  greater power and will rise for no reason within me:

  killing might stop time, I thought.

  To be death, and not, for that moment, to fear it.

  It moved through me like a clot, clear, cold,

  for an instant, I knew myself—shouting in the careening trucks with the rest of them—

  and what, in my exhilaration, I had become.

  My Mother with Her Hands as Knives

  Dave Eggers

  IN RESEARCHING WHAT IS THE WHAT, MY BOOK ABOUT THE LIFE OF VALENTINO ACHAK DENG, ONE OF THE LOST BOYS OF SUDAN, I TRAVELED WITH VALENTINO BACK TO HIS HOMETOWN OF MARIAL BAI, IN 2003. THERE WE LOCATED HIS FAMILY, WHOM VALENTINO HAD NOT SEEN IN SEVENTEEN YEARS. WHILE IN SUDAN, I INTERVIEWED MANY WOMEN WHO AS YOUNG GIRLS HAD BEEN ABDUCTED BY MILITIAMEN—THE SAME MILITIAS WHO NOW PLAGUE DARFUR—AND WHO HAD BEEN FORCED TO ACT AS SERVANTS AND CONCUBINES IN THE HOUSEHOLDS OF MILITARY OFFICERS IN THE NORTH OF SUDAN. THAT PROMPTED MORE RESEARCH INTO THE EXPERIENCES OF SUDANESE WOMEN. THE PASSAGE BELOW, WHICH WAS CUT FROM WHAT IS THE WHAT, IS AN ACCOUNT FROM A YOUNG WOMAN SHORTLY AFTER SHE WAS FREED. IN THIS PASSAGE, I FRAMED HER STORY AS IF SHE WERE TELLING IT TO VALENTINO WHILE THEY WERE BOTH LIVING AT KAKUMA, A REFUGEE CAMP IN NORTHWEST KENYA. BECAUSE THIS PASSAGE WAS CUT AT AN EARLY STAGE OF THE BOOK, IT’S A BIT ROUGHER THAN IT MIGHT OTHERWISE BE.

  I was born in Wunrok, in southern Sudan. When my mother was young she was blessed by great fertility. She gave birth to twenty babies, and I was the sixteenth. Most are gone now.

  Our father was a successful farmer. He kept 180 head of cattle and raised groundnuts, sorghum, maize, okra, and sesame. There was plenty to feed us, and he traded the rest for luxuries like mattresses and dresses. When I was very small I had a doll made in China. You know how rare something like that is, Valentino.

  In 1983 the war was on and the militias, the murahaleen, came. I was one or two years old, so I remember none of this. The Arabs killed twenty men, including my uncle, my father’s brother. They took most of my father’s cattle and kidnapped three of my siblings—two brothers, five and seven, and one sister, who was eight. I don’t really remember them, just as you said you do not remember your older siblings, Valentino.

  There were four of us left, all under five except my brother Jok, who had escaped the murahaleen by hiding in the river. He had used a pole to breathe. I don’t know where he learned to do that. When he got home from the river, my mother sent him with the walking boys, like you. She wanted him to be safe and to study in Ethiopia.

  Our family moved to Panthou, where there was no SPLA. My father thought we’d be safer there; for a time we were, and my mother was blessed with more children. In 1986, the murahaleen came again, this time taking my two eldest sisters. They killed another uncle, my mother’s brother, as he tried to defend the family. He threw a spear at one of the Arabs, and the Arabs cut off each of his limbs one by one, and then threw him on a fire. Everyone in the village could hear him screaming. They threw his limbs down the well, poisoning all the water for the village.

  My sisters were gone and my father was furious.

  My father then did something unusual. He followed the murahaleen. He took his spear and all the money we had and he went north, because he knew that very often the murahaleen didn’t travel fast, because they liked to make the Dinka slaves walk.

  My father spent a year in the North. He went as far as Khartoum, looking on the streets and in the peace camps for my sisters. He returned a year later, and when he did, he seemed defeated. It appeared that he had aged ten years in one. He spoke to no one. He wouldn’t eat. He had been a prominent man and now he was so skinny he looked like a boy, in his body, though his face was so very old. He died two weeks after coming home.

  After my father died, there were five of us left, all girls. My mother used to lament having so many girls. We couldn’t defend ourselves. Panthou was raided four more times as we lived there. We worked the farm with help from boys in the town who had been orphaned. Then the Nuer raided. It was very strange, because we didn’t know to fear them. But they arrived one day and they raped many of the women and took all they could carry. I hid in a hole under a tree.

  In 1988 the murahaleen came again. They came straight to our home, three men on horses. They wore white and approached our mother silently. We were hidden among the livestock and they entered the hut as if they knew where we were. This is how they took my sisters and me. Five of us. They told my mother that they had been told by Bashir that all Dinka girls were to be impregnated with Muslim babies and they were doing their duty. My mother asked them if they intended to rape us there and then. The man said that no, we would be impregnated on a proper bed, and that the babies would be brought up with the civilization only Islam could provide. They tied our hands and tied us to one another and we waited in a cattle pen until the next morning, when they were to take us north. My mother came to us that night as we waited with eleven other girls. “I will come to get you girls. Just be patient. I will see you soon and bring you home.”

  In the morning we were walked out of the village on the main road. Most of the men had ridden ahead and we were guarded by five young men on horseback. They poked us with their swords when we walked too slowly. When we stopped to rest and for water, they insisted that we show them our genitals. They told us that we would soon be freed of the sinful parts of our genitals that made all of the Dinka licentious. Otherwise they didn’t touch us, and every hour they did not touch us I thanked God.

  After four days we stopped at an Arab town, and we were brought into a building that was cool and dark. It was a school. There were desks and chalkboards. We were seated on the floor and left there for half a day. We heard the activity of the town; everything seemed very normal. Sometimes an Arab boy would peek through a window at us and hold his fist up to us or
spit on the window.

  Men were brought into the school, escorted by one of the young Arabs who had kidnapped us. The men would confer, and twice they left with one of the girls. We didn’t see them pay the kidnappers. But soon there were only fourteen of us. My sisters and I stayed close and argued over the best strategy. We had been told that the Arabs liked to split families, for fear that siblings would conspire against them, so we worried that they would see us together and guess we were related. In the end we split into two pairs.

  At the end of the day there were no more visitors. We did not eat that day. We slept there, on the floor, with our heads rested on one another’s thighs and stomachs. In the morning we were made to walk again. There were thirteen of us now. I don’t know what happened to the youngest girl. She was taken as we slept I guess.

  We walked for four hours that morning, tied together in a line, following the Arabs on their horses. It was very hot that day, and one girl was very sick, very weak. She could not walk, so she was thrown onto one of the horses and we continued. Late in the day, the Arabs began to trot their horses, to make us go faster. I think they needed to reach a certain town by nightfall, so the pace was now faster. After some time at this pace, when the day was very hot and we were feeling faint, I heard a voice. The voice said “Stop.” The voice was very distant. I turned and saw a figure running to us. It was a Dinka woman, we could tell; her face was uncovered. “Stop!” the woman said again and again, as she ran to us. The Arabs stopped and everyone turned around. The Dinka woman came closer. She ran like my mother ran, with her hands very straight like knives. She ran closer and it was her. The woman was my mother.

  She had been following our trail. Our stay in that trading town had allowed her to catch up. She yelled at the men. “Give me these girls!” She pointed to us and she wept. “You have taken four others. Four of my children are gone. My husband died looking for them.” The Arabs sat on their horses and said nothing. They were very young, these men. They looked at one another, and then one of them turned. Then they all turned and started their horses again. We walked again, too.