A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

by Alicia Elliott

  BOUNDARIES LIKE BRUISES

  ur love was a process of unlearning the bad love we’d been given. I know that now. I feel it when I wipe tears from your cheek, when you hold me close and stroke my back until the sobbing spasms stop. I feel it when we stare one another’s traumas down, refuse to tremble, refuse to break.

  We both came from poor families, lugging legacies we never deserved. I remember the first and last time I kicked you out of anger. We were walking through the Price Chopper parking lot beside our high school. I did it in front of my sister and your best friend. You tripped me playfully. I stumbled, but didn’t fall, and even as my foot connected with your shin, I thought we would somehow end up laughing. Men getting hurt was funny. Men getting hurt was normal.

  You didn’t laugh. You asked what was wrong with me, and I pretended not to know. But I knew. Trauma and silence flanked me like foot soldiers, only they weren’t doing my bidding; I was doing theirs.

  You’ve never hit me, kicked me, pushed me, punched me. You’ve barely even sworn at me. Sometimes I wonder how you conjured up your version of manhood. You had no father you knew, no grandfathers. You had professional wrestling during its most misogynistic era and a couple Blink-182 albums. Neither were particularly revolutionary when it came to their depictions of masculinity.

  That’s not to say we’ve fully shrugged off the roles we’ve been assigned. You are a man; I am a woman. You are a settler; I’m Onkwehon:we. These differences are stakes in our ground, mapping boundaries that feel like bruises. Any time we push against them it hurts, but we both know we must be more than historical vessels, holding pain; more than performers re-enacting ancient scripts. Despite our best efforts, different shades of abuse will still colour our interactions—sometimes soft and diluted like watercolours, sometimes harsh and angry like charcoal. Cycles are hard to break.

  My parents never broke theirs; after twenty years, the cycle broke them. Moving to the Six Nations reserve did it. Suddenly, my white mother became the minority. For the first time she felt her whiteness—no longer a shield but a siren, screaming inherited histories she’d either never been taught or been forced to forget. Any time my father tried to connect with his Haudenosaunee culture she felt it: her whiteness blinding and bright, as if a spotlight was shone on her.

  She wasn’t racist. She couldn’t be. She had a Native husband, Native children. She lived on a reserve. And yet her white fragility and Catholic colonialism were racist. She wasn’t happy when my father finally felt pride in his brown skin. She felt wounded, excluded. She accused him of being racist against whites. She accused him of committing a mortal sin: turning his back on the Catholic Church he’d only joined to appease her.

  I learned three things watching my mother:

  No one can fuck their way to tolerance.

  No one can marry into tolerance.

  No one can carry for nine months and give birth to tolerance.

  I’ve learned more watching you. You don’t flinch when I say the word “white.” You don’t feel attacked when I discuss colonialism. You encourage me to spend time with my family and community, to learn my language, to stand up for my people, to stand up for our land. You encourage our child to do the same. You see me as a Haudenosaunee woman, love me as a Haudenosaunee woman, and don’t feel threatened by what that means.

  I remember when my father first taught me about the Two Row Wampum. It was originally a treaty between the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch, but it was accepted by the Crown, and therefore by Canada. They’ve never been able to uphold it.

  It’s a belt of white wampum beads, representing the river of life. There are two rows of purple wampum that travel through the centre. One row represents the ship the settlers are steering; the other represents the canoe the Haudenosaunee are steering. Each vessel holds those peoples’ culture, language, history and values. The boat and canoe go down the river of life together—parallel but never touching, never crossing into the other’s path, never attempting to steer the other’s vessel or interfere with the other’s responsibilities. Neither vessel is better than the other. Neither group can make decisions for the other. It is a treaty based on peace and friendship, anchored in a deep respect for each culture’s distinct differences.

  Because of you, I understand how the Two Row Wampum can be more than just a treaty between two nations of people; it can be a lived treaty between two individuals, between us: a Haudenosaunee woman and a settler man. These boundaries don’t have to be bruises. They can be our strength.

  We untangle the threads of history and treat the wounds we find underneath. We listen to one another, support one another, resist our impulses to rewrite one another, to steer one another. We try to understand our distinct physical, emotional, spiritual and mental needs and meet them as best we can.

  Antiracism is a process. Decolonial love is a process. Our love is a process. I never want it to end.

  ON FORBIDDEN ROOMS AND INTENTIONAL FORGETTING

  nce upon a time there was a man named Bluebeard, a man so wealthy he was able to buy a string of young wives. None of the relationships worked out. Still, Bluebeard was persistent. His latest acquisition was a girl who did not want to marry him but who was dragged down the aisle nonetheless.

  Shortly after their marriage, Bluebeard announced to his wife that he had to leave on urgent business. He told her to enjoy her time without him, then handed over a ring of keys. She could use any of the keys, he said—all except one: a small, rusted key to a closet on the first floor. He led her to the door, then warned her: “Never open this door or you shall suffer my wrath.”

  Though she initially tried to resist, the young wife was so overcome with curiosity that she had to open the forbidden door. Inside were the dead, mutilated bodies of all his former wives. As soon as Bluebeard came back he knew she’d opened the door.

  “You must now face my wrath,” he told her, “and join my other wives.” Naturally, before he could kill his wife, her strapping brothers arrived out of nowhere and killed Bluebeard. His young wife inherited his fortune. Apparently she lived happily ever after—whatever that means.

  I’ve always been confused by the moral of this story. Charles Perrault, the most famous chronicler of this tale, suggests the following: “Curiosity, in spite of its appeal, often leads to deep regret. To the displeasure of many a maiden, its enjoyment is short lived. Once satisfied, it ceases to exist, and always costs dearly.” According to Perrault, it seems we’re supposed to shame Bluebeard’s wife for her curiosity. The problem with that, of course, is Bluebeard was a serial killer. Behind that forbidden door were dead women. If she hadn’t used that key, are we supposed to believe that Bluebeard would have treated her well and grown old with her? That he would have stopped killing altogether? Somehow I doubt that.

  Perrault’s failure to mention the sins of Bluebeard is suspicious, to say the least. Why doesn’t his moral caution against doing terrible things that become terrible secrets? Against not only murdering your wives but foolishly hoping their bodies would be safe in your first-floor closet forever? If the roles of Bluebeard and his wife were swapped, I have a feeling this would be the case. Bluebeard wouldn’t be shamed for being curious. He would be lifted up as a hero: the man who bravely opened the door his wife demanded stay shut, finally revealing her as the murderous, manipulative witch she always was.

  The real moral of this story, the one Perrault is too cowardly to admit, is that secrets are allowed to be kept only if they are a man’s secrets. The woman who threatens to reveal those secrets will live a life of deep regret. Any enjoyment she may experience will be short lived and cost her dearly.

  When I was sexually assaulted I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t even let myself think the words “sexual assault.” My bodily reactions—constant stress, crying, disordered eating and sleeping, vomiting, wanting to drink during the day and avoid all sexual contact—were screaming to me that something was very wrong, but I wilfully ignored the signs, reminding myself that
I was an outspoken feminist who knew all about consent. I wasn’t the type of woman who got raped.

  Meanwhile, the man who sexually assaulted me was sending me threats. He warned me not to tell anyone what happened. To keep his secret. I agreed. Even when I couldn’t keep his secret anymore, I still kept it. I told everyone that what happened was consensual. To this day, I’ve only ever told three people the truth.

  It didn’t matter. He was furious. He retaliated by telling my best friend at the time an awful story, the details of which I still don’t know. She refused to speak to me for weeks. When she finally responded to my texts it was only to tell me to stop texting my rapist. I hadn’t messaged him in days, but he was still sending me regular death threats. Apparently she hadn’t asked him to stop texting me.

  He’d warned me. Society had warned me. I didn’t listen. Now I was facing its wrath.

  * * *

  In the days, weeks, months and years following my sexual assault, I’ve gone over the details in my head many times. I’ve played out alternative scenarios, tortured myself with how small changes to choices I’d made could have stopped everything. My inner logic sounds eerily similar to the logic of attorneys who represent accused rapists. I’ve questioned what I drank that night, what I wore, what I’d said to my rapist in every interaction leading up to then, what I’d said to him in every interaction afterwards.

  The only thing that has made me feel better is actively distracting myself from remembering anything at all about that night. At first I was wary of doing this. There’s a very clear stigma around repression and denial. We are constantly told that we should face our traumas and work through them. This is the correct way to heal. But every time I tried to sift sense from my guilt and pain, all I found was more guilt and pain. Eventually I decided that, little by little, and as much as I was able, I wanted to forget.

  I don’t want this choice to be falsely characterized as denial. I’m not denying what happened to me. I couldn’t. That night represented a break between who I was and who I’ve become. I can no more go back to my old self than cooked food can become raw again.

  But I can stop the cycle of torturing myself.

  Maybe.

  I can try.

  Apparently, intentional forgetting is a defence mechanism, which is somehow different from a conscious coping strategy. I don’t know exactly what that difference is. Even Phebe Cramer’s study on the difference between the two, literally titled “Coping and Defense Mechanisms: What’s the Difference?”, had little to offer. One set of criteria she examined that tried to differentiate between coping and defence mechanisms was considered “more a matter of emphasis than critical difference.” Another, based on how both affect psychological or physical health, was “found to be without support.”

  The obvious differences to me are the negative and positive connotations. Calling something a “defence mechanism” implies that the person is accidentally dealing with an issue without meaning to, whereas calling something a “coping strategy” or “coping mechanism” implies the person is choosing to deal with that issue. In other words, one is passive and one is active. Passivity is usually considered a feminine trait, and therefore undesirable. Being active, on the other hand, is considered inherently masculine, and therefore aspirational. It’s strange that something like intentional forgetting, which is done actively, is still considered a passive defence mechanism. Perhaps not as strange as giving different, arguably gendered terms to the same healing process, but we are living in a society that encourages companies to take two of the same razors, paint one pink and one blue, then charge more money for the pink one. This sort of thing should probably be expected.

  Though intentional forgetting is seen as a bad way to heal, there is mounting evidence that it is, in fact, a better alternative to intentionally remembering. The more that we revisit events, the more entrenched they become in our memory. When those events are traumatic, such as with a sexual assault, they have negative emotions attached to them, which are nearly impossible to separate from the memories themselves. Continually revisiting these negative memories not only keeps those memories fresh; it also keeps the person remembering them from feeling good.

  This is similar to the way that depression works. As Jutta Joormann, Paula T. Hertel, Faith Brozovich and Ian H. Gotlib explain in their study “Remembering the Good, Forgetting the Bad: Intentional Forgetting of Emotional Material in Depression,” depressed people have a tendency to almost continually reflect on their past. Their tendency to not only dwell on past events but conjure up negative thoughts and memories creates a cycle of negativity they cannot seem to escape:

  At the same time that depressed individuals hold positive beliefs about rumination as a coping strategy, they hold negative beliefs about the uncontrollability of rumination. Thus, depressed individuals might deliberately engage in rumination in an attempt to solve their problems but then become overwhelmed by negative thoughts about their ruminations.

  They conclude that a depressed person’s tendency to dwell on negative memories and thoughts instead of actively suppressing them is an unfortunate, cyclical part of depression. Further, they suggest training depressed people to intentionally forget “could prove to be an effective strategy.”

  Maybe trying to forget your trauma isn’t as unhealthy as we thought.

  * * *

  I feel the need to make myself clear: I’m not encouraging survivors of sexual assault to stay silent. It’s very important that survivors disclose what happened to them to people they trust, so those people can support the survivor in whatever ways they need. But the amount of detail that we go into when we decide to disclose our assault should always be up to us.

  It’s natural to have questions for sexual assault survivors. People may even think they’re doing us a favour by persuading us to tell them everything that happened. After all, the truth supposedly sets us free. But isn’t the most important truth that we were assaulted? Isn’t that enough? Or must we relive our pain in agonizing detail so other people’s curiosity is quenched?

  I keep coming back to Bluebeard’s forbidden room. I have one, too. Instead of being full of the corpses of former lovers, though, mine holds a memory of that night. It’s projected on the wall in an endless loop. Every time I watch it I criticize myself mercilessly, stupidly hoping that if I watch it long enough the ending will change. Of course it never does.

  I hate this room. I hate what it holds, what it makes me feel, what it makes me think. Whenever I can escape, I lock it up tight. I pass the key off to someone I trust and try to forget any of it exists.

  Because I’m a woman, though, once I’ve handed you the key to this room, I have no control over whether you choose to open it. My secrets are never really mine.

  When I was a child my mother told me about Jesus’s resurrection. He told his apostles he would rise again on the third day after his death. When that third day came and he appeared to them in Galilee, Thomas didn’t believe it was him. Who would believe something like that? It goes against our understanding of the world. Jesus may have been the son of God, but he was dead. He couldn’t come back.

  The only way Jesus could convince Thomas he was, in fact, himself was by letting him put his fingers in his open wounds. Thomas gouged the holes where nails had gone through Jesus’s hands and feet, slid his own hands inside the wide gash in Jesus’s side. Only when Thomas examined the evidence of his lord’s pain first-hand was that pain finally made real to him. Only when Thomas felt the contours of Jesus’s torture was Jesus himself made real to him. He had no problems believing once Jesus offered up his trauma as proof.

  As a child, this story disturbed me. I imagined Jesus wincing with pain as Thomas examined his body, his hands emerging dripping with blackening blood. What kind of friend was he? Why did his belief hinge on such grisly proof? How did this make Jesus feel, that his best friend wouldn’t believe him unless he let him violate his body?

  I often wonder about this burden of
proof. Is my pain valid only when someone bears witness to it? Must I be hypervigilant about my entire person, always? Make sure that my face is composed in the perfect silhouette of trauma—any hint of a smile hastily swept away—whenever I expect someone to believe me? Must I forsake all joy, all warmth, to take up my role as “perfect victim”? As if ever experiencing happiness again were somehow evidence that I never experienced agony, anguish?

  Maybe this is why I’ve told so few people.

  * * *

  There is a performative nature to pain. It’s never just for us; it’s also for those around us. In case I happen to forget this in my own life, I have plenty of reminders. For example, the case of Amanda Knox.

  Knox, a twenty-year-old American living in Perugia, Italy, returned home after spending the night with her boyfriend. She found her flatmate, Meredith Kercher, murdered and called the police. One of the lead detectives noticed that Knox was not crying hysterically, as he assumed she should be. Instead, she was kissing her boyfriend—something he reasoned that no innocent woman would ever do after her flatmate was found murdered. Her response to trauma was so far from what this detective deemed the “right” response, she became the main suspect in the murder case.

  No evidence connected her to the murder. No blood, no DNA, no motive. The prosecution had to conjure up a ridiculous story that maintained that Knox somehow killed Kercher without leaving any DNA evidence, while another suspect, Rudy Guede, left DNA all over the room. It didn’t matter. Knox still was convicted and imprisoned for four years before being retried and, eventually, acquitted.

  If Amanda Knox had performed her trauma properly, maybe she wouldn’t have been treated, tried and imprisoned as a criminal.

  If I’d performed my trauma properly—cried in front of family and friends, poured big glugs of vodka into my orange juice while they were watching, thrown up on their shoes instead of in the toilet of a private bathroom stall—maybe they wouldn’t have been so quick to believe me when I lied and told them that I’d wanted it.