by Sheila Heti
Near the end of our dinner, the professor returned to the subject of my status as a student, saying he was very glad I wanted to stay, adding that he had heard great things about me from Professor X, Professor Y, and many others. He then said, “I need you.” I replied, “You will always get work from me.” He paused and then said, “That’s what I want, work from you.” I paused, and then said, “You will get that from me.” It is possible we understood the phrase “work” differently, but I decided it wouldn’t be productive to push it further. The term—“work”—had helped end a very awkward conversation and my explanations had made clear what he should expect.
INTERLUDE. During one of my episodes.
Self: Dad?
Dad: Yes, Jennie?
Self: Did Stanford happen?
Dad: What do you mean?
Self: Was it real. The professor. Did all of that actually happen. To me.
Dad (after a pause and a sigh): Yes, it was real. It happened.
Self: Because I couldn’t remember if I was remembering something that didn’t happen. But it was real. You’re not just saying so.
Dad: It happened. It was real.
Self (after a silence): Thanks Dad. I needed to know that.
FILL IN THE BLANK.
Crime:
Punishment: suspension for two years without pay.
LECTURE, 2078.
“Originally the sonnet was a site of sexual violence. Male poets were rewarded for celebrating the women they hunted. They used the sonnet form and an instrument called the ‘blazon’ to convert their prey into exquisite English artifacts. Our anthologies still include holograms of jewel-like eyes, porcelain skin, ruby lips, hair like gold, and so on.
“Over time the white men themselves modified the sonnet to make it accommodate topics other than male heterosexual desire. The topics came to include blindness, time, spiders, God, the planets, applepicking, wine, prayer, computers, robots, politics, and the apocalypse. Now, in the year 2078, it is possible to choose existence in a world designed like a sonnet. It is possible to live one’s entire life inside a sonnet. It is possible to become a sonnet.—But only if one has consented to such an existence.”
DISCUSS THE FOLLOWING QUOTATION.
In a 1996 News Service interview, [JF] described the 18th-century attitude toward belongings this way: “There was a sense that objects were preferred over people because they didn’t leave you, they didn’t talk back, and you could project a certain subjectivity and have an intense relationship with them, particularly with books,” he said. (Source: Cynthia Haven, Stanford Report, August 17, 2007)
A LITTLE SONG AND A RECEIPT.
Doe: a deer, a female deer—
Often chased by sonneteers of old.
Caught, and killed, and bathed in fear,
turned to human blazons to be sold—
Eyes—$twin models of the stars.
Skin—$fine tissue wrought from gold.
Lips—$your favorite kind of flower.
Sex—$a secret still untold/a Silk Road to unfold/a thing for you to
mold/a source by you controlled.
Total: $_____
THE BLAZONAUT.
Setting: an alternative universe where, due to the choreography of molecules here, to use words is to versify. Location: southwest Canada (not far from where the Golden Gate Bridge is located in our reality). Time: a year named “The Earliest Early Americanist’ (corresponding roughly to our year 2000 AD). All residents of this universe hold the following truth to be self-evident: Each person has the right to free consent. Living by this truth is to them as breathing is to us. Rape, in this reality, is an alien phenomenon.
1. News
“. . . she fell into the water from the sky . . .”
2. Jae-in Doe
Decedent is an Asian female.
Twenty-two she just had turned.
The cause of death we cannot tell
Despite the many things we’ve learned.
3. TOP SECRET
My Doe-type can be difficult to track.
Yet here I am, my voice-box playing back
From lips hydrangea-lavender in hue
His thoughts during our first few interviews.
The hair is shoulder-length, the color black.
The height and weight suggest she won’t fight back.
The fingernails are unadorned and short.
The eyes are brown; no makeup do they sport.
The skin appears unpierced and untattooed,
Yet scars of ruby-pearl seem to protrude
Like self-inflicted jewelry on each arm
And wrist—which means she’s vulnerable to harm.
The language of her flesh, as I assess her,
Reveals Confucian worship of professors.
Her deference Korean gives me right
To use her innocence for my delight.
4. The Coroner’s Soliloquy
The species: neither robot nor a xenomorph but both.
A blazonaut I call her as I scan her for the truth.
Throughout her brain dimensions grew like flowers wild
And han flowed through her circuits like fog-weather mild
until the onslaught
caused a drought.
The genitals, the soul, the lymph, the spine, the nape,
Show evidence of _____
For which we have no name.
I can’t do this anymore.
DISCUSS THE FOLLOWING QUOTATION.
You can keep nothing safe from our eyes and ears. This is your own history. We are your most perilous and dutiful brethren, the song of our hearts at once furious and sad. For only you could grant me these lyrical modes. I call them back to you. Here is the sole talent I ever dared nurture. Here is all of my American education. (The Korean American narrator of Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee)
MUTANT BLAZON.
My rapist’s eyes remind me of the sun.
To look at them will mean that I go blind.
His mouth beside my ear—they form a gun.
Each breath: a bullet targeting my mind.
My rapist’s eyes remind me of the sun.
His throat: a fist to silence mine designed.
His reason: a ventriloquist’s illusion.
No tenor in the end could hearing find.
My rapist’s eyes remind me of the sun—
Too close for any vessel with a mind.
Survive or get to die—that is the question.
No longer have I any will to mind.
My rapist’s eyes remind me of the sun—
Not dead, not living, neither keen nor blind;
A daily haunting; memory rebegun;
Disaster in some future undivined.
I write, rewrite, a “sonnet” about rape
To hunt that voice I wish I could escape.
DISCUSS THE FOLLOWING QUOTATION (without using the words “predator” or “prey”).
There she beholding me with milder look,
Sought not to fly, but fearless still did bide:
Till I in hand her yet half trembling took,
And with her own goodwill her firmly tied.
Strange thing, me seem’d, to see a beast so wild,
So goodly won, with her own will beguil’d.
—From Edmund Spenser’s poem “Like as a Huntsman” (Sonnet 67 of his 1595 sonnet cycle Amoretti)
DISCUSS THE FOLLOWING QUOTATION (without using the words “predator” or “prey”).
“Yeah that’s her in the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful . . . I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything . . . Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”—the 45th President of the United States of America
COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING DIALOGUE.
Professor: All men have rape fantasies, including your father.
> Student:
A KIND OF CENSUS.
Number of spouses: zero.
Number of children: zero.
Longest stretch of time spent alone inside the apartment: eighteen consecutive days.
Longest stretch of time post-rape without any physical intimacy with another mammal: seven consecutive years.
Number of episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit never seen: zero.
Year I watched SVU for the first time: 2011.
Year SVU started: 1999.
Number of fantasies about cathartic dialogues with Olivia Benson: countless.
Number of years spent closeted to most people about what happened at Stanford: fifteen.
July 5, 2016. Facebook entry posted shortly after I came out as a rape survivor.
Q: Do you think being raped made you gay?
A: Several people have asked me this question (or a version of it). It is a question worth addressing.
(1) I cannot speak for others who have been raped. I can only speak to my own situation. Please do not mistake anything I write here for a generalization. (2) The first crush I remember having: Ellen Degeneres. At the time I didn’t know who she was (I caught a glimpse of her on TV); I didn’t know what it meant to be gay; I didn’t know what I felt was a crush. All I knew was that she made my heart feel nervous and I wanted to see her face again. (3) My parents had an arranged marriage. The arrangement was less than ideal. They spoke to (argued with) each other in Korean—a language that my brother and I did not understand—and they spoke to us in (broken-ish) English. To this day I think of marriage as literally a foreign language. (4) My mother was (is) devoutly Catholic. As a child I myself was devoutly Catholic and confused about my sexuality. The last time I went to confession (I was a teenager) I confessed I thought I might be gay and also I wasn’t sure if God existed. The priest said he could not forgive me but he could give me holy water for me to keep by my bed to repel Satan. (5) My first sexual experience was being raped at the age of 22 by someone who wielded power over me, who controlled my future, and who was fully aware that I was sexually inexperienced and confused about my sexuality. (6) I spent much of my twenties in relationships that allowed me to pretend (or try to pretend) that Stanford never happened. Does it matter that a few relationships were with men and that a few were with women? I honestly don’t know. (7) My last relationship ended a decade ago. Since then my personal life has resembled a desert ruled by agoraphobia and the wish to destroy my capacity to feel attraction. (8) I have been attracted to people of all sexes and gender identities. (9) As the details above are meant to suggest, my sexuality is extremely complicated. Did being raped make me gay? No. (See item 2.) But it is a fact that rape (among many other factors, including those mentioned above) had an impact on how I experience desire and act (or hesitate to act) upon my feelings. Indeed it may be the case that “rape survivor” is one of my sexual orientations. *I would not wish this joyless and often agonizing orientation on anybody.* (10) Again I stress that I speak only for myself. I doubt it is possible to generalize that rape makes people gay (or straight). Different individuals survive violence in different ways. Some of us end up not surviving. Some of us are working on just holding on. I hope that my answer has been educational.
“Noli me tangere”: A Kind of Villanelle
His ghost stands watching me while I’m asleep.
I know that this cannot be real because
I’m wide awake. I never fall asleep.
The hours between twelve and twelve still keep
Me up reciting poetry because
His ghost stands watching me while I’m asleep.
I close my eyes, imagine rivers deep
And soft plush turquoise emerald velvet moss.
I hide myself here as a pebble heap.
What if I dared to sea from cliff to leap?
My absence from the world would be no loss.
His ghost stands watching me while I’m asleep.
When finally I die, will I escape
His ghost’s attention? Or will those glib jaws
Assault my ghost with secrets fresh to keep?
I don’t know if I wake or if I sleep
Or why my speech obeys poetic laws.
His ghost stands watching me while I’m asleep.
Perhaps he’s dreamt a way my soul to reap, to reap, to reap.
PALO ALTO DISAPPEARANCE.
A yard, once used for some kind of sport, lies seemingly deserted. High above her, in a near-future sky, one allosaurus and one magpie, each the size of a skyscraper, battle for extinction. Crowds of invisible spectators flow toward the spectacle. At some point, when the rumors grow too poisonous, she turns around, against the tide, and starts to climb a secret staircase made out of wisteria, the stems of which twine counterclockwise. The more she climbs, more and more flowers surround her. Blossoms thicken. Petals seep into her hair. Her skin becomes liquid petal.
“Anyone is inside your house,” the flowers whisper.
“I don’t have a body,” she responds.
By now she is no longer climbing a staircase. The staircase has disappeared and so has she.
In the distance another mythical creature falls and another endangered animal cannot hear its own appalling song. Where games of sport once took place, palm trees begin to shimmer, dazzle, daze. She is beyond the last thought at the end of the mind.
Obviously this is not reality.
This was one way I got through it.
TERRIFIED VAGUE PRONOUNS.
As he, to have her, turned into a swan,
So she, to bear it, turned him to a swan.
I often wonder which was worse: the swan
She conjured, or the man inside the swan.
I often wonder which came first: the swan
Whose “blow” (Yeats wrote) was “sudden,” or the swan
Whose “sudden blow” was made of piecemeal swan-
Like men in motion slow: from man to swan.
The things that one man did engendered here
A broken mind, the pills within an hour
That should have left me dead. Being caught up,
Accustomed to the comfort of his chair,
Could he possess the knowledge or the power
To see that each from different heights would drop?
AFTER EMILY DOE. JUNE 2016.
One image that’s been invading my mind lately: a mugshot that was never taken. It was never taken because I never pressed charges. I didn’t think to press charges.
He’s no longer alive. He was my adviser at Stanford. He was a tenured professor, a “big name” in academia. I was a first-year Ph.D. student, 21 years old and stupidly naive. I had also recently been hospitalized after a suicide attempt. I had just been diagnosed as bipolar.
“Your mom and I should have—we didn’t know how to prepare you—” my dad said yesterday while we were brokenly discussing the Stanford assault case that has been in the news recently.
To which I could only say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry you have a daughter who made you go through so much trauma in addition to the Korean War and everything . . .”
We apologize to each other, my father and I. The Stanford professor refused to apologize to me.
I know I should forgive him. It wasn’t his fault.
When he asked me if I was a virgin, I told him the truth: yes. (I should have said: It is none of your business.)
When he told me that he controlled my future, I let myself believe I had no future worth imagining. (I should have been brave and stood up to him.)
I still wake up sometimes to find my clothes drenched in sweat and my body numb, literally numb.
In my head the mugshot is blurry. I scarcely remember what he looked like. I can’t bring myself to google his name.
Parents: You do not want your children to end up like me. If your child is assaulted, try to get professional help for your child immediately and be sure to follow through. This may be challe
nging if you are an immigrant who is exceedingly shy, less than fluent in English, financially struggling, Roman Catholic, and/or incapable of saying the word “rape.” But assault can be devastating and the impact permanent if not addressed right away and adequately.
THE NEW MILLENNIUM (after Shelley’s “Ozymandias”).
I meet a stranger in a house of gloom
Appointed with archaic chairs and shelves
Made centuries ago . . . The stranger’s doom
Is my fate too, for that which makes my self
not hers is time alone. Inside that room
She cannot see me but I see her dread,
Her shattered face—Something I know is wrong.
Her body language speaks as though it’s dead.
If minds could text, in hers this would appear:
“Your name is Jennie. My name is Seo-Young.
Let me, your future self, bear your despair.”
Now that I’m home, I’m drowning in decay,
Pill bottles, trash, her burden mine to bear.
Why did I—she—choose to survive this way?
SEX AFTER STANFORD.
One of the side effects (for me at least) of being violated: every time I feel desire, attraction, or any evidence of a libido, I automatically feel guilty. I feel an obligation to cancel my body, delete, to make it disappear.