The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

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The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant Page 14

by Andrea Dworkin

inconsequential that her word under oath meant nothing.

  Now we have a kind of half-memory; one can remember

  being raped, but remembering the name and face of the

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  Memory

  rapist, saying the name aloud, pointing to the face, actually

  compromises the victim’s claim. People are willing to cluck

  empathetically over the horror of rape as long as they are not

  made responsible for punishing the rapist.

  Proust’s madeleine signifies the kind of memory one may

  have. That memory may be baroque. A regular woman who

  has been coerced had bet er have a very simple story to tell

  and a rapist dripping with gold lame guilt instead of sweat.

  A worker in a rape crisis center told me this story. It

  happened down the street from where I live. A woman moved

  into a new apartment on the parlor level, slightly elevated

  from the street but not by much. She needed to have someone

  come into her new apartment to install new windows. The

  worker did most of the work but said that he needed a particular tool in order to finish. He said that he would be willing to come back that evening to finish the job. The woman was

  grateful; after al , there is nothing quite as dangerously insecure

  as an urban apartment near the ground floor with unlocked

  windows. He came back; he beat and raped her. At the trial

  his defense was that he had been her boyfriend, she had had

  sex with him many times, she liked it rough, and as with the

  other times this was not rape. She, of course, did not know

  him at al .

  The jury believed him, which is to say that they had reasonable doubt about her testimony. After al , she could not prove that he had not been her boyfriend, that she had never met

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  Heartbreak

  him before that day. This scenario has to be the world’s worst

  rape nightmare outside the context of torture and mass

  murder. It was so simple for him.

  The point is that once the victim can identify the predator,

  once she says his name and goes to court, there is no empathy

  for her, not on the part of al the good, civic-minded citizens

  on the jury, not from the media reporting on the case (if they

  do), not from men and women socializing in bars. She’s got

  the mark of Cain on her; he does not. Al the sympathy tilts

  toward him, and he has an unchangeable kind of credibility

  with which he was born. To ruin his life with a charge of rape

  is heinous - more heinous than the rape. No mat er how

  many rapists go free, the society does not change the way the

  scales of justice are weighted; he’s got a pound of gold by

  virtue of being a male, and she’s got a pound of feathers. It

  couldn’t be more equal.

  People deal with hideous events in different ways, and one

  way is to forget them. A forgotten event is not always sexual or

  abusive. I worked very hard for years as a writer and feminist.

  One night I had dinner with a distant cousin. “I remember when

  you used to play the piano, ” she said. I didn’t remember that

  fact of my life at al and had not for decades. My life had

  changed so much, I had so little use for the memory, perhaps,

  that I had forgot en the years of piano lessons and recitals.

  I sat stunned. She was bewildered. She insisted: “Don’t you

  remember? ” I was blank until she gave me some details. Then

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  Memory

  I began to remember. In fact, she had remembered my life

  as a pianist over a period of decades during which I had

  forgot en it.

  With sexual abuse, people remember and people forget. The

  process of remembering can be slow, tormenting, sometimes

  impossible. Aharon Appelfeld thanks the Holocaust survivors

  who insisted on remembering when al he wanted to do was

  forget. There are at least two Holocaust memoirs about forgetting, and if one can forget a concentration camp one can forget a rape. If one can forget as an adult, a child can surely forget.

  I read some years ago about a study in which a mother

  chimpanzee was fit ed with a harness that had knives sticking

  out; her babies were released into her presence; trying to

  embrace her they were cut; the more cut they were the more

  they tried to hold tight to her; the more they were hurt the

  more they wanted their mother. The research itself is repugnant, but the terrifying story of what happened during it strikes me as an accurate parable of a child’s love, blind love, and

  desperate need. Remembering and forget ing are aspects of

  needing and loving, not rulers of what the heart does or does

  not know. Those who say children are lying when they

  remember as adults abuse they endured as children are foolish

  - as are those who think children categorically do not know

  when they’ve been hurt.

  I remember a lot of things that happened in my life.

  Sometimes I wish I remembered every little thing. Sometimes

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  Heartbreak

  I think that the best gift on dying would be if God gave one

  that second between life and death in which to know everything al at once, al that one ever wanted to know. For myself, I’d include every fact of my own experience but especial y the

  earliest years - and I'd like to know everything about my

  parents, what they thought and what they dreamed. I'd like to

  know our lineage al the way back, who my ancestors were

  and what made them tick. I have a few questions about lovers

  and friends, too. At the same time I want to know the truth

  about the cel , the galaxy, the universe, where it began and

  how it will end. I’d like to know what the sun is real y like -

  it’s not just fire and cold spots - as much as I’d like to know

  how there can be so much empty space inside a molecule.

  I'd like to go back and redo my high school physics class and

  real y master the language of mathematics. I’d like to know if

  there is a God and what faith means. I’d like to know how

  Shakespeare wrote from the inside out. I know that if there are

  black holes in the universe, multiple personalities simply

  cannot be impossible. In fact they have God’s mark al over

  them as an elegant solution to a vile problem - children forced

  to live in hel find ways to chop the hel up, a child becomes

  plural, and each part of the plurality must handle some aspect

  of the hel as if it’s got al of it. This is more complicated than

  fragmenting a personality, but there is nothing difficult to

  understand. The child becomes many children, and each has a

  personality and work cut out for it; each personality helps the

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  Memory

  child endure. What is difficult is how children are hurt, and

  sometimes the denial of multiple personalities, which is, of

  course, a denial of memory, is also a denial of sexual abuse.

  The story isn’t simple enough to be believed by outsiders, but

  the victim has found a way to survive. It’s miraculous, real y.

  One ritual-abuse survivor with double-digit personalities told

  me to think of her as a small army fighting for the rights of

  women. I do.

  A memoir, which this i
s, says: this is what my memory

  insists on; this is what my memory will not let go; these

  points of memory make me who I am, and al that others find

  incomprehensible about me is explained by what’s in here.

  I need to say that I don’t care about being understood; I want

  my work to exist on its merits and not on the power of personality or celebrity. I have done this book because a lot of people asked me to, and I hope this work can serve as a kind

  of bridge over which some girls and women can pass into

  their own feminist work, perhaps more ambitious than mine

  but never less ambitious, because that is too easy. I want

  women to stop crimes against women. There I stand or fal .

  163

  Acknowledgments

  This book owes everything to Elaine Markson. She wanted

  me to write it and helped me at every step along the way.

  I also want to thank Nikki Craft, Sal y Owen, Eva Dworkin,

  Michael Moorcock, Linda Moorcock, Robin Morgan, John

  Stoltenberg, Susan Hunter, Jane Manning, Sheri DiPelesi,

  Louise Armstrong, Julie Bindell, Gail Abarbanel, Valerie

  Harper, and Gretchen Langheld for their support.

  I am grateful to David Evans, producer for the BBC1 series

  Omnibus. I used testimony from the documentary done on my

  work by David; he helped make the last third of this book

  possible.

  I am also grateful to my editor, Elizabeth Maguire, for her

  useful suggestions and great enthusiasm. I thank her assistant,

  William Morrison, and al the other folks at Basic Books for

  their work in publishing Heartbreak.

  164

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