The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant
Page 14
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
162
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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