returning, re-membering, rebirthing

There’s a part of Persephone’s story that I did not write about before. After she rises up out of the underworld, she has to return, again and again, to the darkness and the deep. Here is where two interpretations of Persephone’s story diverge; if the story is a seasonal myth, it is a perfect circle, and Persephone will always descend and return with each winter and spring. But if one is using the story as a map of trauma and recovery, the circle becomes a spiral: jagged, uneven, but yearning/moving towards wholeness.

Persephone returns to the underworld intentionally sometimes, when she is examining and excavating her pain. But sometimes she is thrown back into the throes of trauma by something that triggers Her, by an unexpected sight or sound or smell that reminds Her of what happened. (I can’t tell you the number of books that I have been unable to finish because they include some reference to sexual violence.) And some of these triggers are cyclical, predictable: anniversaries.

on denial

AP/Charles Dharapak

I found this image to be very powerful. (I first saw it here.)

It resonates with some things I’ve been thinking about recently. Denial, and the refusal to acknowledge the reality of suffering, are so widespread and so destructive. These twin forces enable the creation and continuation of so much violence. While there are important differences between the sexual abuse with which my father ripped and polluted my psyche and the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the United States, denial and distance abetted both of them. This dynamic is an inextricable part of oppression, domination, and abuse.

Denial and the lack of empathy also make the suffering caused by domination worse. In a way, the denial after the fact was worse (or at least as bad as) my father’s abuse itself. I had to live with him for years, secretly in anguish and in terror, and enraged. These feelings were buried and hidden from my conscious awareness; denial was necessary for my survival in that house. Denial was necessary for the survival of that house itself; if the abuse were acknowledged, the family unit would have disintegrated. My mother would have taken me and my sister and left. She has told me as much. “If I knew,” she says, “I would have left.” And yet she is still in her own dance with denial, not yet able to fully acknowledge the truth of what happened. “I can’t know for sure,” she says, “because you are both telling me different stories.” (My father’s first story was this: “I didn’t do that.” His story is now: “I don’t remember doing that.”)

It is crazymaking when my mother says this. Her denial still wounds me, because I am still suffering from the abuse; she is still abandoning me.

(The thing about denial, though, is that it is never a water tight container. On some level, both of my parents know the truth. You can see in Condoleezza’s face that, in spite of her refusal to see, she is pained by the responsibility she shares for so much needless death, for the bottomless well of anguish that she has helped open up in so many lives.)

As much pain and confusion and aching as denial has caused me, I also have to acknowledge that it saved my life, or at least my sanity. There is no way I could have lived with my father and the truth of the abuse at the same time, under the same roof. They would have been like two monstrous beasts engaged in an vicious, teeth-rending, limb-shattering fight, and my five year old self would have been crushed beneath them.

Lately, I have been aware of other ways that denial and distancing myself from suffering appear in my life. In relation to the war in Iraq, for example. I am embarassed to admit how little I allow myself to think and feel about it. Perhaps it is necessary for me to do so, to take care of myself. When I am already overwhelmed by my own suffering and trauma, perhaps I can do little to witness, prevent, and/or transform larger and broader forms of suffering. Perhaps, as is said, “the first duty of a revolutionary is to survive.” Perhaps human beings aren’t evolved to deal with the suffering of people so far away, and so constantly. If I truly processed every horrible thing that happened in this world, I would end up a burnt out, sobbing, suicidal mess. Constantly.

And yet distancing myself is inevitably tangled up with privilege. It also enables the destructive dynamics to continue unchallenged. It also prevents me from fully seeing how my own struggles and sufferings are interconnected with other struggles and sufferings, and thus from taking action to transform myself and my world.

I think, as is often the case, that the answer lives in taking a middle path. Obviously, if I am so aware of the suffering of the world that I am incapacitated, I won’t be doing anyone much good. And if I only pay attention to my own suffering, I will not be acting ethically. I need to find a balance; to be mindful of how much I can cope with; to be as open as possible; to let myself take breaks (media fasts!); to speak the truth as powerfully as the symbolic blood on the hands of the woman in the photograph does, and in so doing to allow my own painful and difficult feelings to flow and merge with other streams, to erode the harsh metallic structures of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy in the world and in my own and others’ hearts, to gather force and momentum and to one day break down that final dam and melt into the ecstasy of the crashing ocean waves, sunlit and free at last.

my (queer) hunger for stories (part 1)

I think that human beings need stories as much as we need food. I know this is true for me. I know this because at times I have been famished for stories. When I was in high school, and still in the early stages of coming to terms with my queerness, I felt horrible whenever I watched a movie or read a book in which they were no queer characters or even any mention of queerness at all. I felt like my existence was questioned… threatened… erased. I had a deep need for affirmation that there were other queer people, that queerness was real, and, within those fictional worlds, queerness was not allowed into the circle.

The depth of my hunger was partially because such stories had been denied to me. My parents, as fundamentalist Christians, were both homophobic and ignorant of queer culture(s). There were no out or visible queer people in my mostly fundamentalist social world as I was growing up. But this invisibility was mirrored (if perhaps to a lesser extent) in the suburban communities I grew up in, and even in American culture as a whole. On this broad stage, the stories and histories of queer people (and queer peoples) have been erased and “disappeared” by heteronormative culture.

The only stories I knew about queer people as a child were those that claimed that we were wrong and misguided and could be cured. There was also a never-fully-spoken, shameful association made between gay men and the sexual abuse of boys. This is ironic, because the person most responsible for the overall filtering of the stories I had access to was my father, the (apparently) heterosexual man who molested me.¹

These are some of the forms which that filtering took: My father once forced me to return a Dungeons and Dragons book which I had bought. My sister and I were not allowed to watch The Simpsons, or R rated movies. He also, in the most absurd example of this dynamic, (temporarily) forbid my sister and I from watching The Smurfs because he had read in a fundamentalist Christian newsletter that Gargamel used Satanic magic in the show.

(This episode from my childhood reminds me of the many examples of fundamentalist Christians attempting to ban the Harry Potter books from libraries. To me, this suggests the political importance of struggles over access to stories, especially for children. See also the recent controversy about the federal government purging religious books which did not appear on their approved lists.)

Despite these efforts at control, books were often like secret messages from other worlds, smuggled in beneath the watchful gaze of my parents, who were mostly unable to recognize their significance. This was especially true once I was able to drive and thus had unfiltered access to the public library. I began to devour queer literature, especially short stories and novels with queer male characters. Still, my hunger was unsatisfied. Partially, this was because I needed more in person interaction with queer people. But I was also searching for a spiritual story about queer people, for a mythology to replace the Christian teaching that a core part of my being was sinful and twisted. Although I had already rejected fundamentalist Christianity as a worldview, this was not enough for me. As Carol P. Christ says, in Why Women Need the Goddess, “[s]ymbol systems cannot simply be rejected; they must be replaced.”

¹In his abuse, he verbally affirmed the supposed connection between queerness and sexual abuse, calling me a “faggot,” and telling me, in the all too common practice of blaming the victim, that I wanted the abuse to be happening, that it was happening because I wanted it. In the story he told himself (and me), my “queer” desire was the cause of the abuse. In reality, of course, it was his own unresolved feelings about trauma and his own history of sexual abuse that caused him to make the choice to abuse me.↵