Sexual violation is a form of robbery. You arrive home to find your house ransacked. All items, the precious and the mundane, the priceless and the merely expensive,have been treated the same way. All items have been turned into the same item. Overturned, flung aside, the picture of the grandparents and the contents of the cutlery drawer. You can still hear the foot-stomps through your house. You can buy a new TV but only time will restore the cushioned peace of your home, heal the rent in the air on the stairs, the aftershock in the living room, all those places where emptiness has been allowed to leer obscenely into your home. Why us? Nothing personal.
(...)
Rape treats the victim like nobody, like everybody, like anybody, bitch! Up the ramp, through the door to the slaughterhouse. The uncountable qualities that make one individual different from another, shocked away; the soul, shocked away from the body, looks on in sorrow and pity at what is happening to its sister, its brother- bitch! It will be very difficult for the body to allow anything to inhabit it after that. Very difficult for it to allow the soul to re-enter. The soul may have to be content to follow close, make common cause with that other lonely follower, the shadow. It is the soul. The shadow's request is more humble, it asks only to be seen. Please don't turn away, every time you turn away, I die.
(...)
Sexual violation turns all children into the same child. Come here. Yes, you. Children heal quickly, so that, like a tree growing up around an axe, the child grows up healthy until, with time, the embedded thing begins to rust and seep and the idea of extracting it is worse than the thought of dying from it slowly. I'm not hurting you. Once pleasure and poison have entwined, how to separate them? What alchemist, that therapist, what priest or pal or lover?
--The Way The Crow Flies, Anne-Marie MacDonald
Sunday, November 2, 2008
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