(This is a recounting of sexual assault, please do not read it if you think you may find it distressing)
I’m not sure how one begins such
correspondence.
Am I expected to be polite during this exchange?
Do I say
‘Hello’?
After all, you didn’t exactly introduce yourself, as you clamped your
hand over my mouth and dragged me behind a dumpster while I was waiting for my
bus home a little over a year ago. I am willing to admit that in retrospect, I
am somewhat relieved that I didn’t see your face. Then again, not seeing your
face also means that you could be anyone, anywhere, and that notion is
particularly terrifying in how unavoidably real it is and has been this past
year.
Now you are everyone. Now you are everywhere.
I am still
unsure why I am choosing to finish writing this letter today, after I began
writing it a year ago. Perhaps, because I feel that writing the words and
acknowledging to myself and others what happened will finally release me from
carrying it and having to relive and deconstruct it in silence every single day. Is this
what they call catharsis? I don’t know, because I don’t feel lighter or clean.
What I do feel is rage, a sense of rage that I can finally admit and openly acknowledge
to myself. A rage that I can quietly store at the center of who I am and feel
alive with as it replaces decades of fear. Perhaps I am seeking solace
with all my #MeToo sisters who have the same story - regardless of how it
happened, where it happened, when it happened and who did it to them. The thing
we all share is that someone took something from us that they had no right to.
Someone thought that our body belonged to them when it didn’t. Or perhaps, it’s
because your side is winning now as it always has and I just want to be with
those of us who are feeling overwhelmed, scared, and enraged.
I honestly don’t
know why I am writing this today or whether I will share it.
I only know that I
can’t carry it alone any longer.
Perhaps the reason I am writing this today
is purely pragmatic, because today the United States Supreme Court overturned RoevWade. You will be surprised to know that this matters to me at all. After all,
why should it, really? I am not American and in a little over a month my visa
will expire, and I will leave this country after five years of having lived here
and studied here and yes… despite you, having felt safe here. It matters because
I am from Pakistan, where my body was never mine in the first place, even the
idea that it could be was an aberration that was shredded in real time for me every single day - either as a child with blows and gropes that I didn’t know how
to name or recognize; as a teenager with the stripping gaze of hundreds of men
staring through car windows, leering in markets or stalking me in the short walk
it took to get from my car to the gated safety of my school. Growing up and
working only compounded that reality, where my body became a free zone for
perverts masturbating publicly in the street while staring at me sat utterly horrified in my car or old men lazing behind large, imposing desks deluding
themselves that their young female employees found their dirty jokes and sexual
innuendo appealing. The constant fear that took root in my skin back home was
shed somewhat in the United States and I am embarrassed about admitting that.
Profoundly embarrassed, because I know better than most, that people like you
exist everywhere - that rape happens everywhere, to anyone, at any time and in
any place. It happened to me here, even though my body had been primed for the
insecurity that accompanied it since childhood. Still, despite you, I can walk
here, out in the open. I take up space without shame. And after months of being
paralyzed I still take the bus. Perhaps, the reason this RoevWade
thing is so jarring is because it affirms that you and those like you will
always be protected at my expense, no matter where I am in the world or what I
am doing. Perhaps it is because, after that night, numb and disoriented as I
was, my first thought the following day was to run to the pharmacy and take a
morning-after pill because I was terrified of getting pregnant and having to
seek an abortion. Perhaps, it is because I now know that thousands of women in
that position will no longer be able to do that.
Perhaps, I am just tired, and
this is all I can do to finally exorcise you.
I don’t really know how to speak
to you. But I guess I will choose to be polite. It’s something I’m known for,
not that it has ever protected me from the impoliteness of others. All it really
allowed me was a faux sense of superiority in the face of bullies. That I was somehow better than them because I had not reduced myself to their level. Then again,
that’s also something those that get bullied must tell themselves. I have spent
my life surrounded by bullies, and the knowledge that I didn’t stoop to their
level afforded me a semblance of self-respect, even if that has never served as a real form of protection. Politeness has its place, but it doesn’t have power. Also, in
the days following what you took from me, I don’t want to give away any more
pieces of myself than the ones I lost in those eight minutes and 39 seconds.
I
know that it took exactly eight minutes and 39 seconds for you to take a person
waiting alone at a bus stop and make them something else. I know it took you
that long to bring my very fragile and meticulously constructed world down
around me in the dark, near a dumpster that smelled of sickeningly ripe bananas
and sour milk cartons because I somehow still managed to catch my bus home after
it had all happened. You pulled apart my body, in slightly over a dozen angry
thrusts and I couldn’t scream through the clamped tightness of your hand on my
mouth or fight in the face of your enormous size, so I froze. I continue to tell
myself that freezing was my ‘choice’ but no reaction born of desperation is ever
a choice. A reflex is not a choice. I remember you licked the side of my face before running away and I
didn’t even have it left in me to scream at that point, so I just waited for it
to be over. After you scurried away in the dark, I was numb and too scared to
turn around and confirm that I was finally alone. When I finally was able to turn around, I waited. I waited
patiently for the bus and then I swiped my bus pass, found a seat in a well-lit middle
section, all the while wondering if anyone could tell what had happened to me. I wondered if my rumpled clothes gave me away or my scratched face or my knotted hair. But
no one really looks at other people directly here. It’s considered rude, impolite – I
can’t quite decide whether that is a blessing or a curse. I got to my stop and then walked the last nine-minute stretch home in silence. One breath before the next, one step before the next. It must have been the
first time I’ve exited the bus in three years without yelling a "Thank you! Have
a good one" back over my shoulder at the driver and for some ridiculous reason,
that’s what I chose to fixate on during that walk home. I was worried the bus
driver must have thought me rude. I’m pretty sure most bus drivers don’t even register
those greetings in their days punctuated by the miserable consistency of a
rotating roster of strange faces but still, it’s the smallest courtesy extended
to someone whose life is considerably harder than mine.
It still bothers me that
I forgot to do that.
Like I said, I’m polite.
Here’s the thing though, I know
what this is supposed to be. I’ve made a career out of teaching young women
about surviving abuse and pain. I study and teach feminism as a discipline. I
spent several years speaking on a near daily basis to survivors of abuse – gang
rape victims, acid attack survivors, women shunned for the crime of not
bearing sons … all the multitudes of women who have survived the multitudes of
men who devise multitudes of ways to punish us for the offense of existing and
having bodies that they consider perpetual provocation. I’ve heard countless
stories and I’ve shared some of my own but somehow the ability to know, recognize and
catalogue all the signs of what I felt at that moment did not help. If
anything, my need to rationalize my rage only fueled it further. I asked myself
all the questions that I knew never to ask a woman – Why was I there when it was
dark? Why didn’t I leave campus earlier? Why was I wearing a sleeveless blouse
with a shrug over it and not a t-shirt that hid my neckline? Why was I humming a
song under my breath? A song you would never have understood both because it’s
in Urdu and because if you could understand it, you wouldn’t be who you are.
It's based on a Faiz poem called ‘Aaj Bazaar Mein’ sung by Nayyara Noor. The irony that this was what I
was listening to when you grabbed me from behind will never be lost on me.
Needless to say, I can’t listen to that song anymore not that I’ve tried.
I’m still too scared to try. I asked myself all the questions a female
body is trained to ask when it is violated even though I know those questions
are wrong and that they have no place being asked. EVER.
On second thought,
perhaps that’s why I am writing this, because I still carried the guilt of
existing loudly and largely enough to be raped by you. I was too comfortable in my
confidence that I was finally safe and I lost sight of all the invaluable
knowledge my skin had harvested over decades – to shrink itself, to contract
when others were near, to constantly be on alert.
I have always hated my body –
which is easy enough to do when all the stimulus surrounding me confirms that it
is wrong. Television tells me it’s not white enough, magazines tell me it’s
not thin enough, tik tok videos tell me my eye color is all wrong. For what was
left, well Pakistan was kind enough to cover all those bases. I have large
breasts and hips, always have had. There is no bigger curse than having a
voluptuous body in a land where even three-year-old girls and corpses are
blatantly sexualized. Also, having been poked, prodded, and subsequently pounded
to a pulp during my childhood helped establish with absolute, unwavering certainty for me that for
men (I reject the qualifier ‘most men’), women are bodies first and the people occupying
them second. If ever. Some men are capable of aligning the two, others can only
focus on the former. I am therefore completely conditioned and resigned to the
default state of thinking the worst of ALL men until proven otherwise. This is the less
stressful alternative to hoping to find the good ones and being consistently
proven wrong. It is just more practical and efficient to be pleasantly surprised
by a genuinely kind and thoughtful man who doesn’t have an ulterior motive than
expecting kindness from most men and living with the constant disappointment,
fear and trauma that accompanies being terribly, dangerously, fatally wrong.
It
took me decades to begin to learn to occupy my body somewhat comfortably, to
view it as a tool that carries my brain and my person from point A to point B. Learning to
focus on the things my body could do – climb, run, walk and dance rather
than how it looked doing them has been a lifelong struggle that you
reversed in eight minutes and 39 seconds. I have spent the past year seeing a
therapist, occasionally, and when my insurance can cover it. I’m not sure it has
helped as half the time I have to contextualize my brown-ness for a very white,
very sensitive and very well-meaning woman who is very bad at hiding how traumatized
she is by my traumas. The process of assuring someone literally being paid to
make you feel better is exhausting and it ultimately leaves me feeling more
resentful than relieved.
Instead, I have found solace in female friends online who share
the same or similar struggles and it is impossible to quantify how desperately women
need to be each other’s support systems. How grateful I am to these voices on
the internet belonging to bodies I have never encountered that have helped heal
me in ways I cannot even begin to fathom. I’ve taught this notion of sisterhood
for years but experiencing it and healing with it has been something that makes
me think there is a place where you don’t and won't matter. That’s probably why
you and yours are so terrified of us when we speak about the things we
have survived at your hands. When we are together in our pain and in our healing
and in calling you out.
In the last year, you sent me hurtling back to when I
was fourteen years old - hiding in closets and behind locked doors from
pounding fists and the sound of screams – some mine, some theirs. Things that I
had spent decades, deconstructing, compartmentalizing, and overcoming came
flooding through my pores and were reincarnated as terrifying, familiar phantoms in my lonely Buffalo apartment. You, were easy enough to forget because I never knew you and I’m
grateful for how inconsequential you are in retrospect. What you unleashed
within me; however, I don’t know if you can ever be forgiven for that. Not by
me, at least. People, systems, laws, and twitter, of course, will most definitely
forgive you. They will even advocate for your mental health, your problems and
your circumstances at the expense of mine. In my country, a woman ‘gets herself
raped’, so the idea of holding men accountable is rather farfetched. But here,
there is at least the acknowledgement of the fact that you raped
me and it wasn’t my fault. That the hemorrhaging of self occurring in the
wake of what you did is all on you. Still, there are many, ever rising in
number, that believe at the core of their being (enough to scream it from tv
screens and social media scrolls) that you shouldn’t have to pay or suffer
for your actions. That what you did to me was a ‘mistake’, an 'accident' even. That men are allowed
their mistakes when women aren't even permitted their experience. I now carry a pepper
spray that a friend, who lives in a different state, bought me as New York State
doesn’t allow them. This makes me angry. It doesn’t allow tasers either, that
makes me angrier.
So many protections for you.
So many loopholes… all for you.
None for me.
I guess that’s where I am right now, studying how people - some who
I don’t know, some who I do and some who I care about - shape the discussions
around abuse and their sympathy and excuses for those who commit it. How people
talk about #MeToo and women’s bodies. I am used to hearing despicable things
from strangers on the internet and in life; I am wary of hearing them from
people I know; and I am both scarred and scared to hear them from those I care about.
But I’ve decided it isn’t worth arguing with any of them over or trying to
convince them otherwise. It's just too exhausting, and I am so tired of constantly
seeking allies who will refuse to defend my destruction at your hands. I have arrived at
the point where every time someone I care about refuses to recognize what
happens to women at the hands of men because they are too busy trying to protect
them, or each other or too guilty to confront their own pasts or
whatever - a door in my mind slams in their face. I close a chapter
on them. I still smile and speak politely but they are no longer someone that I
can afford to ‘care about’.
Of all the things you have taken from me, I will
admit, you gave me clarity.
But even I am not polite enough to thank you for
that.
When I got home that night, I locked my door and walked straight into the
tub and turned on the shower. I didn’t even have it in me to take off my
clothes. I just needed to wash you off me. I spent over an hour under the spray of
water trying to process what to do NEXT - the next minute, the next hour, the
next year and next in my life. To have a ‘list’ of survival tips that would keep me
away from that other ‘list’ of reasons for not wanting to that I reflexively used to turn to
when I was much younger and stupider. A lifetime later, I swapped the shower for
my sheets and I slept until I woke in terror the next morning to run to the
pharmacy for a pill that would ensure, that my body at least, could expunge you
completely and fully.
But there is such a thing as skin memory and it is both
eidetic as well as photographic.
It is also permanent.
Skin remembers.
I know this from
experience, and it took me over a week before I could make my way to the police
to report what happened. Lucky for you, I really had nothing to give them. I
hadn’t seen your face, there was no DNA evidence left and I could only describe
how you smelled and what you said. I told the cops that you said, “Just keep
your mouth shut and it will be over” and in recounting those words, I was
mortified that you and I had shared the exact same thought during that terrible
moment.
How could that be?
What did that mean?
That I told myself
to 'keep quiet and let it be over' to save myself and my sanity in the same moment
you told me to 'keep quiet and let it be over' as you were violating my sense of
self and breaking my sanity?
I am finally realizing that this is the reason why I am
writing this today.
To let myself know that I am not ashamed of what
you did. That what people think or say or how they will now view me is all on
them or perhaps on you but it’s not on me.
It is not mine to carry anymore.
It never was.
So, No.
I won’t
'keep quiet and let it be over' for your benefit.
