COMMENT
A survivor's tale
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Society imposes a conspiracy of silence around rape. But some lift the burden of shame on the victim of sexual assault, writes GEETA DOCTOR of Alice Sebold's two books on this issue.
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ALICE SEBOLD, best-selling author of The Lovely Bones, a lyrically tender account of growing up in small town United States, that is shattered by the rape and murder of the l4-year-old narrator, has provided a coolly clinical account of what actually happened to her when she was assaulted, in her autobiography Lucky.
It's a survivor's tale.
That's what makes Alice Sebold's account of her rape at the hands of a drunken man so passionate, if one might use such a word. She does not tell us that he's black, or that he's poor, or drunk, as these are details of little consequence when she is being attacked. All she can think is of the reality of her position when he drags her down into a dirty tunnel, grabbing her by her long brown hair and pushing her down on the filthy ground as he threatens her with a knife.
"Inside the tunnel, where broken beer bottles, old leaves and other, as yet indiscriminate, things littered the ground, I became one with this man," she writes. "He held my life in his hand. Those who say they would rather fight to the death than be raped are fools. I would rather be raped a thousand times. You do what you have to do."
When she begs him to spare her because she's still a virgin at the age of l8 and that she can give him money instead, he only laughs. Her fear, her attempts to resist him only excite his lust. He has a knife. He has a need. He knows exactly what he wants. As he strips her and assaults her in multiple entries that leave her ripped and bleeding he finally urinates on her supine body. Nothing is spared of her. She too does nothing to spare the reader.
Yet this is only the beginning of her ordeal. She has to pick herself up, report the assault to the police, who tell her that she's Lucky (hence the title of her book) and that another girl, another victim, had been killed in the same ditch, under the tunnel. She has to undergo the examination by the doctors who have to confirm her account. Because of the thoroughness of the medical procedure to which she has to submit, however unbearable it is, at the time, when she finally faces her assailant in court, she can walk away knowing that he has been given the maximum punishment. That happens much, much later. Her immediate problem is that she has to tell her friends at the college, her family and their friends.
What she soon discovers is that there is a conspiracy of silence that follows the event. People closest to her tiptoe around what has taken place, as though the fact that she has been raped makes her taboo. Many of her parent's friends come to visit her in a show of sympathy, but she feels their gaze upon her, as another kind of violation, as if she had become a freak. "I was raped," she said, "I felt I had to say it, but that saying it was akin to an act of vandalism. As if I'd thrown a bucket of blood across the living room."
She becomes invisible. Or what seems to be worse is that she carries the moment of the violation with her for the next 20 years. As she puts it, "I share my life with my rapist. He is the husband of my fate." It's as if society wants her to remain in that ditch, under the tunnel waiting to be assaulted over and over again. The man himself seems unchanged. When she accidentally meets him in the street, before the conviction, he greets her with, "Hey, girl, don't I know you from somewhere?"
In her novel, The Lovely Bones which has sold two million copies, the heroine Susie comes back as a disembodied spirit, from Heaven to re-live her life, backwards from the moment that she was raped and murdered by a neighbour while walking through a cornfield on her way home. It's as horrific in its quietly controlled description of the rape, as Sebold's first book, but there is also a meditative quality about it. It's as if, freed from the burden of her physical self, Susie is able to see things in an altogether different perspective. An Indian reader might say that she takes a Vedantic view. Nothing can assault that inner core of pure being that is not the physical body. This knowledge allows her to look at the pain, to feel not just her loss, but also to acknowledge the grief that her family, in particular her Father feels towards the senseless death of a beloved child.
With that knowledge comes a certain acceptance. Terrible things happen. They can destroy you. It's not just the rape victim that is assaulted, but also the whole fabric of society that is ripped open. It's not fair. But no one promised that the world is going to be as perfect and innocent as you have been taught to expect as a child walking through a cornfield on a beautiful December evening in a story-book town in the U.S.
Anyone can be a victim. At the same time you do not have to remain a victim all through your life. Part of Sebold's thesis is in her painful journey towards acceptance of these elemental truths. She de-mystifies the business of rape by the documentary quality of her description. She refuses to be shamed by it. Indeed, her anger is reserved for those, who by not calling it by its name, surround it in a bogus aura of shame that is reserved only for women, subtly indicting them for their misfortune and dragging them back to a more primitive type of conditioning when women because of their bodies, appear to invite men to assault them. The burden of guilt is transferred to the victim, rather than the perpetrator.
Whereas, as Sebold shows in both her accounts, the men turn out to be pathetic individuals, who cannot perform sexually, except under extreme conditions, when they feel they can be in a position of power. There is a tacit badge of approval that glamorises the "act" in almost all primitive societies, the licence that allows a conquering army for instance to take the women of their conquered foes, that makes rape a mark of valour. This is perhaps what makes it so difficult to even report instances of rape without giving it the colours of a major crime. Or, worse still, by causing a ripple of sniggering consent amongst certain segments of society who desperately want to believe in the myth that there are certain women who are always "asking for it". This is certainly the message that comes through in the titillating images of women as both vamp and virgin that dominate our film and television media. While high profile cases of sexual assault do make it to the headlines, what can one say of the innumerable instances where young children, servants and increasingly employees working under a tyrannical boss have had to keep quiet because of the fear of blackmail, or of death, or repeated assaults, due to the terrible burden of shame that is placed on the idea of rape.
Can a time come, when survivors can become heroines in their own disaster? Alice Sebold's stories in both fiction and autobiography track down how it can be done — by shining the fierce light of truth onto our selves and our bodies and learning to read the pain and the ultimate triumph that this knowledge can bring. Women must stop being victims.
Lucky, Alice Sebold, Picador, first published in l999 by Scribner, New York, £6.99.
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold, Picador, $21.95.
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