To all survivors, their families and friends, to all of my friends and also those who left for being caught, I presume, in the current of rape culture, these words are for you.
Pour mes amis francophones, le texte en français suivra sous peu...
I am sitting comfortably in a large square room that has magnificent wide windows on three of its walls. Facing west, I can see the sun diving in the steel blue waters of the lake while the warm orange rays sneak into the room through the beige, blue, green and red curtains. I love this brief peaceful point in time. It will last the perspiring instant of a touch while breathing in the inspiration of my muses and the raw courage needed to type on the screen the first few words of a humble attempt to weave words within each other, as graciously as possible.
To penetrate into the tremor that shakes many women's lives as well as trying to describe it metamorphically is no easy task, but I am up for the challenge. It is April after all, The Sexual Assault Awareness month in the United States of America. Hope you can take the jolt.
But first, I have to restart my existential clock...
[caption id="attachment_906" align="aligncenter" width="200"] The clock tower of Finale Emilia (near Ferrara), after an earthquake in the Italian Emilia-Romagna Region.[/caption]
Writing about rape can be experienced as a provocation for many of us. For myself, it feels like trying to put into words a space in time where language no longer exists. A juncture of events in which any attempt to decode them through the senses risks becoming lethal information while my mouth runs dry and my stomach tightens.
When an earthquake strikes a woman's country it is always at large magnitude. Buildings of stones and trees of memories oscillate like heavy pendulums to eventually leave her cities unveiled down to their foundations, silenced, in just a few minutes. The clean porcelain, the heavy furniture, the immaculate walls, the greanest trees, the beautiful clothing, the long roads, the beats, bumps, chinks or clacks, clashes, clumps and drums, scrunches, splashes and flops pound all together. Crash. The sound, is no less fearful than the movement. It is a major blast towards humanity abandoning the bright reds and the holy milk of life to their destiny. They fade into shades of grey under the abrasive clouds of dust and the flesh it has soiled. Confusion abounds about the space and the time that the disaster took place while a tsunami alert arouses and many many more after shocks are felt. Pure terror.
In this encounter with death, the metallic spice of passing is engraved through the skin of a nation and her sacred ecosystems, but the skeleton of her life remains. She has witnessed the end of one kind of consciousness and the beginning of another. Not the end of a chapter of an era or a life, such as the end of puberty or modern age, but the actual disappearance of her previous identity and the emergence of something altogether new and unknown. Major tremors are both a death and a razor-edged rebirth. It is the end of one kind of life and consciousness and the beginning of unintentional labour pains to raise another.
No city, no country can be rebuilt as it was before after utmost trauma. The landscape is forever change. It has become a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces do not match the picture on the box. They fit together, but they do not make up the same picture. Everything learnt and known is not longer relevant, as dead as those tumbled trees.
Life is for now on and for a very long time ahead, on disturb. But it is tenacious, and it wants to thrive even though it would be reasonable for you to assume it can never be regained. The destroyed buildings and cities, the fallen trees and the memories turned into rotting blankets of mud, are waiting for a sign from the rest of us. The woman cannot remodel her whole nation alone nor does she wants to be late for her resurrection. She stoically awaits for a few fresh droplets of rain, the sunshine and humankind to take on the many tasks of reconstructing.
It won't take three days, three months or three years to rocket her realm, it will take a life time. First, the rubble must go.
For every building that will rise and for every new city that will thrive, a profound joy will be felt within her heart and the heart of many. For it will now have the ability to contribute in more meaningful ways to life.
If you are patient and have enough compassion, you can volunteer through the ups and downs of this enormous earthquake aftermath, the reconstruction. You will be part in the unfolding miracles for decades to come. Life will thrive again within new colors, new trees, new buildings and the new roads of her motherland. Rape is not the end. She will rise.
It is just a matter of love more than time.
Sick, but wanting to thrive again, it is in 2009 that I started to work on regaining my voice. It was far from being easy. It was painful not only for myself., but for the people I loved the most. The more I hurt, the less they would understand. The less they would understand... the more I hurt... the more I hurt the less likely I would find the strentght to get back on my feet again.
This 2010 music video represents my very first step.
Links
Pandys.org
Le projet hippocampe / Groupe de discussion Facebook
Agressionssexuelles.gouv.qc.ca
Centre d'aide aux victimes d'actes criminelles
Indemnisation des victimes d'actes criminels