Take Back the Night
Take Back the Night is an international event with the mission of ending sexual and domestic violence in all forms. Hundreds of events are held in over 35 countries annually. Asked to speak, as a professor at my college’s first TBTN, I read this piece.
2014
My mother always told me not to out alone at night. Not to wear short skirts, or go to parties without parents there, not to leave the shades open, not even a crack. I thought she was paranoid. I didn't know then that just ‘cos you're anxious doesn't mean they weren't also out to get you.
My mother's father was a monster. He incested her, and me, her sister, all my girl cousins, and he brutalized his wife. He was told by his world that we were his possessions.
She never told me any of this becasue she’d forgotten. As if a fine cloth had wiped something that happened to her body away from something that happened to her mind. At the age of 76, she remembered incest, she remembered abuse in therapy, but not the perpetrator.
Five months ago, my mother died. In the process of her dying, she fell through the ice of her life long secret, trapped in a three day long nightmare calling out from her tiny nursing home bed: “Papa, no! No, Papa, No.” Just her and me in that tiny cell together, and my father, pretending to sleep, and her father, deeply present, possibly the most solid energy in that room. And “No, Papa, No” was her metronome, her mantra for three days and nights while I tried to hold her tight, tried to winch her out of the ice water, tried to tie him down, tried to interrupt the terrible possession.
She was 94 years old. She lay there, semi-conscious, her tiny face a fist that couldn't hit, her bared teeth fierce and her hands fluttering like wild birds that had gotten trapped inside the breath of that space.
Nurses and aides moved through the room, moved her body, moved around me, where I knelt, frozen for days. I lay with her in that narrow bed and whispered in her good ear for hours at a time: “Let's go, Mama, we can just leave, right now. We can just walk right out of this room, together. I’ve got you.”
Not knowing how to reach her, or where she was, I spoke on and on, desperate, “Mama, whatever's happening, you're safe now. I'm with you. Come on. Let's go. I'm right behind you. I'm right behind you.”
But I had ceased to register on her radar. I was gone. All she could do was thrash and struggle, panting. It was just her and him. It was just Me and him. It was just him.
After the second day, I called my friend, the Jewish mystic healer, to come and clear the evil out of that room, to exorcise my grandfather from my mother's ancient, dying body.
That day, nothing changed. Her terror mask froze deeper, and the panting of “No papa no” became her breathing. On and on she inhaled and exhaled that plea. That night I slept on the floor in the space between my parents' narrow beds like a loyal golden retriever, except I didn't sleep. I lay there, triggered backwards in time. I couldn't stop crying. The strongest person in that room was my Zayda, and he'd been dead since 1965.
The next day, the healer sent me out of the room. When I returned, an hour or two later, Mama's teeth were unclenched, her grimace gone. Her wild-bird hands were still. She was breathing deeply, asleep. She was almost gone. “Don't touch her”, the healer warned, “She's very close now. Don’t do anything to bring her back.” She was shrunken and shining and peaceful.
And when she died, the rabbi came and wove defensive spells, and the Chevra Kadisha— the Holy Jewish Burial Society, dressed her in white, tied white silken knots in the symbols of Hebrew letters of Heavenly protection— around her wrists, her throat, her ankles.
And I brought her home with me, buried her 40 feet from my door on my mountain, and Adenoi, the Jewish warrior god came along to guard her graveside. He's still there, protecting her with his flaming sword, and we are learning to tolerate each others' fundamentalism. His son, my grandfather, is banished forever from our bodies. We sent him—my mother, her god, my goddess and I, away, into the airless depths of outer space, far from the tender flesh of little girls.
She is safe now. Safe to the night. Safe to walk alone, to dress how she pleases, safe to open the curtains wide. Forever, safed. Dead, she is safe.
I am a survivor of incest. Of rape. Of Patriarchy. A survivor of the catcalls of rape, the vampire gaze of rape, the relentless fear of rape that all women know and most men do not see. How do women survive the paralyzing fear of rape, the invisible secret that haunts our days? I want to tie white silk ribbons around our hearts and all the tender places where we ache with what we know.
Last year, I was invited, because of my credentials as a women’s studies professor, to speak on a panel about rape. This was on a morning radio show, our local groovy station— KGNU. It was a call-in show. There were five of us. The moderator began with some data—the numbers of women who are raped. When it was my turn, I corrected her grammar, the agentless passive. “Women are raped. Women are battered.” You English professors know what 'm talking about. “Women are raped by men”, I said.
We talked for 30 more minutes, about the horrors of rape, women's fear of rape, rape culture. Afterwards, the phone lines lit up, and the first 9 calls were from men who were furious at me for saying that men rape women, outraged that I had dared to state the obvious, and upset their morning coffee or yoga, or whatever. They insisted over and over that they do not rape. One actually said, ‘No wonder you get raped.’ This was KGNU, progressive bastion of Boulder. It was 8:30 in the freaking morning. Who the fuck were these guys?
This night is about women's voices. It's not about male bashing, but it's not about tiptoeing around the big secret of female existence. I know that not all men rape, but that doesn't matter much to me, cos the big secret of rape culture is alive and hardy in patriarchy. Men swim in entitlement and haplessness. We women drown in toxic acts and images of brutal masculinity and victimized femininity. We have ignorant legislators and right wing backlashers who only deepen women's hell.
All women are afraid of being raped, of being murdered if they resist rape, of being blamed or disbelieved if they report rape. We worry about our future promised rapes—it’s a stone in the belly, a shard in the brain, and yet we're taught to abandon ourselves in order to protect male comfort levels. We don't speak of it to them, to you, the good men. But what about the not-so-good men, of whom there are way too many? If you're too nice, you lead them on. If you're too honest, you risk violence. Either way, you're a bitch. We try to stand on thinnest ice, to not fall through.
Patriarchy. To not fall through the ice of patriarchy. The massive power differential between us, the sinister forms uncoiling, the relentless pattern of gender roles in our society. We live in a culture, in a world steeped in the domination of women; we women circle the cold sucking drain of misogyny. Misogyny—the hatred of women. You've heard the story of the battle: the one who screamed and fought back and got away, the one who was roofied and did not remember, the one who was killed. The stories of the battles surround us, but this is the battle of the story. History paves over the fear women suffer. Who's gonna name the terror, who will narrate the dark streets and corridors, the beds and bars of battle?
I say it—patriarchy is alive and thriving. It's the very real stage on which we all perform rape culture. It is the idea that a man has a right to have sex with a woman, regardless of her desires. It's the fact that his rights trump hers', or she just has no rights. Or she just has no voice, no place in the gender script except as an object to be desired and conquered and owned. This sense of being owed sex is everywhere. We owe them. They have a right. To us.
Because they need it, because life is hard and we are soft, because they bought us a drink, because rape culture keeps them in a constant state of aggression and arousal and because we are drawn as sexual delivery systems, objects, caricatures shaken like a red flag at a bull to slake those out-of-control hungers. Our bodies plastered over every screen, over every street, over every pornographic ad.
The invalidity of the word NO. The danger of the family home. The workplace, the party, the college campus, the night.
And rape is still somehow such a controversial subject. And, to dare to name Patriarchy is to end all conversations in mixed company. It's not nice to talk about rape culture, there's no polite conversation to be had there—only jokes, only fetishized images. Patriarchy isn't even a real word that most college students can put a definition to, like fish defining water. It’s just Life.
To win the battle of the story, women must become both credible and audible.
Violence is a way to silence people. Date rape. Marital rape. Incest. Domestic violence. Privilege, domination, power, and oppression.
At the heart of the struggle of Feminism is a passion and duty to name and re-name the world. We have come to understand, through Feminism, that sex, while beautiful and wonderful, is an arena of power and that power can be abused. We have to resist being bullied out of our own perceptions and shamed out of our interpretations. We have to resist the story that women are not reliable witnesses to our own lives, and that the truth was never our property.
And all the uncountable generations, the millennia of women who weren't allowed into the laboratory or the library or the conversation or the revolution or even the category called human cry out to us tonight to march, to change the world, again, even if it's just in a parking lot, because this is symbolic, meaning it's a ritual. We march, we dare, we fight back. Yes, things have gotten better, somewhat, somewhere, but this is a war. Rape is a war. It may be the oldest war. I depend now upon younger women to say what you need to say and be who you want to be and go where you choose to go—unencumbered. Proudly. Safely. Even dangerously, because what could be more dangerous than our silence? What could be more deadly to rape culture than our voices?
This one night of womens’ voices in a world where space opens up for men, shuts down for women. Where power is expressed in discourse and physical violence, and the world is still organized to silence and annihilate women.
We work so hard to rise up out of that annihilation. My Mama worked so hard. She clarified her story in the fragile beaker of her body. She crossed the threshold of alchemy and became pure gold. She did this for me, and for all her female relations. I believe she did it for All of us, and so I call her spirit here to march with us tonight, in our symbolic ritual to finish forever domestic violence, sexual assault, rape and incest, because my mother—Lillian Chezar would be proud to be a subject of this story in our battle, as we dare to take back the night.
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