Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,14

I didn’t know what had happened at 438 Lyon Street, but I did know that the poet and memoirist Maya Angelou had lived not far to the northeast during her adolescence, not long after the end of the five years of muteness that was her response to being raped repeatedly at age eight. And I knew about the apartment a few blocks in the other direction from my own, at 1827 Golden Gate Avenue, into which nineteen-year-old newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was brought in a thirty-gallon garbage can after her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a small delusional would-be revolutionary group, in early 1974. She was, she testified, kept blindfolded and bound for weeks in a closet in this location and a previous one and raped by two of her kidnappers. These two stories found their way into the news. But most never did or they were small items on the back pages.

Some I witnessed. Once late at night, out the window of my apartment, I saw a man with a huge knife in one hand cornering a woman in the doorway of the liquor store across the street. When a police car drifted up silently and the officers surprised the knife wielder, he slid the weapon away along the sidewalk and claimed as its steel clattered on concrete, “It’s okay. She’s my girlfriend.”

The writer Bill deBuys began a book with the sentence “A species of hope resides in the possibility of seeing one thing, one phenomenon or essence, so clearly and fully that the light of its understanding illuminates the rest of life.” And then he begins with the pine desk at which he’s writing and travels from a description of the grain and color of the wood to trees and forests and keeps going into love, loss, epiphanies of place. It’s a lovely journey. I can imagine many forests into which I’d rather go from my own desk, which was made of trees that must have been cut down before my grandmothers were born, than into the violence against my gender.

But the desk I sit at is a desk given to me by a woman who a man tried to murder, and it seems time to tell what it meant to me to grow up in a society in which many preferred people like me to be dead or silent and how I got a voice and how it eventually came time to use that voice—that voice that was most articulate when I was alone at the desk speaking through my fingers, silently—to try to tell the stories that had gone untold.

Memoirs at their most conventional are stories of overcoming, arcs of eventual triumph, personal problems to be taken care of by personal evolution and resolve. That a lot of men wanted and still want to harm women, especially young women, that a lot of people relished that harm, and a lot more dismissed it, impacted me in profoundly personal ways but the cure for it wasn’t personal. There was no adjustment I could make in my psyche or my life that would make this problem acceptable or nonexistent, and there was nowhere to go to leave it behind.

The problems were embedded in the society and maybe the world in which I found myself, and the work to survive it was also work to understand it and eventually work to transform it for everyone, not for myself alone. There were, however, ways of breaking the silence that was part of the affliction, and that was rebellion, and a coming to life, and a coming into power to tell stories, my own and others’. A forest of stories rather than trees and the writing a charting of some paths through it.

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It felt ubiquitous then. It still does. You could be harmed a little—by insults and threats that reminded you you were not safe and free and endowed with certain inalienable rights—or more by a rape, or more by a rape-kidnapping-torture-imprisonment-mutilation, more yet by murder, and the possibility of death always hung over the other aggressions. You could be erased a little so that there was less of you, less confidence, less freedom, or your rights could be eroded, your body invaded so that it was less and less yours, you could be rubbed out altogether, and none of those possibilities seemed particularly remote. All the worst things that happened to