Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,78

agricultural fields and the tech industry in the upheaval called #MeToo, and then beyond the USA, from Iceland to South Korea. In response to the 2018 Supreme Court hearing at which a woman told her story of being assaulted at age fifteen, and the residual trauma, and received death threats as a result of speaking up.

The brutality of what we examined and the exhilaration at being able to tell and at the power of telling made an odd mix, and the storytellers were both liberated and returned to their suffering as they spoke. Through each rupture poured so many stories that it seemed as though everything hidden had come out into the open, and then another rupture happened, and thousands or hundreds of thousands more women told their stories for the first time.

Violence against bodies had been made possible on an epic epidemic scale by violence against voices. The existing order rested on the right and capacity of men to be in charge—of meaning and of truth, of which stories mattered and whose got told, as well as of more tangible phenomena (money, law, government, media) that maintained the arrangement. And it rested on the silence or silencing of those whose experiences demonstrated the illegitimacies of the status quo and those atop it. But something essential had changed. The change was often seen as a beginning but I saw it as a culmination of the long, slow business of making feminist perspectives more widespread and putting more women (and men who regarded women as equal and credible) in positions of power as editors, producers, directors, journalists, judges, heads of organizations, senators.

The rise of social media and the plethora of new online forums created space for many more voices, and these amplified individual stories brought their own testimony to the conversation, and fortified the diagnosis and the need for change. This chorus created a broad river whose current carried individual voices such as mine; to the extent that the world has been changed, it was a collective project carried out by many millions.

It’s often assumed that anger drives such work, but most activism is driven by love, a life among activists has convinced me. Too, though the remedies for trauma most often proffered in our privatized society are personal, doing something for and with others, something to change the circumstances under which you were harmed, is often an experience of connection and power that overcomes that sense of isolation and powerlessness central to trauma.

Writing about sexual assault and misogyny has been the easiest writing I’ve ever done, perhaps because what drives me is a force harder to stop than to start. It requires a deep immersion in hideous crimes; for many years, over and over, I have read about rape at breakfast and beatings and stalkings at lunch and had murder for dinner, taken in many thousands of such stories, and yet because all this is coming to light in a new way, and because there is some possibility of transforming the situations and shifting the power, this ferocious drive overwhelms the horror and the terror and is perhaps the first thing that has.

At the Nevada Test Site I learned that you deal with the worst things by facing them directly. If you run away from them, they chase you; if you ignore them, they catch you unprepared; and it’s in facing them that you find allies and powers and the possibility of winning. So it was that I tried several times before to face and name gender violence in my writing and eventually found what I had so long waited for, a global movement of women facing it and creating the conversation we needed.

Storytelling was our central tool. We pointed out how often the same tropes, clichés, and excuses are used, the same assumptions are made, the same people are protected and believed, the same people are discredited and punished. We stripped away the old excuses, the victim blaming and trivializing, by making the patterns obvious, by insisting, for example, that rapists cause rape and not alcohol, outfits, or the desire of women to go places and talk to people. Finally, we talked about stalking, harassment, assault, rape, domestic violence, and femicide as different manifestations of the same misogyny. The conversation about feminism broadened and deepened knowledge of how sexual abuse takes place, why victims often don’t report it