Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,80
without power, is a bewilderingly awful condition, as though you were a ghost, a beast, as though words died in your mouth, as though sound no longer traveled. It is almost worse to say something and have it not matter than to be silent.
Women have been injured on all three fronts—as have men of color and nonwhite women doubly so. Not allowed to speak or punished for speaking or excluded from the arenas—courts, universities, legislatures, newsrooms—where decisions are made. Mocked or disbelieved or threatened if they do find a place in which to speak, and routinely categorized as inherently deceitful, spiteful, delusional, confused, or just unqualified. Or they speak up and it is no different than remaining silent; they have told their stories and nothing happens, because their rights and their capacity to bear witness don’t matter, so their voices are just sounds that blow away on the wind.
Gender violence is made possible by this lack of audibility, credibility, and consequence. We live inside an enormous contradiction: a society that by law and preening self-regard insists it is against such violence has by innumerable strategies allowed that violence to continue unchecked; better and far more frequently protected perpetrators than victims; and routinely punished, humiliated, and intimidated victims for speaking up, from workplace harassment cases to campus rape cases to domestic violence cases. The result makes crimes invisible and victims inaudible people of no consequence.
The disregard for a woman’s voice that underlies sexual violence is inseparable from the disregard afterward if a woman goes to the police, the university authorities, her family, her church, the courts, to the hospital for a rape kit, and is ignored, discredited, blamed, shamed, disbelieved. They are both assaults on the full humanity and membership of a person in her society, and the devaluation in the latter arena enables the former. Sexual assault can only thrive in situations of unequal audibility, credibility, and consequence. This, far more than any other disparity, is the precondition for epidemic gender violence.
Changing who has a voice with all its power and attributes doesn’t fix everything, but it changes the rules, notably the rules about what stories will be told and heard and who decides. One of the measures of this change is the many cases that were ignored, disbelieved, dismissed, or found in favor of the perpetrator years ago that have had a different outcome in the present, because the women or children who testified have more audibility, credibility, and consequence now than they did before. The impact of this epochal shift that will be hardest to measure will be all the crimes that won’t happen because the rules have changed.
Behind that change are transformations in whose rights matter and whose voice will be heard and who decides. Amplifying and reinforcing those voices and furthering that change was one of the tasks to which I put the voice I’d gained as a writer, and seeing that what I and others wrote and said was helping to change the world was satisfying in many ways to me as a writer and as a survivor.
Afterword: Lifelines
One day in New Orleans in late 2013 I was sitting behind a table in a narrow room signing books for a long line of people, along with my coeditor, native New Orleanian Rebecca Snedeker, when a woman took my hand in hers and began to read my palm. The book was our atlas of that city, my fifteenth or sixteenth or seventeenth book, depending on how you count them. I’d come to New Orleans six months after Hurricane Katrina, on Easter weekend of 2006, and been drawn into the untold stories of the storm and its aftermath, gotten involved in trying to expose some of the racial crimes, which I prodded investigative journalists to look at and wrote about myself in my 2009 book about disasters and the remarkable societies that arise in the wreckage, A Paradise Built in Hell.
I’d shown up in New Orleans to look at what was ugliest about the city: poverty and racism and how more than 1,500 people had died of those things in the flooded city as they were first abandoned and then attacked and prevented from evacuating and from receiving relief, died of stories that demonized and dehumanized them. And I’d fallen in love with what was most beautiful about New Orleans, including the way that its inhabitants