My memories of my prison interviews with Jimmy McElroy, aka Mac, are stark in my head: the way light played across his rough features, the smell of Lysol, the squeak of cheap guard boots, the ringing clang of scraped blue metal bars.
Eerily interspliced between gory tales of mob hits would sit the mundane and the cherished: stories of Mac’s children, his girlfriend, his plans when he got out, everyday incidents with my brother, questions about my life.
“Hey,” Mac interrupted himself, “how is that young man of yours? What’s his name? You told me last time but I forgot. You two doing okay? He treating you right?”
The last question had more weight, a gravity born of an earlier conversation. Mac had said my boyfriend “better treat you right or the Westies will pay him a visit!”
Mac’s question during this visit hit me like a punch to the gut. I slapped as neutral a smile on my face as I could.
“Oh Dovid. He’s fine, we’re good, he’s treating me right.”
He wasn’t, we weren’t, and again he wasn’t. We had, in fact, broken up right before I got to the prison. I was too needy, and he was too lazy. I was too demanding, and he was too selfish. He wanted to be with me but wanted none of the work that entailed. I made what should be fun nothing but tedious work. The arguments went around and around and increased in frequency, pitch, and desperation.
In reality, we moved too quickly in our relationship. We were more interested in being in love than in seeing who was directly in front of our faces. Dovid was infatuated with a big-haired, fiery Black woman poet who didn’t take any shit, and who looked six-feet-tall on stage. I fell in love with a politically aware, sensitive white Jewish man who was an amazing father, who dedicated his life to struggles against racism and imperialism.
Unfortunately for both of us, neither of those people existed. Or more truthfully, they did not exist in their purest forms. I might be a poetry Amazon on stage, but I also suffered from deep depression with the state of the world, my life, and myself. He might work against racism, but that didn’t mean he didn’t carry his own issues with him into our relationship, tracking them around like mud on a clean carpet.
I had met his parents—his father was a brutal tyrant in the house growing up, and an angel in the street. I could see how Dovid lived in fear of becoming like that. His own son, Zakai, seven when we first started dating, was always at the forefront of his mind.
The first time I met Zakai was at a concert I planned. I had picked my afro out to its full glory. I was surprised and happy when I turned to see Dovid there. I was already infatuated with him, well before our first date. He introduced me to Zakai, whose face was inscrutable, as only a seven-year-old can get away with.
I shook his hand, and said, “It’s really nice to meet you. I heard from your dad that you love Spiderman. Next to Wolverine from the X-Men, he’s my favorite super hero.”
A lie. Spiderman was a boring character to me when I started reading comics at Zakai’s age, and I promptly shunned him. It is a lie, however, I will never regret. Zakai’s face cracked into the wide missing-tooth grin I grew to love. As I turned away, he yelled out, “I like your hair.”
It was the beginnings of a family I had wanted my entire life. I was not ready to let that go without a fight—and Dovid and I had many of those.
So I left Philadelphia for a two-month trip to Mexico, a trip I had spent years planning. I saved up my vacation days and squirreled away money. I went to learn from an indigenous rebel group there, the Zapatistas, who rose up against the Mexican authority to demand their independence and autonomy. They set up liberated communities all over the state of Chiapas, dreaming new ways of living and being into existence. There are hundreds of thousands who proudly call themselves Zapatistas.
Setting out on this trip of a lifetime, which changed me more than any one thing in my life, all I could think about was losing Dovid and Zakai. Losing this family. We were already coming apart at the seams when I left, though neither of us wanted to admit it. I was worried we would completely unravel in my absence.
Many prisoners recreate family, building to make up for what they never had and for what they lost. I understand this longing. My mother was an incredible woman who raised me well and lovingly. I still longed to be part of a unit, more than just a solitary pair. This was something denied me by the everyday prisons of racism, poverty, masculinity, and low self-esteem that trapped my father. I used to think I could love away all of the intangible prisons that keep people separated.
* * *
All of my memories of my interviews with Mac are stark, except one: the visit with him two weeks after I had an abortion. I remember almost nothing from the time that does not have to do with the abortion. It devoured everything.
The visit I don’t remember happened in June 2006. It would have been sunny and warm. I know this because it is California. I know I rented a car at the Oakland airport (which is cheaper to fly to from Philly than SFO). Perhaps it was the time they gave me the PT Cruiser, or the Grand Am. I only know it was not the time they gave me the SUV. I begged them not to give me such a big car. I had gotten my license, belatedly at twenty-four, less than a year before. This proved to be prophetic. I brought the car back three days later with a dent gouged into the entire passenger-side door. That was when I learned: always get the insurance.
I know which hotel I checked into, because I have only ever stayed at one. Once I find a clean hotel in a town, I keep going back, unwilling to push my luck. From past experience, I know that I must have unpacked, read through some of my notes, set my alarm for 6:20 am, and fallen asleep to the late night sounds of cable television.
I would have risen with the alarm, showered again, dressed. Double-checked I was not wearing anything my visit would be denied for (underwire bra, see-through clothing, open-toed shoes, skirts too short, sleeveless shirts, hoodies, coats with linings).
On one trip to California, the airline put my luggage on a flight arriving hours after me. They promised it would be there that night. I was wearing a tank top, a puffy vest, tight jeans, and flip-flops. Not a single item would pass prison regulations. I waited all night. At 5 am, I ran to Walmart. Every small prison town has a Walmart somewhere nearby. In my mind, Walmarts are inextricable from prisons. I bought the first outfit that looked like it would fit me. I ended up wearing a t-shirt with “I Don’t Do Drama” emblazoned on the front, a black skirt so big it swept the floor, and awkward boots.
On the trip I don’t remember, I would have gotten in my car and driven the fifteen minutes on winding, one-lane roads to the prison, parked, lined up, and been admitted and processed. I would have gone into the visiting room and sat at my assigned table, waiting for Mac to come out. I would have had extra sanitary napkins in my pocket. Even though I can’t remember it, the guards would have hassled me at the front gate about it.
I had extra pads because I was bleeding heavily. The abortion had been three weeks before my visit. I was not supposed to fly. I had had a medical abortion, taking a pill that induces a miscarriage, rather than a surgical removal. Flying at high altitudes could put pressure on my uterus and cause serious bleeding. It could put my life at risk, the doctor said.
He was right. On the flight back from the west coast, my bleeding became so heavy that I went through a pad an hour. Then a pad every half hour. The doctor had clearly told me if I went through more than a pad every two hours, I was to go directly to an emergency room.
I crouched in the cramped airplane bathroom, staring down into the toilet bowl where my blood dripped, a faucet not turned completely off. I went to stand up. Pinwheels of light exploded in my head. I opened my eyes to find my head resting on the sink, a knot where it hit when I passed out. I passed out three more times on the taxi ride to my house.
I had gotten pregnant after I came back from Mexico. Dovid and I had not taken that time apart as a break. We wrote love letters every other day, and paid for exorbitant international calls once a week. By the time I returned, we had both forgotten what we should have remembered.
Our “honeymoon” lasted a month. Nothing had been solved. We took it out on each other. One day we fought—as most other days. Our frustration was a screaming teapot boiling over. Energy was transmuted, passion transferred. We fell into each other’s arms. We clawed at each other, then fell into one another on my hideously orange couch. He moved inside of me. We moved as one.
His dick slipped out of my vagina behind me. There were no words between us. Then I felt its pressure on my asshole. In my asshole. Barreling in. Rearranging.
We had had anal sex before. He always asked. Used lube. Moved slowly.
This was a package crammed into an overfull mailbox at Christmas.
I heard myself say no. Again. And again. I was suspended in time. My mind was hazy. An eternity, a minute—which was it, or was it both? He got off me, seeing I was upset. He did not understand—Are you still mad from before? He kissed me. He said he would call later after picking up his son. I did not know what had happened. I pulled a blanket off the back of the couch and wound it around my nakedness. I began to cry. To sob. To howl.
I called him, tears splattered in my voice. I told him it wasn’t right. Something wrong had happened. Something had been stolen. Broken. He did not understand.
“Did you—do you—are you saying… I… raped you?”
No. Yes. Was it or wasn’t it? How to give words to a violation gone in a breath? An assault, unintended or not?
I knew it was not right. He agreed. He knew it was not right. “What do you want me to do?” an endless refrain. What did I want him to do? I turned like a sheet in the wind. I did not know what would make it better. I only knew it was not right. I did not think of calling the police for so many reasons. I did not believe in calling the police; I felt it only made a bad situation worse. In this situation, it was also a Black woman’s word versus a white man’s. This was Philly. This was America. There would be no “proof,” no rape kit testing positive.
Even more than all of this was the forensic evidence of my love for him. I did not want him thrown away. I could not imagine a guilty verdict in any court in this country, where women—even those who are the “right” kind of survivors, who fight off strangers that attacked them and did violence—are put on trial, dragged through the mud and made to prove they were not “asking for it.” Even if I would have been certain of conviction, I did not want Dovid broken. I only wanted to be made whole again. I did not realize how important the feeling of being safe in the arms of the person you love was until it disintegrated. I wanted safe back. I did not have answers about how to do that. I wanted to stay and find the answers. I did not want to walk away carrying the pieces of me cupped in my hands. I needed to know how to fix this.
I searched for answers in the exact wrong places. I went through his computer, through his journal. Was I looking for clues to understand this? Clues to hold against him?
I found an entry. Undated. The entry said it was not the first time. Another assault. Another violation. He did not know. He did not know at the time. She told him later. He did not know if he could believe. He trusted her word. He was a feminist man. But what did that make him in his own eyes?
I was wounded. I was angry. I was also unsure. I was angry he had not told me this before—angry I was not the first. He had asked himself all these questions before. And here he was again.
And yet when I read his description of what happened with this other woman, I saw it through his eyes. It did not bear the color of rape or the shape of assault. It was not what we are told rape is. It was wrong. But how much wrong could she claim?
How much wrong could I claim?
I told him what I had read. He was angry. He, too, felt violated. I thought his violation of me gave me immunity. We yelled and yelled ourselves hoarse. I threw things: keys, plates, a framed picture of us.
I left. I cried. I looked at myself. I did not know who I had become.
We did not talk.
Days later, I met him in the park by my house. We sat on opposite ends of the bench.
“This is my list of things for you to do. This is what you have to do to make this right,” I said.
He nodded as I read through the list so quickly my words slurred together. You have to tell people what happened you have to reach out to a local anti-assault organization to get help we can’t see each other you have to tell me when you are going to be at an event I want to see your son like we said whatever happens between us I want to make a schedule to pick him up I will wait outside.
He nodded through the entire list. He said yes. He said this makes sense. He said this is reasonable. He said I want to make this right. He said I am so sorry. He said you are right. He said I love you.
We both got up to leave. He walked me up the hill to my front gate. This is the last time I will see him like this, I thought. I felt panicked. Things were not fixed. I did not want things to be accountable right then. I just wanted to forget. I wanted to pretend.
He asked if he could give me a hug. In his arms, I only remembered hours of being there, of telling life stories, of laughing uncontrollably—of being safe.
“Will you come upstairs?” I asked.
He hesitated. I held my breath. I did not know which answer I wanted more from him.
“Yes…. Yes, of course I will.”
And that was the day I got pregnant.
We continued together, not knowing of the pregnancy, our relationship in stasis, our hearts in crisis. I did not want to let go. Swimming in a sea of pain, I clung to him. I wanted him to make it right. Neither of us knew what that meant.
I knew I was being torn apart by staying together. I knew space was the healthy thing, for both of us, the only path to growth.
I wanted him to be accountable. I told him he had to tell his friends what happened. I reached out to my friends, asked them to speak with him. Accountable was the word. I had heard it so much in radical activist communities—this is what we did. We did not call the police. We did not rip our communities apart. We held accountable those who had done serious harm. I did not know exactly what it meant. I wanted him to tell enough people, as if the telling could make our community fix the situation. I wanted a community accountability process, though I did not know exactly what that meant. I wanted him to go through the list and check it off. Most of all, at the end, I wanted to be healed. More than healed, I wanted all of this erased.
In a vegetarian Chinese restaurant in Center City, I sat across from Em, one of the friends I asked to speak to Dovid. I knew Em had done this process before. I was relieved when Em said they would be involved. I was off the hook. Someone else would know what to do. Someone else would make it right.
“I talked with him.” They took a bite of fried veggie dumplings. “He is back and forth. He says he did something wrong, but he doesn’t want to be called an assaulter. He doesn’t want to think about it as assault.”
I nodded. I knew this. I knew Em was one who believed me, supported me.
“He also said it could not be that bad, as you and him were still together and seeing each other all the time.” Em’s face was unreadable. I read into it disappointment.
My face grew hot. I knew I could not let go of him. I did not think I could find the words to explain the convolution of my situation—of my heart, my head. I wanted to be with him. I wanted him to be accountable. I also wanted him to be punished. I wanted to punish him. I wanted him to heal me. I wanted it fixed. I wanted everything, including him, to go away.
I evaded. “He’s trying to minimize what happened. He’s trying not to have to admit what he did.” True.
“I mean of course I see him,” I continued. “I go to pick up Zakai, and I see him. And I met to talk to him about this. And we’re working on a film project together.” True. And not true. None of these reasons explained me lying in his arms, in his bed, closing my eyes as he entered me, trying not to think about before—only thinking about before.
Em didn’t believe me. I was trying desperately to believe myself.
I did not tell any of my friends how much time we were spending together. I thought if I did, they would think I was lying. Lying about the jagged edges of me. Lying about the assault. That it was not as serious as I said. It did not shine the bruised colors we are told are violation anyway. I thought they would deny my pain, leave me alone with it while telling me it was nothing.
Dovid told a woman who was his friend what had happened. I pressed him afterwards, asked what she said in response. He hesitated. “She said it didn’t sound like that big of a deal to her. She said stuff like that happens all the time. She said you’re being dramatic.”
It rang in my head. It haunted me. Another woman, this woman who knew me, said it was not real. It haunted me because there was a part of me that agreed. This is not how it happens, the something inside me whispered. There was no dark alley; there was no knife. There was no stranger. There were no hours of pain and devastation.
My friend Bayla, the keeper of my heart and my secrets since the age of fifteen, said this was not true. She is a teacher of self-defense, she worked at an abortion clinic. She saw women every day surviving violations, of all kinds, taking back control of their bodies.
Assault happens on a spectrum, Bayla said. Assault can be done in the blink of an eye. Women make different decisions after. None of those decisions are wrong. This was not the first time this happened, she assured me. This is actually how it happens most of the time.
You are not alone.
As a feminist organizer, I knew this. I knew this about others. But I did not know it about me. It has taken years to know this about me: to allow myself to see the complexities of the situation; to see myself as a survivor and to lay claim to that word; to forgive myself for what I felt was weakness—the weakness of staying. Staying past the point of trying to fix it. asha bandele wrote in The Prisoner’s Wife, “And now, today, I know myself well enough to understand that there is a part of me who always wants to make what is ugly somehow beautiful.”
I stayed to make our relationship beautiful. To see him as beautiful. Most of all, to see myself as beautiful.
It has taken me years to see Dovid as more than a villain—more than someone who hurt me, violated me, and left without piecing me back together.
The truth is not simple.
Yet I needed to find the space to claim what I had gone through. I needed to be able to name it, because to name something is to know it.
It was not until I reread bandele’s memoir about meeting, falling in love with, and marrying a man in prison that I found a framework to allow my heart to rest. In The Prisoner’s Wife, bandele realizes she had been assaulted and sexually abused when she was younger; she had repressed those memories, packed them away like clothes outgrown in the attic. She had turned off the lights and shut the door.
I read and reread bandele’s exploration of herself as a wounded woman, as a strong woman. I heard faint knocking: something in my attic, tapping at the door. I did not know I had packed away childhood pains, violations so old they had yellowed and faded. Probing hands before my mouth knew it had the right to no. Eyes of authority that froze me, told me to lie still.
bandele and I unlocked our attic doors. Her book taught me that assault is a prison as well. Assault is about power, and about taking what is not given. This is power that continues after the actual act is finished, reasserted with every memory. There is a reason rape is a tactic in warfare. It is a threat.
There is a reason Dovid could not name what he did as assault. He did not want to see himself as someone who took without permission. He thought if he admitted this, it would erase his other identities. He would become nothing more than that. And I would become nothing more than victim. We were both denied healing. Only stolen power was left.
Prison is power: control of the individual, community, people, nation. It is a taking from our community and our spirits that which is not given. It is a threat to all of us.
I lost control of my body. It was a colonization of my flesh. In prison, people are nothing but bodies. My brother becomes nothing but a body. He is told when his body must get up, when his body will feed, when his body will exercise, and when his body will lie down.
And what of the bodies that live at the crossroads? What of those that have had so many foreign flags planted in their soil that they have lost count? The population of women in prison is mushrooming: up 646 percent in the last thirty years, says the Sentencing Project. Black women are the largest growing group of faces in the shadow of bars.
So many of them dwelled in prisons before they ever set foot in one.
Fifty percent of women in prison have extensive histories with sexual abuse before the walls. These are the stories on the other end of the spectrum, where no one would deny these violent, brutal violations as rape. They made me feel my violations were as miniscule or nonexistent in comparison.
And once they get to the gates, the violations do not stop. They increase. All people—men, women, trans—are assaulted. They are assaulted not just by other prisoners, but often by guards, especially women and trans prisoners. They are assaulted by authority—by the state.
In her book about women prisoners, Resistance Behind Bars, Victoria Law writes of “Gina,” a prisoner at Oregon’s Coffee Creek Correctional Facility. Gina worked in the kitchen. One day, the food coordinator ordered her to “drop her pants and bend over so that he could have sex with her. Scared, Gina complied.” The assaults continued every day. Gina did not say no. She did not feel she had the power to say no. Months away from her release date, a bad write-up could push it back so far she would not be able to see it. She could not say no.
Even more so than the assaults enacted sometimes by other prisoners and often by guards, Angela Davis tells us in her book Are Prisons Obsolete? that prisons themselves function as daily assault. “[This] exposes an everyday routine in women’s prisons that verges on sexual assault as much as it is taken for granted.” The very mechanisms prisons use to maintain power and control can be defined as sexual assault. Davis cites the example of the Brisbane-based organization Sisters Inside, who did an action at a national conference of corrections officers, where activists re-enacted a routine prison strip search on stage. The audience, who do this every day for their living, was utterly repulsed. “they must have realized… that ‘without the uniform, without the power of the state, [the strip search] would be sexual assault.’”
This is how the system maintains itself.
Assault is a prison where the physical act may only last one minute. Or an hour. Or many hours. Then you are to forget. If you cannot forget, you are to be silent. Admitting to being a survivor brings shame not on the perpetrator but the perpetrated.
In our society, those who assault are invisible. Men (and those of all genders unfortunately) on the street drift past. I wonder if they have scarred someone: slipped it in while someone was sleeping, pushed to turn a no to a yes, or took silence to be a yes. The first time I had sex was like this: with my first boyfriend, six years older than me. I had panted no for months, in response to his frenzied hands and even more frenzied “please.” That night I strung nos like pearls on a necklace—so many I became scared they would form a wall between us. So I did not say yes, I just stopped saying no. For him, that was enough. It hurt. I felt tingles of pleasure. I did not know what I was supposed to feel.
This is a typical story. I have told many women this. So many nod their heads in recognition. I loved him. He was good to me, for a time. This is how those things happen sometimes, unfortunately.
My first boyfriend left the next morning. We did not talk about the sex. He kissed me. He said see you tonight. I cleaned the stained sheets. Scrubbed them to remove the blood and the semen.
This is not a “real assault.” I would never call it rape. I did not know what to call it. We do not have words for this in our society. It is not the stories I have heard from every single woman I love in my life: stories not of silence but sobs and pleas to stop, for mercy. I know every time they hear someone make a joke about rape, see a movie with a gratuitous assault scene, hear how someone got “raped” at their job because they had so many taxes taken out, they are right back in the prison of sexual assault—bodies not their own, memories invaded.
I feel this too. I wonder sometimes whether I have the right to feel that pain, and to carry around that wound. Did I endure enough to claim this as mine? I cannot stand prison rape jokes, so acceptable in almost every social context. “Don’t drop the soap.” They remind me of the women I love, of myself face-down on an orange couch, and of the horrors Kakamia has suffered that I do not even know about, that he will never tell me.
I have to turn off pop culture in my head. I have to push away the jokes that trivialize this pain and the frames that question whose fault it is. Most of all, I have to battle the feeling of being weak, for my decisions and for my indecision. None of us—not a one—is weak. We are stronger than anyone could imagine. As asha bandele wrote, she fought not to “be defined by my experiences. I would be defined by what I chose to do with my experiences, if I was open and willing, and uncompromising and honest.”
What I have decided to do with my experiences is attempt to wedge open our understanding of assault, to see the ways that people (often women and trans folks) are violated every day in a male-dominated society, and that a single assault does not happen in isolation. It is not confined in that alleyway. It did not originate in that bed. It is the thousand acts every day, which many (often cisgender men) are not even aware of. It is this sea we have all learned to swim in. It is the polluted air we have learned to suck in. We do not even recognize it is there.
This is the definition of a rape culture, where those who are valued less by patriarchy—women and trans folks—are disposable tools to be used and to reinforce power. It serves to maintain the hierarchy that is the foundation of our society, where white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism are inextricably intertwined. In that way, every assault is state-sanctioned.
A joint statement by two abolition organizations, INCITE and Critical Resistance, spells this out clearly, calling for movements to “develop an analysis and strategies to end violence that do not isolate individual acts of violence (either committed by the state or individuals) from their larger contexts. These strategies must address how entire communities of all genders are affected in multiple ways by both state violence and interpersonal gender violence.”
The fact that so much of what I have been taught tells me that this is not mine to claim because I should have figured out a way to fix this—that if I had just been stronger I wouldn’t feel this way—is one of the mechanisms that keeps this system functioning. Claiming my experience, calling it wrong, a violation, is not only my right; it is a liberatory act.
I find more comfort and strength in the words of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi when I think of my assault than in most of the books on assault I have read. When asked by Black radical intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois for a message to the “twelve million people who are the grandchildren of slaves,” Gandhi replied, “Let not the twelve million Negroes be ashamed of the fact that they are the grandchildren of slaves. There is no dishonour in being slaves. There is dishonour in being slave-owners.”
The shame of any violation, personal or historical, lies with those who committed the violation, not with those who survived to heal and rebuild. And just like during slavery, every individual abuse, violation, and brutalization served to uphold, reinforce, and strengthen the larger systems of oppression.
This is the analysis needed, I believe—the framing to understand painful experience.
But the question remains: then what? In this society where all of us are taught that any bodies other than cisgender men are virtually worthless, how do we respond when someone’s actions reinforce that?
I have worked to use this experience to reinforce for myself the belief that people cannot be thrown away like used tissues. I was so angry at Dovid for so long. I was angry at myself. I tried to throw us both away.
But I believe in transformation, and therefore, for me, I have to believe in both of our abilities to change. This is where my beliefs become the most difficult to live, in my own skin. I do not believe prisons make us safer. I do not believe prison helps anyone come out better than they went in (if they come out better, they do so in spite of prison, not because of it).
I absolutely believe communities need to hold people who do harm accountable, while still holding them as humans who can change. Redemption cannot be unattainable if we are all to remain human.
We did try. I have to remember Dovid did try, while still holding him accountable for the original harm and the ways and times he failed to try.
He agreed he wanted to help. He wanted support. He wanted to be accountable to something other than him—at least at times.
We turned to two linked organizations in Philadelphia, one a group for survivors of assault, the other a group of mostly cisgender men working to hold perpetrators accountable, to make communities safer, and to not throw anyone away.
This is one of the hardest things to imagine when you think of a world without prisons. “What will we do with the rapists?” It is a valid question. And part of me wants to say no, not them. They don’t deserve redemption. They can rot.
But I cannot allow myself to believe this, because we would be throwing away so much of our community. The vast majority of assaults happen by someone the survivor knows. These people are in our communities, at our jobs, or sitting next to us in the pew at church. Our parents. Our partners. Ours. Redefining assault, claiming every violation that has happened to us for what it is, would implicate so many. They are absolutely culpable, and behavior has to be addressed and changed—but are they all irredeemable?
Dehumanizing those who do harm dehumanizes all of us, especially marginalized and oppressed communities. Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA) wrote, “Dehumanizing the aggressor undermines the process of accountability for the whole community. If we separate ourselves from the offenders by stigmatizing them then we fail to see how we contributed to conditions that allow violence to happen.”
And I absolutely must be clear that I do not speak for or to survivors of assault. I do not speak for them, because survivors are not monolithic. I also would not presume to speak to survivors in a way that scolds or dictates responses. There is no “right” way to feel in any assault, and I certainly cannot begin to imagine my own feelings if my situation had been different, if I had felt cold steel at my throat, felt blows on my body, or feared this pain every night.
Often the responsibility for maintaining perceived political integrity is shifted to the survivor in radical circles. What we do in response to trauma is scrutinized. Did you call the cops or not? Did you file a restraining order or not? Did you try to take it to court and get a conviction or not? For people who do not believe that police make us safer, we often end up policing other people’s survival strategies, rather than focusing on the gaps in the larger movements. We, as a movement, have not developed organized mechanisms to address harm done in communities outside of the criminal legal system. We have not prioritized keeping people, especially those most vulnerable in our communities, safe from harm, from gendered violence. It is so much easier for us to look at and confront state violence, rather than the ways we individually replicate that violence in our relationships.
While we all want our actions and our principles to be in alignment, we cannot abandon our collective responsibility and leave the onus on the shoulders of those who have survived, and are surviving harm.
Too often we are used as tool against one another, held up as the example of how we “should” feel, what we “should” do. I do not know what we should do, beyond starting with questions, not answers. We need questions that make us examine the deepest parts of our beliefs and ourselves.
* * *
Dovid reached out to the group in Philly working to hold perpetrators accountable. I was glad. Someone else would figure this out. Someone else knew what to do. It was no longer my burden.
But I did not join the survivors’ group. I was not ready to call myself a survivor, again didn’t know if I deserved it, had suffered enough to have “earned” it. I was also not ready to sit in a room of mostly white cisgender women, because that’s what they were. That’s who society so often tells us survivors are. In that space, my Black radical womanness would be bright as a bullseye.
I was not ready to let the larger community know what I “let” happen to me. I was not even sure what to call it. I knew I did not want to walk into a political event, into a room full of knowing eyes.
And I was not ready to disengage from Dovid, to sit alone with myself. I was not ready to open the attic door.
It is so much easier to imagine a new world than to go about the painful work of constructing it out of our bones and hearts. I believed and still believe in community accountability processes for people who do harm to a community. I still believe it was right for me to try to address this in a way that honored my principles.
But theory is not practice. Practice is messy, like sheets stained with blood and semen and no answers to contradictory questions. These organizations understood this situation. They knew there was a spectrum of assault. They did not think I was overreacting. They had a strong analysis about holding perpetrators accountable. They truly wanted to support me as the survivor.
But then human realities take over. I wanted confidentiality. Dovid told the organizer he was working with my name. This was a no-no, but the organizer had not told Dovid that before they started talking. A small oversight. A pebble in the ocean, but it created a tsunami in my life.
They created an accountability plan together: counseling; ongoing sessions between Dovid, the organizer, and people in our community; and telling those we knew jointly about the violation, without minimizing it. No more “she’s overreacting” ringing in my ears. The plan was good. The plan might have worked. I had input into it. It satisfied my need for accountability. I was on a merry-go-round of emotions. On the days I was being the best me, I wanted Dovid to change and to rectify. I wanted both of us to move forward better people than we were at that moment. On my worst days, I wanted him shunned, punished, and ostracized. I wanted him to hurt for a long time. The accountability plan reminded me of my best self’s intentions, when I could not see through the pain. Looking back now, I do not blame myself, as I did at the time, for perceived weakness. I see what I was going through was absolutely and completely understandable and natural: a multitude of feelings, needs, and desires that raced through my injured heart. All of them were true; there were no lies. This was me, in many ways, at my most human. Transformative justice organizer Kiyomi Fujikawa talks about the ways we don’t allow for humanity in accountability processes. We often expect people to be their best selves a hundred percent of the time under the worst possible conditions. That is not transformative, that is not sustainable and it absolutely does not set people up to be able to complete this process.
And this is why I needed a community around me to hold the course towards a shared vision of accountability when the tumultuous seas inside me cast me about—a community to remind me of the visions of justice I held sacred, when I, in my pain, was not able to see them.
But then the organizer working with Dovid on the accountability plan left for three months. No prior warning. No backup point of contact. In fact, no one from the organization returned Dovid’s calls. The plan crumbled, a sandcastle in high tide.
In the meantime, I had found out I was pregnant. And when I realized it happened that first night of weakness, I was filled with shame. I felt I was being punished for not being stronger, for not adhering to the boundaries I set.
This was not my first abortion. I had had a surgical procedure previously. It was immensely painful: the sound of suction, a white doctor who looked through me while patting my leg, saying patronizingly, “Good girl.”
Despite the conditions surrounding it, I knew that first abortion had been the right decision. While my partner at the time was very sweet, neither of us was prepared on any level to be a parent.
But this time it was different. I was older, financially stable with a regular job. And my heart yearned to have that child, lick the sweet of a little brown sugar to camouflage the taste of blood I was having to swallow, to paraphrase the poet Staceyann Chin. If I couldn’t have the family I had dreamed of with Dovid, perhaps this would be the beginning of my replacement.
But when my friend Bayla asked the hardest question I’ve ever had to answer—“Do you think this would be healthy for you, for a child?” —I had to answer no. I knew what was necessary.
It has taken years for me to work through my feelings around the abortion, which are so intimately connected to the assault. Though I have done work around reproductive justice for over a decade, I did not often speak about my assault or my abortions, the two most gendered, personal-as-political issues I carry with me. They are the locales where I struggle to see the larger systems of oppression at work. This is how the state invisibilizes its role in inequalities: we (especially those who are gender oppressed in this society) are encouraged to think of it as our “personal” concern, and often a personal failing or stain that is ours alone to carry. In my work organizing against prisons, against militarism, against police violence, and for political prisoners, the role of the state in perpetuating and maintaining oppression is clearer—though of course the blame for mass incarceration is shifted to individuals, pathologizing people and communities.
Part of what allowed me to begin to viscerally explore, claim, and connect my assault and abortions to broader issues of justice was the abolitionist framing offered by many women and trans folks of color: “By constantly shifting the center to communities that face intersecting forms of oppression, we gain a more comprehensive view on the strategies needed to end all forms of violence,” says the introduction to INCITE’s Color of Violence anthology. “[We] better understand how various forms of intersecting oppressions contribute to the creation of a violent world, and… devise the strategies necessary to end violence.”
By shifting the way we organize and the way we envision the world from separate social issues to seeing them all woven together, and by centering folks like LGBTQ folks of color, we see the ways these systems are interlocking and interdependent. If our movements and our communities are not addressing the very real ways oppression is enacted upon individuals’ bodies, we can never hope to fundamentally transform the current system.
* * *
Months later, Dovid and I no longer spoke. He moved to New York. I had begun moving forward. There was a miscommunication in the survivor’s group. I was contacted by an organizer with them. She had heard I wanted to join them, and that I had reached out. I reared back. This was my biggest fear. Who else had they told? Who else would look at me with knowing eyes? With pity, disgust, disbelief, anger, judgment? I felt naked in a hailstorm.
I called and emailed them, enraged, taking this as the opportunity to vent my pain at the failed accountability process. My pain at myself for staying, for not being the woman I thought I should be. I felt this validated my fears that my situation was not real, that I did not deserve support, and that I would not get support.
No one from the organization called back.
This is not the only way this process can go. I have heard many stories of healing, of closure, of communities and individuals made whole again. I have had the opportunity to work with organizations like CARA and others who show how the process should truly be undertaken. I have seen communities taking responsibility for supporting survivors while creating avenues to hold perpetrators accountable.
However, it is incredibly important to recognize there are no magic solutions. There are no perfect endings in something like this. And I think our expectations in this quick-fix, solution-oriented society are to blame. While I have seen processes where people have been held accountable, I have not seen processes where anyone could be described as “happy” at the conclusion of it. I have seen individuals and communities achieve closure, which is something wholly different. I originally thought that how you judged a successful accountability process was if everyone was healed at the end of it. But I now believe that is not something that happens in the process. A “successful” accountability process is one in which the person who has done harm takes responsibility, makes amends as possible, and sets the foundation for life-long changes in their behavior, mentality, and actions. A “successful” accountability process is one where the person who has been harmed feels they are able to move forward from this—that enough poison has been sucked out so that they can heal—eventually. It is not the “happy ending” we have all been taught to expect. It is not, in reality, even an ending, for the successful completion of whatever requirements made for the person who has done harm is just the beginning; everyone involved, including the community, will have to revisit this. Rather than a neat, linear progession towards healing, at best, it is a spiral. We continue moving upwards, but we will revisit the same place over and over again, hopefully each time moving a little closer to healing and closure.
Fujikawa, on a panel at the 2015 INCITE Color of Violence conference, talked about the disconnect between our ideas of community accountability processes, and the lived reality:
I feel like we have sort of pitched this image of community accountability and transformative justice as this really sparkling package that you’re supposed to check out… [We tell survivors], “Well, we have this awesome thing called community accountability and it’s going to be great!” And then survivors open up that box and it is not as pretty as they thought it was going to be. And we’re doing a disservice to survivors by doing that.
And none of this is to be taken as an excuse for doing nothing or for abandoning those who are most vulnerable and marginalized, within already-oppressed communities, to deal with the replication of state violence enacted through familiar, intimate hands.
* * *
My visit with my brother on the day I was bleeding out in a prison visiting room was hours long, but it lasts ten minutes in my memory.
Before the visit, I did not tell Kakamia of the tumultuous waters Dovid and I navigated. I did not tell him my boat capsized, that there were days I did not think my head would break water, or that there were days I wished it wouldn’t.
When I see incarcerated loved ones, I imagine the horrors they live every day. It is not just brutality and violence—those are extreme daily manifestations. I imagine it is the loss that must weigh the most. It is a loss of freedom: taking a walk when you want, going to the store to pick up food and cooking a meal, calling up a friend, going over to your grandmother’s for an unexpected visit.
I want to bring light and fresh air with me when I come into a visiting room, or when my mail gets dropped on their bunk. I want, most of all, to bring a piece of hope with me—to stem any extra pain with my hands.
They’ve seen enough ugliness for one day.
But Kakamia knows me too well. Though we do not share the same blood, we share the same face. He reads my expressions as he does his own.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, after an hour of our visit.
I don’t remember what I said. I know it did not satisfy him. In the end, I told him.
I remember his eyes on my face, his hands on mine, his voice.
“Why? Why?”
I thought he was asking why I got the abortion. I hung my head.
He lifted my chin. “Why didn’t you tell me? That’s what big brothers are for. Why didn’t you tell me?”
He wrapped me up tight in his arms, knowing why all too well, loving and hating me for trying to protect him, knowing he couldn’t protect me.
I don’t know if he knew how much him holding me in his arms and rocking me meant to me.
I felt the safest I had felt in so long; my brother’s arms pushed back the bars of all prisons, even if just for a moment.
* * *
Any movements for justice where we do not see the ways that larger societal oppression is replicated by individuals we know and even sometimes love—where we do not create mechanisms to address serious harm that is done within our communities—achieves no real justice at all. Instead, we just reproduce the brutality of the larger system.
This offers us frameworks and no clear answers. Because even if the accountability process happens, even if the perpetrator is held accountable and meets every requirement, completing the entire plan, then what? This is the question that plagues communities of justice who go this route. How do we accept perpetrators of assault back into our communities? And yet that is the very purpose of the entire accountability process: to heal the individuals, to heal the community—to make whole. Often, this is the hardest part. How can people in our communities—especially other survivors—feel safe around people like this? I have seen too many processes crumble here, where the perpetrator who has completed everything is shunned, often through social media, where the ability to have nuanced, heart-centered conversations is reduced to an infinitesimal possibility. We become caught. How do those of us who are marginalized—women, trans folks, queer folks, youth, people of color and most especially those who sit at the intersections of identity and oppression—balance our desire to keep safe, honored, and centered with our belief in systems outside of police, outside of prisons, outside of destroying those who have hurt and harmed?
I do not have any answers to offer. I wish I did. I only know that we must ask these questions, and not settle for easy, simplistic answers. We must not forget, ever. We must not hide from intimate violence, close our eyes and just hope it will go away. And we must hold fast to transformation. We have to believe transformation is possible, or our accountability processes, and our larger visions of a new world, are doomed before they begin.
I have been indelibly changed by my assault, and by the response of my community afterwards. I am less idealistic. I am less trusting. But I believe more firmly than ever in the ability to redeem and to change—to fundamentally transform. I believe that through my own process, it has happened for me. I truly hope it has happened for Dovid as well. And I want with all my heart to be part of a community able to embody this transformation. Most of all, I know if I want a world free of sexual assault, outside of the criminal justice system—if I want a community built infused with determination, dedication, forethought, accountability, understanding, and care—no one will build it for me. I have to submerge myself in the messy, sometimes painful, and hopefully beautiful process, trusting the waves of love will bring me back to shore.