When time travel isn’t possible, make a tiny roar

Keema Waterfield

A guest post from Keema Waterfield:

Recently Hillary Clinton offered a personal farewell to The Toast, a website that, among other things, offered a safe haven for women-folk writing and talking about the intersection of literature and women-folk related things (e.g. everything). In her toast to The Toast, Mrs. Clinton encouraged forlorn writers, readers, and contributors mourning its loss to continue to, “look forward and consider how you might make your voice heard in whatever arenas matter most to you… And if the space you’re in doesn’t have room for your voice, don’t be afraid to carve out a space of your own.”

Can I tell you something? Mrs. Clinton’s words fell on me like an ice bath during a climate-change induced mid-summer heatwave.

As a new mother, I sometimes lie awake at night overwhelmed by the odds my daughter faces in a country that still struggles to do justice by its most vulnerable. It happens all the time: victims of spousal abuse, rape, gun violence, childhood trauma and gender nonconformity and inequality, all are regularly treated like mewling kittens and swept under the rug by a culture that is discomfited by their cries. The earnest are so uncomfortable to behold.

A few special corners of the Internet make a space for those voices, and The Toast was one of them. The Toast welcomed writers of the irreverent, the raucous, the thought-provoking, and the visionary. It carved out a space for our manifold voice to manifest. Now The Toast is gone and despair seems too small a word for the loss.

It is easy to feel voiceless in that dark, lonely place under the rug, particularly when you are not rich or famous and you don’t have a Twitter following in the thousands. But I keep thinking of Mrs. Clinton’s urging: “Speak your opinion more fervently in your classes if you’re a student, or at meetings in your workplace. Proudly take credit for your ideas. Have confidence in the value of your contributions.”

When the Senate failed to make even the most basic gun reform after the Orlando shootings I huddled in bed with my five-month-old daughter for days before Tweeting:

When I was 3 a man held a gun to my head with his pants around his ankles. He was a known felon. #EnoughIsEnough #DoneWithGuns #EndGunViolence

For an hour after I posted that message my heart raced. I alternated between rolling up in a blanket, shaking, and sitting with my face pressed to the window fan. I hovered anxiously over the toilet, waiting to vomit. Then I deleted the tweet and curled up around my sleeping baby, exhausted, but magically cured of my post traumatic flu. I was relieved that I’d saved myself the humiliation of sharing that horrible, bald, truth so…truthfully.

I don’t aspire to serve as the face or voice of a cause, particularly not a heartbreaking and dark one like childhood sexual trauma and gun violence. And I don’t have enough of a following on social media to make taking a stand worth the anxiety, right? I’ve written a memoir that touches on my experience and, recently, my lyrical essay “You Will Find Me in the Starred Sky” appeared in Brevity. It is enough, I think, to have addressed it in a literary format, with context.

Still, after I deleted the message I struggled with the urge to speak up, to say something, all through the following day. Too rapey, I thought. Too raw. Too real. Too political. I don’t want to be a “victim”. It is exhausting. It is traumatic. In real life I am not all day, every day, a victim. I don’t want to center myself inside that heavy rhetoric forevermore.

I am also dead tired of the silencing and marginalization of victims. I worry that every silence increases the cultural pressure of repression by tacitly accepting that it is agreeable to be silent.

In her 2011 Rumpus essay “The Careless Language of Sexual Violence,” Roxane Gay responded to a report on the gang rape of an eleven-year-old girl that used language sympathetic toward 18 rapists and one distraught town, but barely touched on the victim. Because the truth is, real victims are hard to look at. We are more comfortable when their edges are blurred, softened, dramatized. Artistic license makes violence palatable.

“I am troubled by how we have allowed intellectual distance between violence and the representation of violence,” Gay wrote. She suggested that we find new ways of rewriting rape that, “restore the actual violence to these crimes and that make it impossible for men to be excused for committing atrocities.” That’s a hard one too. Take away the crush-worthy investigators and their personal stories from Law and Order: SVU and you have an unbearably painful show about gross violence.

The struggle is real: I don’t want to be a victim. I am a victim.

We badly need to rewrite the language of atrocity, repression, race, gender, trauma and yes, even hope and happiness, to look on these experiences honestly. Simply. Directly. Unflinchingly.

My silence won’t change the fact that when anyone dies at gunpoint, I am a victim again. When rape goes apologetically unpunished, I am a victim again. I fear my silence would mean I’ve accepted that those hurts are agreeable.

I do not accept that those hurts are agreeable. I’ve been silenced enough by the cultural expectation of not making other people uncomfortable with my trauma. Who do I hurt if I speak up when the need arises? Who do I help? What would happen if everyone quit keeping the peace in favor of saying out loud this is the violence you prefer not to see happening in your midst to your most vulnerable. You must not look away.

The night after I deleted that first Tweet, the sit-in on the Senate House floor turned into a slumber party and I couldn’t be silent anymore. I Tweeted again:

At 3 y/o a man held a gun to my head to keep me in line. He was a known felon. #EnoughIsEnough #DoneWithGuns #EndGunViolence #NoBillNoBreak

I couldn’t stay silent. I regret that I let my fear of being too rapey stop me from being more direct. I wish I could have gone forward in time to read this essay to help myself through the process. But if that were possible then time travel would be possible, and I wouldn’t waste time writing about being a victim now, I’d go back and make sure that particular trauma never landed me in this quagmire in the first place.

At the time, though, it felt big enough. If two people read it, two people think about it. And that is two more than before. It is a small space I may have carved out, but it’s mine. What’s yours?

The end of The Toast may mean one less forum for sharing our complex and manifold voice, but it doesn’t leave us voiceless. We can carry on the tradition, writers, perhaps even more bravely. Why save our truths for our memoirs or our deathbed confessions? With so many mediums at our fingertips we can continue to carve out space for our voices every single day. We can climb on out from under the rug together and make a tiny roar.

One thousand #tinyroars can’t be silenced.

___

Keema Waterfield was born in a trailer in Anchorage, Alaska the year John Lennon was shot, Smallpox was officially eradicated, and the first Iran-Iraq War began. Her work has been published in Brevity, Pithead Chapel, Redivider, The Manifest Station, Understory, and Mason’s Road. She received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Montana and is currently at work on a memoir recounting her childhood adventures performing alongside a revolving cast of folk-hippies on the Southeast Alaska folk festival circuit. She can be reached at keema.waterfield@gmail.com or @keemasaurusrex.