Rape - Carolyn Gage

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Published on

January 31, 2021

The Walls of Silence: A Survivor's Museum

Child Abuse Incest Rape

About 35 years ago, I got the idea of building a museum to commemorate and honor women who are victims of rape. I was inspired at the time by the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. I eventually published "The Women's Rape Museum" as a blog on this site.

Because of this blog, two architecture students from the University of San Carlos in the Phillippines reached out to me, asking me to be a consultant on their thesis project, which was to design a museum for survivors of sexual violence. The two students were Allen Celestino and Fairyssa Biana Canama... and they did an incredible job with their project, titled "Walls of Silence: A Survivor's Museum." It was designed for a site in Cebu City, but it could and should serve as a model for similar museums in any city.

Celestino and Canama studied a range of Holocaust and war memorial museums, and came up with a design that would take visitors on a healing journey through the different stage of assimilating the trauma of rape. To aid in the presentation of their thesis, they made a beautiful short video that takes the viewer on a graphic tourof the various passages and chambers of this architectural journey.

Their video journey is only 3.5 minutes long... and well worth the viewing! They have broken down the chaotic and inchoate process of healing from post-rape trauma, helping the victim access an experience that too often is an internal and unassimilated secret.

The genius of their project is that this is also a healing and integrating experience for the friends and families of survivors, who often have no idea what their loved one is going through. In this museum experience, they can literally accompany them through these externalized stages, offering enormous opportunity for dialogue and empathy.

For those who are interested in the process behind their choices, their half-hour thesis presentation is fascinating and also available online. (It includes the shorter video of the museum tour.) Both Celestino and Canama come out as survivors in their video, and their design process reflects their constant engagement with their own experiences.

I encourage survivors and those who love us to take the short tour of Walls of Silence, and then the longer tour of the thesis presentation. I encourage all of us begin to think more deeply about the needs of survivors in our culture and ways to bring this tangible, visible proof of caring to our communities.

Before the visitor begins the descent into the survivor's journey, they pass through the exhibit of Rape Myths, to clear their thinking of popular and oppressive misconceptions.

The post-trauma journey begins...

The Descent to Darkness

This is the Path of the Silenced.

In the early stages of recovery, the survivor often masks their pain and adopts an attitude of silence about their experience.

The Dome of Inner Thoughts... again, giving voice to the shame and self-doubt.

Entering the Hall of Judgement

In the Hall of Judgement

The Debriefing Room... for processing these earlier passages.

The Maze of Decisions as the trauma begins to become unfrozen.

In the Hall of Empowerment, the visitor has an opportunity to ritually dispose of artifacts associated with the trauma.

Leaving the fire and entering the second part of the Hall of Empowerment

Giant statues of healed survivors in the Hall of Empowerment
Published on

November 2, 2020

Green Grow the Lilacs and Oklahoma!: The Appropriation of Native Perspective

Rape Reviews Women And Theatre

In the annals of theatre history, Green Grow the Lilacs by Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs is mostly known as the play upon which the blockbuster Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! Is based.

That’s ironic, because the musical actually subverts the radical paradigm that Riggs has so beautifully crafted. Perhaps that kind of dramaturgical subversion is inevitable any time a Native writer’s work is adapted for mainstream commercial purposes. Also, the American musical is probably not the best vehicle for exploring the moral ambiguities and contradictions that are intrinsic to Riggs’ depiction of frontier life in what he specifically designates as “Indian Territory”—in other words, not the state of Oklahoma. Finally, Riggs is not only writing about colonization of Indian Territory, but also about colonization into heteropatriarchal values through a particular community ritual called "shivaree." The musical completely subverts the nature of that ritual and its pivotal role in Green Grow the Lilacs.

But first, let's look at the appropriation of Indian Territory:

What exactly was Indian Territory in 1900, the year the play takes place? It was, according to the Encyclopedia Brittanica:

"…originally ‘all of that part of the United States west of the Mississippi, and not within the States of Missouri and Louisiana, or the Territory of Arkansas.’ Never an organized territory, it was soon restricted to the present state of Oklahoma, excepting the panhandle and Greer county. The Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, Cherokee, and Chickasaw tribes were forcibly moved to this area between 1830 and 1843, and an act of June 30, 1834, set aside the land as Indian country (later known as Indian Territory)… In 1866 the western half of Indian Territory was ceded to the United States, which opened part of it to white settlers in 1889. This portion became the Territory of Oklahoma in 1890 and eventually encompassed all the lands ceded in 1866. The two territories were united and admitted to the Union as the state of Oklahoma in 1907."

Yes, Indian Territory is on the brink of statehood in 1900, when the play opens, but Riggs makes clear this is not something about which the prairie folks are enthusiastic. Here is Aunt Eller’s speech to her neighbors from the end of the play: “Why, the way you’re sidin’ with the federal marshall, you’d think us people out here lived in the United States! It’s jist a furrin country to me. And you supportin’ it! Jist dirty ole furriners, every last one of you!”

And her neighbors are quick to respond: “My pappy and mammy was both borned in Indian Territory! Why I’m jist plumb full of Indian blood myself.” “Me, too! And I c’n prove it!”

In most productions, the characters of the play are presumed to be settlers, but Riggs tells us in the dialogue that they are, in fact, “full of Indian blood” and proud of it.

So... on to the issue of the shivaree, a traditional frontier ritual involving males in the community kidnapping, harassing, and terrorizing newlyweds on their wedding night.

The shivaree as depicted in Oklahoma! has become sanitized and civilized, so that it is little more than an extension of the wedding party… kind of like when the bridesmaids and groomsmen sneak off to tie old shoes onto the back of the newlyweds’ car. The musical has transferred the scene from the dead of night to broad daylight. Shivarees are traditionally done in the dark. In the musical, just after the ceremony, the bride tosses her flowers over her shoulder, and then exits to change into her traveling clothes. The groom leaves to pack, and the men announce that they plan to have a shivaree. There is a vaudevillian interlude featuring a henpecked husband, and then the men return with pots and pans, making a racket. As the bride and groom exit for their travels, the men hoist the groom amiably on their shoulders… but whatever good-natured hazing they have planned is interrupted by the arrival of Judd Fry, the villain of the piece. Wielding a knife, Judd goes to attack the groom and a fight ensues that ends in Fry’s death. The shivaree has been reduced to a noisy, fraternal, daytime bon voyage party for the newlyweds.

Th shivaree in Riggs play is something completely different. It is a terrifying artifact of rape culture, and it serves to traumatize and permanently alter both protagonists in ways that are resonant with the appropriation of Indian Territory. To understand its dramaturgical significance, it’s important to look at the origins of the custom:

“Charivari” dates all the way to medieval and early modern Europe, where it was a ritual used to punish members of a community who failed to conform to social norms, especially sexual norms. Targets of the charivari might include a widow who remarried, a wife who assaulted her husband, or a couple who failed to have children. In France, where the term originated, teenaged boys and unmarried men traditionally led the ritual, parading through the streets, shouting mocking insults, beating on pots and pans, and threatening violence. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, these males would also attack local brothels during Lent. If the victim paid his or her tormentors off with money or wine, the charivari might end without these threats being carried out.

Apparently, until two hundred years ago, most Europeans thought the charivari was a legitimate and effective practice for curbing social deviance. It allowed for a public venting of outrage, with the opportunity for a “peaceful” resolution of a potentially explosive situation. In other words, it served as a kind of communal vent for blowing off steam… an exorcism of deviance. The victims were shamed, but then reintegrated into the community.

Here’s the thing: It’s actually a rape culture ritual empowering young males to assert their primacy and dominance in the community, and especially with regards to widows who dare to remarry, women who most likely were just attempting to defend themselves in abusive marriages where their husbands had legal rights to rape and batter, married women attempting to salvage some degree of bodily autonomy and/or freedom from compulsory serial pregnancy by practicing birth control or abstinence, and women who were prostituted. The historical roots of the 19th century Midwest shivaree were not in a playful hazing of newlyweds, but in a sanctioned, violent policing by gangs of young men over women who, in their eyes, were not sufficiently sexually subordinate.

Even when church and secular authorities attempted to outlaw charivari, local authorities were reluctant to prosecute these gangs of young men. Possibly, they feared reprisals against their persons or their properties, as coming between young men and what they perceive as their sexual prerogatives can be dangerous. Not surprisingly, when gang rape or other forms of violent assault occurred within the context of a charivari, the sentencing would be considerably lighter than under other circumstances.

But by the mid-1600’s, some victims began to push back, lodging formal complaints against the practice. Finally, by the 1700’s, the practice began to decline—first in the cities and eventually in rural areas.

In Green Grow the Lilacs, Riggs is writing about shivaree as practiced in 1900 in Indian Territory. It’s probable that he knew people who had experienced it. In fact, in 1900, Riggs would have been two years old, and his grandparents—if not his parents—may have been witnesses, victims, and/or participants to the kind of shivaree depicted in the play.

Unwelcome statehood looms over Indian Territory in Riggs’ play, as the final stage of a relentless and brutal colonization of the West. The shivaree looms over the protagonists of the play as a final and brutal stage of initiation into their expected gender roles in patriarchal rape culture.

Significantly, the shivaree scene opens at night. It opens as the newlyweds are attempting to sneak back into the farmhouse. Expressing the hope that nobody knows they have gotten married, they are desperate to avoid a shivaree. Laurey, the fearful bride, asks, “… if they ketch us, whut’ll happen? Will it be bad?” Her anxious groom responds, “You know about shivorees, honey. They get purdy rough.” He then assures her that they have outsmarted their would-be tormentors, but as they exit the stage, the gang of men enter in excited anticipation of capturing their prey. Their comments reflect their envy of Curly for having scored a bride who comes with “grazin and timber and plowed land,” as well as physical appeal. Their prurient excitement mounts as they note a light coming on in the bedroom, the lace curtains blowing, and the shadows passing in front of the window. As the men attempt to scale the walls of the house with a ladder, a drunken farmer appears and salaciously shouts, “No time to wait now. Time to git goin’. See that there bride a-glimmerin’ there in her white! Waitin’ fer you. Been standin’ there with her hair down her back and her lips a-movin’. Git next to her, brother! Gonna be high ole times, gonna be Jesus into yer heart!”

The men drag the groom Curly from the house. He is angry and yelling at the men to leave his wife alone. They agree to stop manhandling her as they bring her in. Laurey enters, “pale and shaken” in a nightgown with her hair down.

The men have leaned a ladder up the side of a haystack and they force Laurey to mount it. Then they force Curly to climb up after her, amid lascivious catcalls. When both are at the top, they pull the ladder down. The men have urged the bride to “Make out it’s a bed, why don’t you!” They begin coaching the couple to kiss and for Curly to bite her shoulder and “eat her alive.” As the men’s “orgy of delight” (Riggs' description) increases in its frenzy, one of the men calls out “Ain’t no right to be in no nightgown!” Another man taunts the bride, “How’s it feel to be married, Laurey, sugar, all safe and proper, to sich a fine purty man with curly hair and a dimple on his chin! Whee! Got you whur I want you—” The men begin to toss straw babies up to the top of the haystack, counting them out as they mock the couple.

Suddenly Curly cries out that the haystack is on fire. He begs for the ladder to be replaced, but the men ignore him as Jeeter (the Judd Fry character in Oklahoma!) enters with a torch. Curly jumps down and a fight ensues. Laurey climbs down from the haystack in time to witness the death agony of Jeeter. The scene ends with Laurey in shock, repeating “He laid there in the stubble, so quiet, th’ his eyes open, and his eyeballs white and starin’! He laid there in the stubble—th’ his eyes open—!

The shivaree is not gratuitous violence. It is the pivot of the play, in which Riggs has initially depicted the community as wholesome and even puritanical, counterposed against Jeeter’s solitary indulgence in pornography. But with the shivaree scene, the black-and-white moral world of the play is turned inside out. Under cover of darkness, the upstanding citizens of the town transform themselves into rapists and terrorists. What is Riggs telling us here? And how does it fit with the context of an indigenous territory about to become annexed as a state?

In the subsequent scene, three days later, Curly is in jail awaiting a form of prairie justice that may or may not honor his plea of self-defense. Laurey, sleepless, has been hiding in her room since the shivaree. She emerges in the lamplight, “looking very pale and changed, years older, a woman now.” Her speech indicates that she is distracted and dissociated, dwelling on the events of the shivaree:

When her aunt attempts to comfort her, Laurey insists that she can never forget what she’s seen: “Over and over! The way the men done. The things they said. Oh—why’d it have to be that-away!”

Finally, Aunt Eller admits the futility of attempting to forget. This is the pivotal speech of the play: “They’s things you cain’t get rid of—lots of things. Not if you live to be a hundred. You got to learn. You got to look at all the good on one side and all the bad on the other, and say ‘Well, all right, then!’ to both of ‘em.”

And with that, and a few more speeches about how hard a woman’s life is, Laurey admits she’s been “sich a baby” and becomes, what the playwright intends us to understand as an adult woman. Here is her transformative speech:

“I’ve thought about that awful night, too, until I thought I’d go crazy… Looked at it time and again, heared it—ringin’ in my ears! Cried about it, cried about everything! A plumb baby! And I’ve tried to figure out how it would be if sump’n did happen to you. Didn’t know how I could stand it. That was the worst! And nen, I tried to figger out how I could go on. Oh, I’ve went th’ough it all...from the start. Now I feel shore of sump’n, anyway—I’ll be growed up—like everybody else. I’ll put up with everything now. You don’t need to worry about me no more.”

Laurey has accepted her annexation into the role of wife and mother. She will forget what she has experienced at the hands of the town’s citizens. She will put up with everything now.

Riggs was a gay Cherokee playwright, born in Indian Territory in 1899. He was a disappointment to his father, a banker and a rancher. Photographs of Riggs show him to be a man of slight build, something of an “egghead” with his glasses and premature balding. What was his experience with the hypermasculinity and heteronormativity of the West? Did he experience hazing and bullying as a rite of passage? Did he learn to “stand it” in order to become an adult? Is he telling us something about the survival of his people, as each new generation has had to face a heritage of ongoing violence, denigration, and theft?

The musical adaptation has appropriated Riggs’ deeply disturbing play in order to generate a post-war celebration of America, and especially of American expansionism. (Hawaii and Alaska were still territories when the musical opened.) Male violence, which Riggs characterizes as central to the enforcement of "family values," is relegated to the perverted outsider (Jeeter), who can be easily exorcized. In fact, Oklahoma! tells a colonizer's fanciful story--personal and politcal.

Green Grow the Lilacs is an Indian play, and its significance far outweighs its role as appropriated source material for Oklahoma! The play stands on its own merits and occupies a critical place in Native American drama, documenting a pivotal time in history. Riggs' treatment of the shivaree as a paradigm for colonization/annexation is still ahead of its time.
Published on

July 4, 2020

The Ladies' Room: A Complicated Conversation

Civil Rights Lesbian Feminism Rape Women And Theatre

From the Uppity Theater Company's production of The Ladies' Room

The bathroom has been a site of "gender anxiety" historically, as well as a battlefield, and, although it is tempting to write this off to ignorance about gender and fanatical, knee-jerk policing of the "gender binary," the issue goes deeper than this.

Rapists do choose public bathrooms as sites of sexual predation, and the presence of men in traditionally female spaces is often dangerous. On the other hand, there is a biological and cultural gender continuum among humans, and a gender binary is oppressive and dangerous for people who are not easily identified, or who do not identify, as male or female. Transgender women and masculine women are harassed and humiliated when we attempt to use public facilities. What is the "politically correct" attitude toward gender presentation when the ability to identify a stranger's biological sex in an isolated environment can be a question of life or death? What happens when queer theory butts up against the intensely polarized reality of male violence against women?

These were the questions on my mind when I wrote The Ladies' Room, a six-minute play about a bathroom confrontation. The play opens in a ladies' room at a shopping mall. A woman has just gone to report to the security guard that there is a man in the bathroom. The "man" is actually Rae, a teenage, lesbian butch. Angry and humiliated in front of her partner, Rae is hurling taunts and insults directed toward the woman complainant. Her teen girlfriend, Nicole, is uncomfortable about the dynamic, and the two begin to argue.

When Nicole expresses concern that public bathrooms are the third most common public site for sexual assault, Rae ridicules her for buying into an urban myth. As Nicole defends herself, it becomes apparent that she has been a victim of a stranger rape in a public space. Rae is emotionally overwhelmed by this information. At this point, her accuser is seen returning with the security guard, and Rae has to make a decision about how to respond.

Responses to the play have been strong and personal, especially by women who experience frequent challenges about their sexual identity. In my play, Rae chooses not to run away at the end, but to go out to meet the security guard and voluntarily offer her gender credentials in the form of her driver's license. Several women took exception to that ending, feeling that Rae was enabling of her own oppression in making that gesture. One of my critics, who has experienced humiliating official pat-downs in airport bathrooms, expressed the belief that the women who challenge her appearance are not concerned about rape, but are just trying to impose their class-based sense of a "gender dress code."

Another masculine woman, who actually lived a passing life as a man for several years, took a different approach. She was a victim of a gang rape, and she told me that when she is confronted in bathrooms, she draws attention to the fact that she has breasts and is a woman, and then she thanks her accuser for her vigilance. This woman identifies as a radical feminist, and, for her, it is a priority not to shame her confronters or in any way, punish them, or make them uncomfortable for their vigilance about the possibility of a man being in a woman's space.

The two actors who performed the play this summer at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival shared their own recent experience with unisex bathrooms. They had attended a large conference for queer-identified youth, and one of the first things the attendees did was to convert all of the bathrooms on their hotel floor to "gender-free." The actors commented that women using these bathrooms were constantly exposed to the sight of men's genitals, as the men were using the urinals and also leaving the doors open to the stalls when they used them. The women reported their feelings of shock and discomfort, noting that it would not have been safe for them to express these responses in the context of the conference, which was focused on the safety of trans youth.

The controversial ending of The Ladies' Room was not intended to represent a solution. In the play, the character makes the gesture as an attempt to remedy her perceived insensitivity to her partner's rape history. The play is designed to initiate dialogue between feminists and genderqueer allies.

[Originally published in On the Issues: The Progressive Woman's Magazine, August 18, 2009.]
Published on

July 4, 2020

Perpetrating Performance: The Depictions of Survivors of Sexual Abuse on the Stage

Child Abuse Incest Lesbian Feminism Rape Women And Theatre

I have a friend named Elliott, who is a disabled, radical, working-class, Jewish, lesbian-feminist activist. She wrote an interesting article about the political implications of the contents of the supplemental dictionary of her word-processing program. The supplemental dictionary is a file that allows the user to customize the spell-check program by adding words that are not in the default dictionary that came with the program. Here is a partial list of words from Elliott’s file:
ableism
ableist
accessibility
Ashkenazic
assimilationist
batterer
classism
classist
clit
dyke
Eurocentric
feminisms
futon
heterosex
heteropatriarchal
homelessness
ism
lesbophobia
miso
mythologize
sephardic
sizeism
tampax
tempeh
therapism
yiddishe

Obviously, the words that are critical to Elliott’s defining her experience—not only her day-to-day reality, but also her identities and her oppressions—are missing. The point of Elliott’s article was to make visible the usually invisible process of marginalization. What does it mean when “tits” is in the dictionary, but “clit” is not? What does it mean when there is a term for hating queers, but not one specific to the combination of homophobia and misogyny? What does it mean when “ablebodied” is in the dictionary, but “ableism” is not? What does it mean when every conceivable category for christian sects and denominations is included, but the words descriptive of Jewish ethnic origins are not? What does it mean when all the pejorative terms for poor people are in the dictionary, but “classism” is not?

Elliott’s printout of the contents of her supplemental dictionary file makes visible a process that is usually hidden. The printout not only exposes a mechanism of exclusion, but it also suggests connections and patterns of oppression among her diverse identities.

What is missing from the traditional canon of dramatic literature? Turning to the supplemental file of my own canon of plays, I find that nearly all of the archetypes I use are absent from the traditional canon: the avenging mother, the survivor of sexual assault who is believed, the angry young woman, the ambitious winner, the fiercely loyal sisters, the venerated crone, the lesbian lover. My archetypal narratives are also missing: the sanctioned patricide, the woman’s resurrection through rage, the recovery of memory, the shifting of paradigms, the de-colonization of the body, the furious re-invention of the self, the reconstruction of the ruptured mother-daughter bond.

There are many archetypes in my lesbian-feminist culture that are missing from the traditional canon of dramatic literature. As with Elliott’s supplemental dictionary, I find it instructive to examine these omissions for what they reveal about that mainstream canon. These archetypes include the rejected older woman who, instead of becoming consumed with revenge like Medea, liberates
herself joyously from the entire heterosexual paradigm that would put her out to pasture at menopause. In the patriarchal canon, the archetypal survivor is Cassandra, whose ability to predict the future is seen as a curse, not a strategic advantage, because no one will believe her. In my culture, the survivor of male atrocities uses her second sight to heal herself and to rescue and recruit other victimized women. In our epic dramas, the daughter, unlike Elektra, sides with the mother against a perpetrating father, and our goddesses, unlike the motherless Athena, endorse the patricide of the perpetrator, not the matricide of the avenging mother. Our Antigones, longing for a voice in the political process, are not satisfied with impotent and self-martyring protests against a sadistic, misogynist system, but seek out the alliances with other powerful women. We have a literature
replete with warrior women from long lines of unbroken matrilineal bonding. Why are these rich roles and archetypes missing from a canon that purports to be universal?

I suggest that it is because of the censorship of incest as a subject fit for inclusion in the canon. If we believe the statistics that tell us one third of all girls are sexually abused before the age of eighteen, usually by a male caregiver, the case could be made that incest is the central paradigm for women in patriarchy. Incest is the template for a woman’s experience of betrayal by her fathers and her brothers. When the mother is forced to choose between the interests of her male partner or male offspring, and the interests of her daughter, she will most often align her interests with what will give her the most stake in a male-dominated system. Sadly, most mothers will reject their sexually abused daughters. And here we see the Cassandra who cannot erase her memory of trauma, but who cannot find the women—or the men—who will believe her. Here we see the Clytemnestra, who, in
avenging the murder of her daughter, falls victim to another daughter and a son who identify with the perpetrating father. Here is Medea who avenges her sexual rejection on the younger woman and on her own children. Here is Athena, defining the father as the true parent, the one who provides the “seed,” and the mother as only the empty carrier, the borrowed womb.

When incest is not named, when the incest story is not told, it becomes the accepted paradigm, part of the default lexicon for defining accepted reality.
In preparing this paper, I asked the members of my theatre newsgroup for titles of plays that dealt with child sexual abuse/incest. I say “child-sexual-abuse-slash-incest,” because, in my experience of working with survivors, the two are most often synonymous, or, at least, very closely related in terms of scenarios and syndromes.

The first thing I noticed from the list of titles was that the “slash” has disappeared. There is almost no connection at all between the portrayal of incest and child sexual abuse in the majority of these plays. Incest as a titillating scenario of adult desire is a recurrent theme. Child sexual abuse is all but absent.
A sampling of incest titles from the traditional and contemporary canon include: Oedipus Rex, Phaedre, Pericles, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Desire Under the Elms, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Ghosts, Fool for Love.

Lots of stepmother-stepson adult attraction, lots of half-brother-half-sister adult attraction, and a couple of cases of adult parent-child, mistaken-identity attraction. I know and have worked with hundreds of incest survivors, and not one of our stories even remotely resembles any of these. In fact, I don’t know anyone whose story resembles these. The popularity of these models for incest must be attributable to either the fantasies or the subconscious fears of the male playwrights who employ them as plot devices.

Moving away from incest to plays that deal with child sexual abuse, we find the field thins out considerably. Almost all of the plays in this category are recent ones. One of the oldest is Turn of the Screw, with its suggestions of sexual abuse by a tutor and a governess. Part of the much-touted mystery of this play, however, is the fact that audiences never know if the story is true or just the neurotic, projected, sexual fantasies of a frustrated spinster. There are two contemporary plays about child sexual abuse set in all-male environments, focusing on the fate of the perpetrator in prison communities: Lilies and Short Eyes.

Two of the suggested titles finally dealt with experiences of child-sexual-abuse-slash-incest. The first is Nuts, a play by Tom Torpor that was made into a feature film starring Barbra Streisand—a film which, unlike other Streisand films, received almost no critical attention. The protagonist is a prostituted woman who has murdered a john. During the course of her trial, she recovers repressed
childhood memories of paternal incest.

And then there is How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel, which has just won a Pulitzer. In this play an older girl is sexually abused by her uncle. What does it mean that a play on the traditionally taboo subject of incest has been officially recognized by being awarded the Pulitzer? Is this a sign that the silence about incest is being broken, or just a subtler form of censorship. In order to answer
that question it is important to look carefully at the depiction of the survivor in How I Learned to Drive, and it is also important to understand something about the process of a child when she is sexually abused, especially by a trusted adult or caregiver, as is the case in Ms. Vogel’s play.

The experience of the sexually-abused child is this: “This can’t be happening to me” and “This is happening to me and I can’t stop it.” There is a variation on that second part: “This is happening to me and it’s going to keep happening to me, night after night, for years and years and years, and I can’t stop it.” Obviously, “This can’t happen” and “This is happening” are mutually exclusive propositions. To accommodate them in one body, the mind splits off the second part--the
unthinkable, the unspeakable part. Some children literally experience themselves rising up to a corner of the room and watching it all from the ceiling. Others spontaneously repress the memory as it happens. In the case of Marilyn Van Derber, a former Miss America who was raped by her father for years, she had a “day child” and a “night child” identity. The “night child” had no communication with the “day child,” until Van Derber was in her 30’s and began to recover her
memories, the recovery apparently triggered by her daughter having reached the age at which her own abuse had begun.

Some children experience displacement. A typical episode of displacement involved a child who was raped by a friend of her father’s while her father held her down. During the rape she focused on a poster of a rock star that was on the wall, and afterwards she “remembered” the abuse being perpetrated by someone whose description tallied with that of the rock star. She successfully displaced the identity of the rapist to protect herself from information too dangerous to access.
In some cases, the child does not travel to the corner of the room, but instead, she merges her identity with that of the perpetrator. In this syndrome, referred to as “fusion with the perpetrator, “ the child identifies with him during the abuse, adopting a pornographic perspective toward her own body as “other.” Because of her complete lack of agency, it is safer to identify with the experience of the perpetrator than with her own. The child who experiences fusion during the trauma learns, as a survival skill, to become aroused by her own pain, fear, and humiliation.

Most survivors split off not only the incest, but also various emotional affects associated with the experience. The child whose natural instinct would be to fight off or even kill her assailant is obviously in a dilemma if this assailant is a primary caregiver on whom her survival depends. In cases of incest, normal healthy emotional responses can jeopardize the life of a child and she may develop completely various dissociative states to store these taboo and life-threatening emotions and behaviors. Rage at her rapist and grief at the betrayal are two of the strongest and most taboo emotions for the survivor, and it may be very difficult for the victim to access these, even later in life, because of her early association of these emotions with life-threatening conditions.

Getting back to How I Learned to Drive and the Pulitzer… Ms. Vogel’s play is an accurate depiction of a certain type of incest, in which the girl is older and the perpetrator is not violent and poses as someone supportive of her interests. In situations like these, it is common for the victim to feel complicitous, to mistake the perpetrator’s predation for a “relationship,” and to romanticize or sentimentalize the experience. Her confusion stems from the still-necessary repression of rage and grief.

Does this have anything to do with its official recognition? I maintain that it has everything to do with it. The key to that Pulitzer lies in what is missing from the canon: the incest play from the perspective of a recovered survivor—the survivor who has integrated her rage and her grief and who understands her experience in the context of a male-dominant culture dependent on the sexual subordination of women.

Ms. Vogel’s play was praised for the “humanity” with which she treated her subject. She was also praised for depicting the “complexity” (read “mutuality?”) of incest, the fact that is not always so “black and white.” They praised her even-handedness in the sympathetic portrayal of the perpetrator, the confusion of the victim. In other words, the majority of the critics were not noticing that the point-of-view was pathological, that the victim was still deeply dissociative. But in order to
notice this, they would have to notice the lack of anger or grief. I submit that her critics did not miss the anger or grief at all, and, furthermore, I submit that she received the Pulitzer precisely because that anger and that grief were missing. She told an incest story in which there is not political context, in which the act itself is as isolated as a tree falling in the woods, in which the perpetrator is not a sadistic predator, but “merely” a loser. Her survivor is resigned, superior, moving on. How poignant, how handy.

How I Learned to Drive is not the only dissociative narrative being valorized as the whole story. There are several well-known performance artists, women and self-declared survivors of horrendous sexual abuse, who tour to colleges and universities where they take their clothes off and even recreate scenarios of sexual abuse in the name of sexually liberating themselves or protesting the
objectification of women. Performance art critics have written tomes of theory about these artists, none of which incorporates a shred of theory about trauma and recovery.

What if these “radical porn feminist activists” are actually partially-recovered survivors still in the “acting out” phase of early recovery? What if the replication of traumatic scenarios under these more controlled and therefore subjectively more empowering circumstances (no pimps, no johns) is part of their process in integrating? What if the audience is watching an unrecovered survivor
parade her pathologies in front of us in an articulate, but still incoherent attempt to tell her story and integrate? What if these are not sexually liberated adult women at all, but women who are still slaves to their traumatized childhoods?

One sure way of finding out would be to compare their performances and their narratives to the work of recovered survivors, whose narratives incorporate anger toward the perpetrator and a full sense of the lost entitlement of safety and agency, with the cultural context in which their abuse occurred as subtext. But these narratives are conspicuous in their absence. The story of the fully integrated
survivor is missing, even as the survivor who sentimentalizes her perpetrator or who recreates her own abuse for mass consumption receives the official endorsement of the mainstream.

Why aren’t more women noticing and protesting this absence, this censorship? Well, let’s imagine we are at a play right now. And let’s assume that those of you who are listening to this paper are the audience. Let’s break it down: Half of you are women. For every three women in the audience, one will have been sexually abused as a child, most likely in a situation involving incest with a male
perpetrator. Let us consider that those women, those women who comprise one third of the female audience. Do they remember at all? Many will not. If these women do remember, how have they dealt with it? More to the point, with whom are they sitting? Probably with family. Would those seat companions be there if she remembered, if she told? If the companion is a spouse, would he welcome the inevitable disinheritance, the stigma, the disruption of childcare arrangements, the
awkwardness at family gatherings? Is he up for the financial and emotional demands of the healing process? If she’s there with parents, would she lose one? Both? And how many siblings? Most of these women will have tried to forget or ignore. Frequently they are helped out in this by dissociative disorders which keep the memory conveniently disconnected from the emotions, which have been hermetically sealed off in other parts of the psyche. And here How I Learned to Drive, with its deeply dissociative heroine, will provide reassurance and validation. This play will be much more comfortable for the woman in denial than a play about a recovered survivor.

If these survivors in our audience are inclined to be religious, they can mistake this dissociation for forgiveness or transcendence, as did the critics of How I Learned to Drive. Forgiveness and transcendence are both endorsed as feminine virtues in ways that anger or a sense of entitlement are not.

But maybe these women in our audience have forged an entire identity from their fusion with the perpetrator. Maybe they experience themselves as sexually liberated, because they revel in the recreations of scenarios of their abuse. Certainly a pornographically-inclined partner will not be likely to complain. In fact, mainstream culture will endorse the woman who enjoys acting out sexually against herself. One could, in fact, make the case that this is the point of incest. If this third
of our female audience is still experiencing fusion with the perpetrator, they might enjoy the work of performers who treat their own bodies as “other,” and who arouse themselves with self-violation.

But what if this audience is not identified with the perpetrator? Then they are likely to react to this kind of “performance art” with sexual shock, retreating into the various dissociative states to which they have become habituated. Or maybe they are further along in their healing than the performer and they are feeling anger toward the rest of the audience for their exploitation of an obvious survivor. But if these women express this opinion, if they protest what is going on, or if they walk
out of the theatre, they will be labeled puritans, members of the sex police, feminazis. They are greatly at risk of calling attention to themselves as survivors, which is very dangerous in a situation where sexual predation is being encouraged. She may feel trapped with dangerous perceptions she
cannot articulate. If she is on a road to integrating, she may be forced back into splitting, and this is tremendously destructive of the healing process.

What is my point?

My point is that the canon is skewed, that the depictions of child sexual abuse that are allowed serve an agenda to marginalize the voice of the recovered survivor. My point is that we cannot possibly understand what we are seeing on the stage, nor can we theorize about it, until we have allowed all the voices of incest survivors to be heard, and especially the voices of those who have integrated
their experience and who can make the larger connections between a culture that looks the other way when girls are raped and then turns around and markets their damaged sexuality as role models for all women.

[Originally presented at Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference, Toronto, 1999.]
Published on

May 18, 2019

A Survivor Looks at Fun Home: The Musical

Child Abuse Incest Rape Reviews Women And Theatre

I’m just going to put this right out there: I did not like Fun Home: The Musical.

I liked the original graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. I thought it was brilliant, overwhelming, honest, searing… and a masterful execution of graphic art. I thought it deserved the American Book Award and the Lambda Literary Book Award.

So why did I feel so differently about the musical? To be perfectly honest, I have not worked that out yet. But I do have some ideas. First, musical theatre is a very different genre than a memoir, even when that memoir is an illustrated one.

Theatre has its own conventions and tropes. The American family is a familiar subject for American theatre: Raisin in the Sun, Fences, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Little Foxes, Fifth of July, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Awake and Sing, August: Osage County, Death of a Salesman, and so on. The yearning for connection with an emotionally unavailable parent is a frequent theme. These family dramas are filled with bittersweet nostalgia for a bygone era and the lost innocence of childhood. And of course infidelity and broken homes are also common themes.

Plays transpire in real time and in real—and restricted—space. You can’t turn down the corner of a play and come back to it later. This reality dictates a structure with suspense, momentum, audience identification, and investment. Good live theatre has much in common with spectator sports… because of that “actual bodies in actual seats in real time” thing. The art of playwriting is the art of compression. Biographical/ autobiographical material has to undergo a lot of pruning and grafting, because real life rarely has well-defined plot points and resolutions.

Also, authorship is important. The writer of a memoir is telling her own story, often with a motive just to get it out and on paper. The musical-theatre adaptors of a best-selling memoir have a different motive. It’s not their story, clearly. They are incentivized to tailor the material to the genre. I may or may not agree with the memoirist’s perception or interpretation of her experiences, but I appreciate that she is entitled to her confusions, her “in-process” status as a human being. She is inviting me to look over her shoulder and I am aware that this is a privilege.

Musical theatre is something different. It is an incredibly powerful medium, and I am acutely aware of when and how musical theatre can be used to manipulate emotions and reshape values.

So… at this point, let me just move on to my objections…

So here is the story of Fun Home, memoir and musical, in a nutshell: The protagonist of the play, Alison, grew up in a town in rural Pennsylvania, in a dysfunctional, middle-class family filled with secrets. The biggest secret was that the father was a stalker and sexual abuser of children. He was also a closeted gay man and an adulterer. But the serial, pedophilic predation is—or should be—the most significant of the secrets.

In the musical, three actresses portray the different incarnations of the protagonist at different ages in her life. “Small Alison” is a little girl, “Medium Alison” is a budding lesbian in her first year of college, and “Alison” is an adult cartoonist in mid-career, in the act of creating the memoir that is the basis of the play. The plot turns around all the Alisons’ relationship to the father.

In the musical, the child sexual abuse is obliquely alluded to, but only presented factually in one line of a song sung by the mother. The song is a lament about her husband’s adultery and the line is, “some of them underage.” That’s it. The pedophilic predation is presented as a footnote to the father’s infidelity and his homosexuality. It’s also presented as a victimless crime. The reactions of all the characters are consistent with those of a family who discovers a history of cheating by the patriarch. It’s a play about a cheater, not a criminal sexual predator. It’s about adultery, not child rape.

At the point where his history is unmasked, Medium Alison is in her first year at college, coming out as lesbian, and in her first relationship. She comes out to her parents. She brings her girlfriend home. Her mother tells her the truth about her father. Shortly after this visit her father steps in front of a truck in what appears to have been a suicide.

I get it. All of this must have been overwhelming for a nineteen-year-old. I see why it took decades for Bechdel to be able to write about it. I see why there are so many conflicting emotions, so much confusion in the telling. These are all reasons why her story makes for such a powerful memoir. And they are all reasons why it should never have been shaped into a mainstream musical about a dysfunctional American family.

Here is my question to theatre audiences who love Fun Home: What if the family secret was that the father had been stalking and murdering his students and his barely-legal, former students, but the dialogue had remained fixated on his cheating and the daughter’s desire for connection with him? Would that have changed your experience of the play?

I ask this, because, for me, as a survivor of child sexual abuse, I experienced the father as a kind of serial murderer. He was a murderer of childhood, a soul murderer. I sit in meetings with grown men who were the teenaged victims of men like Mr. Bechdel. I hear how they were confused, how some of them believed they were consenting or participating at the time, how it took them years to remember, to sort out the shame, to figure out what their sexual orientation was, or even just to recognize that they had been victimized. It took them decades to trace their self-harming behaviors and addictions back to the betrayal by their trusted teacher, priest, parent, and so on.

I am going to answer my own question here: Yes, my experience of the play changed when I understood the father was a soul-murderer of children. I could no longer relate to an adult who was still obsessing over her failure to connect with her father. I no longer sympathized with the wife/mother who was solely focused on the pain of being abandoned. And the ending of the play, sentimentalizing the rare moments of tenuous, father-daughter connection, left me stone cold. I was watching a nest of enablers, a system of incest, in a theatre of folks who were feeling uplifted by this indulgence of sentimentality.

When one is in a family, a difficult family with complicated and damaged individuals each struggling with their personal demons… and then it is revealed that one of them is a child-raper, the entire paradigm should shift. Every memory should become subject to revision, every emotion cut loose from its moorings. Trauma occurs. Something utterly unthinkable, completely unacceptable must be thought, must be accepted. But it can’t be. But it must be. But it can’t be. And that schism, that impossible conundrum, that trauma, is what happened to me in the theatre, because the writers of the show chose to elide the criminal behavior with sexual orientation and adultery.

Here is another question: What would Fun Home look like if the members of the family came out of denial and responded appropriately to information that the father is a pedophilic predator?

Well, how about this for a potential scenario: At the moment where the mother sings the infamous line, “some of them underage,” the lights are cut, the music stops mid-lyric. A single spotlight comes up on the adult Alison. She is surrounded by darkness, in sudden limbo.

She sings a song, “Oh, my god… I didn’t know… and yet… those boys… those boys he taught… Oh my god… I didn’t know… And yet my mother did… And yet my mother stayed… And those boys… those boys…”

And then we see Small Alison and Medium Alison appear. They are both frightened. Alison puts her arms around both of them.

And then the Boys appear, one by one. They each sing a song about the time Mr. Bechdel picked them up when they were walking on the road and how he offered them beer, even though they were underage. They sing how he said he would take them home and then drove them somewhere else, to “get to know them.” They sing about the time he hired them to work in his yard. They sing their stories… and then their adult selves appear and sing about the years of doubt and shame, the nights of terror, the secrecy, the sexual confusion, the self-hatred, the shattered relationships, the addictions.

The Boys fade into the shadows and Small Alison starts to sing a song she opened the show with: “Daddy! Hey, Daddy, come here, okay? I need you/ What are you doing? I said come here…” Alison stops her and sings about how she, adult Alison, will take care of her now. She tells Small Alison that her father is gone forever, but that she doesn’t need to be afraid, because adult Alison will be her parent now.

And then Medium Alison starts singing “Say something! Talk to him! Say something! Anything!” This is a song from a car ride she had with her father right before he died. Again adult Alison stops her. She sings to her that her father can’t talk to her, because he is a very sick man, because he has sexually abused children. Medium Alison is confused and wants to talk about how he is gay, like her. Alison says that his being gay has nothing to do with his being sick and raping children. Medium Alison, still confused, wants to talk about how he betrayed her mother and the family. Alison tells her that his cheating has nothing to do with how he is sick and a pedophilic predator. Finally she tells Medium Alison that her mother knew he was harming children and was an enabler of his crimes. Medium Alison puts her fingers in her ears and starts to repeat “Say something! Talk to him!” Alison tries to interrupt, but Medium Alison shoves her and runs away.

Alison and Small Alison end the show standing together. Alison explains to the child how they can never go home again, but that they can go forward and help the children like the Boys their father victimized. She sings about how they can tell their story to help victims be believed, to show that they don’t need to feel ashamed about what happened to them, but that they can find other survivors and build a different world. She tells her that it is not up to them to find a way to patch up or save the family. It’s gone.

Would my version make it to Broadway and win a Tony for “best musical?” No, of course not. For starts, there is a huge continuity problem. It’s actually made up of two completely different plays: the slightly comedic, dysfunctional dramedy and then the shocking paradigm shift. Which is the experience of child sexual abuse. Welcome to my world. The perpetrator’s suicide is not only not the dramatic climax, it’s not even relevant. There is nothing bittersweet or sentimental about the situation. The closure must occur outside of the family, in affiliation with other survivors.

I am saddened that this first major musical with a lesbian protagonist had to hitch its ride to Broadway on the coattails of denial about the seriousness of sexual abuse of children. I am shocked to see the intentional blurring of lines between pedophilia and sexual orientation. I was angry, but not surprised, to see the wife/mother framed as a tragic and damaged victim, instead of a very active enabler. Finally, there was a very charming subplot about the daughter’s coming out that deserved a better vehicle.

In conclusion: We need to hear the voices of survivors. #MeToo is old news to most women. The only thing trendy about it was that men are believing us for the first time. For all the publicity and Congressional hearings about rape in the military, sexual assaults are at the highest levels ever this year. And no, it’s not about “better reporting.” Stop that. Child sexual abuse and trafficking are big business globally, and the Pope has still not mandated reporting child-rapists to civil authorities. That’s an outrage. Broadway’s response to sexual harassment in the academy was Oleanna, a play about those manipulative lesbians in Women’s Studies encouraging false accusations against innocent men. Broadway’s response to the priesthood scandals? Doubt, whose title says it all. Prostitution? How about Best Little Whorehouse in Texas?

We all have to speak up. We really do. And it’s always going to feel scary. Do what you can. I gave Fun Home a standing ovation, because I was in a post-traumatic panic attack when the curtain went down, and I felt it was the more dangerous choice to draw attention to myself by staying seated. But I am home now. I have gathered Small Carolyn and Medium Carolyn and all the others around me, and together we are writing this blog.

Love to all my survivor brothers and sisters. You are not alone. “We must say to every member of our society: If you violate your children, they may not speak today, but as we gather our strength and stand beside them, they will, one day, speak your name. They will speak every single name.”—Marilyn Van Derbur

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Thanks to Eleanor Cowan, the author of A History of a Pedophile's Wife: Memoir of a Canadian Teacher and Writer, for her feedback on this blog. Click here for my blog about her book. I have several blogs on the subject of child sexual abuse and incest.
Published on

February 5, 2019

The True Story of Sacagawea

Child Abuse Incest Rape Women's History

This was originally published as "Sermon on Stories" in Sermons for a Hot Kitchen From the Lesbian Tent Revival.

Stories are great things. Stories can be maps. They can be templates. They can be guidebooks. They can be cautionary tales. They can be mirrors. They can be latitude and longitude. They can be spiritual vitamins. They can be precious heritage. Lesbian poet Muriel Rukeyser said, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” That sounds kind of poetic until you look hard at what we call reality, at quantum physics. Then it’s actually pretty scientific. And here’s poet Maya Angelou: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Which brings me back to that great quotation from the Gospel of St. Thomas, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Now you can bring forth that “thing that is in you” in poetry, or painting, or dance, or theatre, or music, or story. And if you bring it forth as story, it may be a story that only you can interpret, and that’s okay.

But stories can also be propaganda. That’s why we’re going to synapse around the whole thing of “story” today. Because the propaganda stories can get us thinking along lines that will cause us to betray our own best interests… and often, in scrubbing off the layers of falsehood in popular myths, like fairy tales or folklore or patriotic myths, we can recognize some life-saving truths that underlie the distortion or the appropriation. Kinda like when you find a masterpiece underneath that painting of dogs playing cards.

So that’s what we’re doing today.

We’re going to look at a very popular story in the colonization of America. We’re going to look at the story of Sacagawea. Most of us will remember that she was the Native American woman who accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition in their efforts to locate a route across the western half of the continent, to the Pacific Ocean. She’s a big heroine in American history, and her image—or some artist’s idea of her image—is on a dollar coin, and she’s been on a postage stamp, and folks love to tell the traditional story about her, because it’s about a strong woman on a bold adventure, and it’s also about interracial harmony.

Now, those aren’t bad reasons for telling stories… except that in the case of Sacagawea, they aren’t the whole truth. And the parts of the truth that they are hiding are really, really important parts of the story. And there is also a story underneath that is not being told.

So, let’s get out those tools for scraping off those layers of cultural whitewash and mansplainery, and see a little bit more of what’s really going on in this story.

Sacagawea was born into the Shoshone tribe in Idaho around 1788, and when she was eleven or twelve years old, she was in a Shoshone hunting camp near what today is Three Forks, Montana, that was attacked by the Hidatsa, a Siouan tribe of Native Americans. In this raid, four Shoshone men and four Shoshone women, and several boys were killed. Sacagawea was taken captive and enslaved. Remember, she’s eleven or twelve years old. And these Hidatsa force her to walk with them back to where they live in North Dakota, which is about five hundred miles away, as the crow flies. So here’s this eleven or twelve-year-old child who has survived a massacre of family and friends, and she’s now enslaved, and she’s having to march for hundreds of miles back into North Dakota from Montana, and when she gets there, she is—you know—she’s still an enslaved child.

And then, one night, there is this French trapper who shows up in the village, and he plays some kind of gambling game with the Hidatsa, and he wins. And to pay off their debt, the Hidatsa give him Sacagawea. Who is twelve by now, or possibly thirteen. So now she’s his slave. He already has bought another Shoshone captive girl, “Otter Woman,” from the Hidatsa. He calls these enslaved children his “wives.” It is a formalized child-rape arrangement brokered by adults. And, sisters, remember, every single time you read or hear something about Sacagawea’s French trapper husband and you do not raise hell, you are actually participating in legitimizing this child-rape arrangement. He was her owner, her captor, and her rapist. Period.

Sacagawea conceived around the age of fourteen, and the reason we know this is because she was pregnant in the winter of 1804-5, when Lewis and Clark showed up in the Hidatsa village and started negotiating with Sacagawea’s perpetrator for his services as a guide. Lewis and Clark were the two men leading this expedition commissioned by the US government. They were leading twenty-nine white men and one African American man, who was enslaved. Sacagawea’s perpetrator told Lewis and Clark that the pregnant child was his wife, and he negotiated a fee for her services as a Shoshone translator—a fee that would be paid to him, of course. As her captor’s so-called wife, Sacagawea never received a dime for her services—or any form of compensation—for the work that she did.

So here we are, with this fourteen-year-old, pregnant girl, in the company of thirty-two men, most of whom speak a language she can’t understand. She is the only Native American among them, and the only female. She gave birth en route, and, according to Lewis, who attended the birth, it was a very painful and violent delivery. Afterwards, she became desperately ill with what, from Lewis’ journal notes, appears to have been a severe pelvic inflammatory infection, possibly due to her enslaver’s continual postpartum rape of her. In his journal, Lewis expressed a suspicion that she was a victim of a transmitted venereal disease. She came very close to dying, but she managed to recover. She spent the rest of the trip with her baby strapped to her back.

Sacagawea trekked on this expedition for two years, four months, and ten days. Sisters, she walked eight thousand miles with these white men and the African American enslaved man… with a baby on her back. She forded rivers and climbed steep mountains and crossed deserts and swamps in snow and rain and sweltering sun. She translated for the men, she foraged for them, she cooked for them, and she did the sewing, mending, and cleaning of their clothes… you know, the “women’s work.”

There have been whitewashing and mansplaining efforts to downplay her work as a guide, but the truth is, she was responsible for pointing out the pass they should take through the Rockies and the pass they should take into the Yellowstone basin… the Bozeman Pass. Kind of a big deal, locating these passes.

Oh, and by the way, the only reason we have the record of this expedition is because Sacagawea had the foresight and agility to rescue Lewis’s journals when they were tumbling out of a capsized boat. For her pains, she had a river named after her. But no pay.

One of the greatest services that Sacagawea provided was protection. By this time, Native American tribes had come to assume, and assume rightly, that any group of white men traveling into their territory probably constituted some kind of war party. They had learned that it was better to attack first and then try to figure out who they were later. But the fact that this group included a Native American woman with a baby was taken as evidence that these men came in peace. In other words, Sacagawea saved all their lives and probably many times over.

So, eventually, the expedition gets to the western part of Oregon, to the coast. And they set up a camp and start sending parties down to the beach to see the actual ocean. And these parties are reporting that some kind of “great fish” has washed up on the beach—possibly a whale. And, unbelievably, these men were not going to allow Sacagawea to leave the camp to go see it. Unbelievable. She had to beg and plead with them, and this was so unusual on her part, that Lewis wrote about it in his journal. And it really pisses me off that she did all this enormous work, as a child, with a newborn, involuntarily, and then when they finally reach their goal—the Pacific Ocean—where there’s this magical, giant fish, this eighth wonder of the world, they make Sacagawea beg and plead just to be able to see it. If there is ever any historical doubt about her degree of autonomy on this expedition, that should lay it to rest finally and forever. She had none.

Sacagawea was dead by the age of twenty-five. Still with her rapist/captor, she was living at a fur trading post in Montana at the time of her death. She was very sick and wanted to go home to her people. She reportedly died of typhus, a disease transmitted by a human body louse—a disease associated with conditions of poor hygiene and sanitation. But, if Lewis was correct in suspecting that Sacagawea had been infected with a venereal disease by her rapist, she may have died from a fever associated with that. We know that she left behind an infant girl, and the typhus or the venereal disease may have taken hold during postpartum weakness. The daughter appears not to have survived. The son was taken in by Meriwether Lewis, who paid for his schooling.

I know. It’s a horrible story, isn’t it? Sacagawea was obviously heroically strong, but she was a victim throughout her short life. From age eleven, she was separated from her people and enslaved. She was a victim of ongoing rape from puberty and subjected to involuntary pregnancies.

It’s a story of endurance, but it’s not the story of multi-cultural diversity in the early years of the US. Sacagawea is not the poster woman for biracial marriage. She was obviously powerful, but she was not empowered. If there is any multi-cultural story to be told here, it is a shameful story of the collusion of powerful men—French, Hidatsa, and Anglo American—in the exploitation of an enslaved, female child. It’s a disgusting tale of adult males bonding through the bartering for forced labor and victimization of a Shoshone girl. However divergent their cultures, these men were all in agreement in their misogyny. They all colluded in characterizing the formalized child-rape arrangement as a legalized marriage.

But, there is another story… one that is very important. It’s actually found between the lines in Lewis’ journal. Let’s take a look… Bear with me, because we’re going to have to backtrack a little bit in the story before we get to it…

So at one point in their travels, the expedition ended up camping at the very place where Sacagawea was captured and abducted by the Hidatsa as a little girl. This was the place where she lost her tribe, her family, her history, her culture, her freedom... and, sadly, her childhood. This was the place from which she was forced to undertake a journey of a thousand miles with her enemy.

So, when the Lewis and Clark Expedition arrived at this former Shoshone hunting camp, Sacagawea told them the story of the massacre and here is what Lewis wrote in his journal: “I cannot discover that she shews any immotion of sorrow in recollecting this event, or of joy in being again restored to her native country; if she has enough to eat and a few trinkets to wear I believe she would be perfectly content anywhere.”

He seems to be describing her as someone who is kind of shallow or emotionally under-developed… “primitive” in the sense of being in some early stage of evolution or history. He appears to be comparing her affect to that which he believes he might experience, had he been in her shoes… which is as ridiculous as it is unfair. As a white, male colonizer, he has absolutely no context for understanding the trauma of her past, or the context of her ongoing rape and enslavement. He does not appear to understand that he is complicit in enabling her ongoing enslavement.

It sounds to me like Sacagawea was experiencing very severe post-traumatic stress syndromes. She sounds numb, possibly experiencing dissociation from her situation, or maybe even depersonalization… which is a post-traumatic syndrome where your own thoughts and feelings seem unreal, or like they don’t belong to you.

Depersonalization is a kind of complete loss of identity, which makes sense when you consider that her trauma was far from over. And when we consider that this is what Lewis wrote in his journal, it’s a description of Sacagawea that lets him off the hook. Since she doesn’t seem to register any kind of emotional response to this terrible massacre and abduction… he doesn’t have to feel bad about not paying her, or pretending she’s a married woman, when he knows damn well she’s a slave. It’s kind of convenient for him to see her as someone who doesn’t feel any pain… It’s like the way they tell you that lobsters don’t feel it when you drop them in the boiling water. What they mean is we don’t have to feel it.

This part of the story tells a sad truth about much of human nature. We are incentivized to see and hear what will benefit us. That is a fact. Which is why we, should spend time working to reprogram our brains so that we can make a primary commitment to the truth. We do that reprogramming by learning to incentivize ourselves against the grain of a culture that will punish us for knowing or speaking the truth. We do this because any time the truth is not a primary commitment, we are greatly at risk of not seeing it, of deluding ourselves… because this is patriarchy, and knowing the truth, our truth, women’s truth… well, that can get you killed.

But let’s get back to the truth about Sacagawea, who is most often depicted as a grown woman making her own choices about helping these heroic white pathfinders, blazing a trail that will “civilize” the West… We, as a nation, are not much incentivized to adjust that soft-focus lens to bring into sharp definition the fourteen-year-old slave child on a mission that will spell defeat for her people. And one of the reasons why we love that grown-woman-in-charge-of-her-own-life narrative is because it tells us she is choosing—sisters, choosing—to help men. There are no other women anywhere in sight for most of those eight thousand miles. A Native woman choosing to help the white men… and even though she has a baby, she takes total, complete responsibility for him. Straps that baby on her back and never skips a beat while she does all the domestic work of caring for these thirty-three grown-ass men. And then she turns her paycheck over to her “husband!” What a fine example. Look at what she did! Now, surely women today, with all the conveniences of modern civilization, can take those three days of maternity leave and turn their kid over to day care and get right back to work. Be like Sacagawea! Don’t be thinking of motherhood as a second job or a sacred responsibility! Don’t be missing your women friends! Don’t be hoarding that paycheck! Don’t be complaining and comparing! Do it all and don’t take any credit for it! Be like Sacagawea!

Story is everything. It’s the web of synapses we weave to make meaning. As astrologist Caroline Casey says, “Imagination lays the track for the reality train.” It surely does, sisters. And a story is like a line on a railroad… like the Long Island Rail Road or the Staten Island Railway. The story is a route with a destination. We take these stories in when we hear them. We pass them along. We put them in our toolkits for how to live our lives. Story is everything. We have to think critically about the stories we are given. Who is doing the giving and for what purpose? Who is going to benefit from them? We have never had so many stories. Not just books… but Hulu and Netflix and Youtube and cable and movies and podcasts. So many stories… But how many of them tell our truths? Women’s truths? Lesbian truths?

African American author and activist Toni Cade Bambara wrote an essay titled, “The Issue is Salvation,” and in it she says, “I work to produce stories that save our lives.” That’s what we should all be doing. And if we can’t write them, then we can go into uncovering the truth about the ones they hand us.

And that’s exactly what we are going to do now. We are going to go digging for that story that is hidden between the lines of Lewis’ journal. And keep in mind that Meriwether Lewis’ journal… the one that Sacagawea dove into the water to rescue, is five thousand pages long. That’s a lot of pages. But the part that we are are digging for is just two sentences. Two sentences out of five thousand pages. Kind of like a needle in a haystack. But, sisters, if you know what you are needing to hear, if you have a pretty good idea of what these patriarchs are trying to hide… you can find that needle. It’s going to be like a magnetized needle… a compass needle, pointing us to the truth.

So here they are… Here are those precious sentences from Meriwether Lewis’ journal… the needle in the haystack… This was on August 15, 1805. Lewis is talking about when the expedition came to the camp where Sacagawea’s people lived… where her tribe was—her family—before that massacre and abduction when she was eleven. And keep in mind, she’s been enslaved this whole time. She’s never been back to her people. This is the first time she’s seeing them in four years.

“We soon drew near to the [Shoshone] camp, and just as we approached it a woman made her way through the crowd towards Sacagawea, and recognizing each other, they embraced with the most tender affection. The meeting of these two young women had in it something peculiarly touching, not only in the ardent manner in which their feelings were expressed, but from the real interest of their situation…”

I like that Meriwether Lewis is noticing the “real interest of their situation.” And I like that, after describing Sacagawea as pretty emotionless and shallow, he is now going back on that completely and describing a scene that is ardent… which means passionate, and tender, touching and overflowing with affection. Obviously, Sacagawea had been keeping her emotional life sacred… for another female and a woman of her tribe.

So who is this other fifteen-year-old Shoshone girl who is embracing Sacagawea so ardently? Well, her name was Pop-pank. She and Sacagawea grew up together, and they were at that hunting camp together when the massacre happened and Sacagawea was taken prisoner. Pop-pank had jumped into the river and, leaping like a fish, had managed to get to the other side and escape capture.

And here she was when the Lewis and Clark expedition showed up to try to buy some horses on their way to the Pacific. And here she was seeing again her beloved girlhood friend, Sacagawea… now with a baby and enslaved. And this is what Lewis recorded: the reunion of these two girls—and they were both still girls—embracing each other, tender and passionate at the same time.

We can hold onto that story as tightly as Sacagawea held onto Pop-pank. It is a story of an authenticity that resists colonization, of a memory that resists the distortions and erasures of trauma, of a bond that defies appropriation in the colonial narrative.

Let us not be fooled by the fact it only warrants two sentences in the journal of Lewis, or that it was only a few stationary minutes out of a journey of hundreds of days and thousands of miles. It is a glimpse into reality, into eternity. It shows up the colonial, patriarchal, misogynist pageant for what it is: an utter sham.

I think of something that 19th century feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman said… She said, “Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time.” And every now and then we can part the curtain and catch that glimpse. Maybe only a glimpse, but it contains all that we need.

Sisters, let us hold close those two sentences that Meriwether Lewis wrote, not understanding even as he wrote them, because they illuminate the pages of history more than all the rest of the words in his journal.

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