Rape, ritual, rupture, and repair: Decentering Euro-American logics of trauma and healing in an analytic autoethnography of the five years after my rape in Sierra Leone
Abstract
Responses to the trauma of rape vary. People find different responses helpful and a multiplicity of trauma theories should be considered. Through an autoethnography and critical phenomenology of myself and my collaborators in Sierra Leone after I was raped there, I analyze how subjective and cultural frames for managing rape impact an individual's processing of the experience; how they shape ideas of self, community, and world; and how they frame their unraveling and remaking. While I retreated, internalized, and individualized my rape, my collaborators wanted me to externalize it, let the community help, and undergo a ritual to disconnect me from my rapist. Cross-cultural exchange can enhance understandings of responses to trauma and approaches to healing. This is done not to cement cultural frames, to localize or to particularize trauma, nor to overgeneralize but to consider interlocking factors, fill in politically created gaps in focus and memory, and consider multiplicity as enriching on a level playing field. This may help decenter Euro-American notions of trauma and foster an ethics of care.
“Get up, you need to move,” commanded Darren, who also lived in the one-room-and-a-parlor dwelling I shared with 11 others during parts of my research in Sierra Leone. His words barely reached me, his proposition seemed absurd, and his presence intolerable, so I shut him out of my world by closing my eyes. By refusing his presence, I tried to reject the reality that had now become mine, a reality in which I had been raped and would never not have been raped.
My world felt sterile, cold, without sound, color, or smell. And I was under. My rapist's hands had pushed me down and, eventually, I had given way. I did not stop, however, when I hit the ground. I drifted below its visible materiality to a place that had now become my world: a place devoid of feeling, devoid of senses. Words reached me, but I could only see and act upon the actions of others through a filter that stripped everything of emotional qualities. Under was where I stayed; a place of depression. My new reality was somewhat bearable, but Darren desperately wanted me to come back from there.
“Hey,” he insisted, pushing through the walls of my place below. “You need to get up and move, otherwise it will grow.”
His voice was muffled, as if I was covered by sound-proofing insulation. Still, I heard him.
“What will grow?” I questioned him. “It's done.”
“No, it isn't,” he said warmly. “It has just begun.”
He left something in you and through that something he controls you. A meresin man [medicine man] needs to cut this bond. If you don't do it quickly, he will have power over you, the bond will grow stronger and you can never break it.
Darren added: “If you don't separate this relationship, he will forever be connected to you.” I related their talk of the “bond” to the power ascribed to semen in Sierra Leone. As Kumba Femusu Solleh writes about the Kono of Sierra Leone, the word shaman comes from the word semen and refers “to the male energy of creation” (2011, 12). Bodily fluids are crucial in Sierra Leonean secret societies and in rituals as concentrations of gender, sexuality, purity, and pollution (Bledsoe, 1980; Eberl-Elber, 1936; Ferme, 2001). Yet the thought that, by leaving his semen in me, my rapist had created a relationship between us that could only be broken through ritual was unbearable to me. I did not want to hear about a connection between us. I felt that Darren and Mohammed were making the rape about my rapist. They explained that the ritual would require me to be naked, drink a cleansing substance, and rub my body with something that would expulse “the bond.” However, being naked and vulnerable with another man or men was inconceivable to me. Instead, I washed myself repeatedly to ensure that all residues of semen were removed from my body. This was a rape, where my rapist had ejaculated in me. I did not want to elevate his power by considering his semen to have uncanny qualities. So I refused to undergo the ritual.
In this article, I depict how I tried to “figure out what to do, how to live” (Bochner and Ellis, 2006, 111) and how to make sense of my rape and myself afterward. Using analytical autoethnography (Anderson, 2006) and critical phenomenology of the body (Csordas, 2002), I bring to the fore my sociocultural coping mechanisms and compare them to those proposed to me by friends and collaborators in Sierra Leone. Using autoethnography when studying the topic of fieldwork and researcher rape allows insights into embodied processes that might otherwise elude us (Minge, 2007; Qambela, 2016). It facilitates an analysis of how rape impacts ideas of self, community, and world, and how one's subject positions and sociocultural repertoires shape their unraveling and remaking (Brison, 2011; Winkler, 1991, 1996). First-person narratives are then crucial in “facilitating our understanding of trauma and victimization” (Brison, 2011, xii). I examine the role and place of cross-cultural exchange in enhancing understandings of and access to the manifold ways in which people respond to trauma and approach healing. Thus, this article offers an understanding of how subjective and cultural frames for managing rape impact the processing of the experience, and how we may be able to decolonize and decenter rape responses, perceptions of trauma, and pathways toward healing, not just in theory but in practice, too. This, I hope, may foster an ethics of care, by which I mean compassionate responses to the manifold ways in which people respond to the trauma of rape. Such ethics recognize that trauma is contextual and relational and that there is no one way of responding. Concurrently, it gives access to various coping registers. It is a collective, caring ethics of mutual respect and support.
LOCATED SELVES AND THE PLURALITY OF TRAUMA
Trauma does not follow the logics of a “single story” (Adichie, 2009; see also Hinton and Good, 2016). How trauma manifests in us is not globally universal (James, 2015; Nicolas cited in Marcus, 2017). It is subjective and rooted in our socialization, in cultural repertoires, and in expectations we put on ourselves and receive from our communities. When we are personally affected, we may react differently from how nuanced theoretical work outlines. Indeed, developments in academia are not always reflected in the embodied ethos of everyday life. The clash between how I responded and how I theoretically perceive trauma are indicative of this and require a sketching of trauma theory's developments through my eyes. Trauma theory gained popularity in the 1990s under the hegemony of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which built on Freudian logics of trauma, memory, and time (ahistorical, phylogenetic, and mythical) (Breuer and Freud, [1895] 1995; Freud, 2003; Visser, 2015, 254). In the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the APA (1984), trauma is defined as a “serious injury or a threat to the physical integrity of the self in the form of an overwhelming, sudden, and unassimilable experience” (Visser, 2015, 252). This presupposes that conscious and unconscious elements form a particular self that has a contour and that can be attacked (the whole, concrete self). Trauma that causes disturbances must be brought to the conscious mind to become manageable and to allow a person to be functional (the stable self). This psychoanalytic, Euro-American idea assumes that a self can be integer and thus stable and fixed, with instability and fluidity being threats to well-being. It also locates trauma in “the completed past of a singular event” (Caruth, 1995, 1996; Felman and Laub, 1992; Hartman, 2003; Rothberg 2008, 230).
Such a narrow understanding of trauma causes multiple problems. Because it is depoliticized and dehistoricized, it cannot grasp the (collective) traumas of (neo)colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, violence, and conflict that persist (for analyses of such traumas, see Erikson, 1994; Lascelles, 2020; Nkrumah, 1974). Focusing on the bygone neglects “everyday forms of traumatizing violence” (Rothberg, 2008, 226), “the intergenerational transmission of trauma” (Rothberg, 2008, 230), and the “unequal recognition of disparate traumatic histories” (Craps, 2010, 53). It ignores that although everyone can be subjected to trauma, trauma has historically affected some groups of people much more than others. Moreover, the questions of how far people who experience trauma are taken seriously and supported, and how traumas interlock and pile onto each other, are intersectional and influenced by race, gender, class, sex, and other factors (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). In particular, Indigenous people and women of color, as well as women who experience(d) Soviet erasure politics, have been subjected to interlocking traumas that, despite being collective and multiple, have been individualized and silenced (Budrytė, 2010). Additionally, people do not always experience or display (any) symptoms that adhere to the DSM’s criteria (e.g., James, 2015, 360–1).1 Not accounting for diversity in how trauma is experienced and expressed ignores cultural, material, bio-social and structural processes and conditions, erases patterns of insecurity and exploitation, and can lead us to underestimate the prevalence of trauma (James, 2015, 360–1; Lock and Nguyen, 2010). It can also further unsettle and traumatize affected people who are made to feel as if they do not respond “as they should.”Hence, the narrow Euro-American conceptualization of trauma of the 1990s has been critiqued and extended in important ways (e.g., Andermahr, 2015; Lloyd, 2000).2 I follow postcolonial and critical literary scholarship that has moved trauma away from “event-based” theories (Rothberg, 2008, 228) that adopt an “accident model” (Styvendale, 2008, 207) toward an appreciation of trauma as event and process that can be “cumulative, collective, intergenerational, and intersubjective” as well as “trans/historical” (Styvendale, 2008; see also Martinez-Falquite, 2015, 127). I believe that only by embracing plurivocality and a multiplicity of experiences, approaches, and directions can trauma theory attempt to capture the intricacies of trauma (Apter, 2006; Melas, 2007; Rothberg, 2008, 225). This requires enhancing cross-cultural dialogue. I do not wish to cement cultural frames, localize or particularize trauma, nor overgeneralize. Instead, I hope to contribute to the consideration of interlocking factors, fill politically created gaps in focus and memory, and compile a rich, multidirectional assemblage of tools.
It took me many years to get here. When first exposed to the trauma of rape, I responded in exactly those Euro-American logics scholars have worked to decenter, and which I do not believe in. I therefore ask what the emotions and reactions to rape can tell us about how we understand self and world, what subconscious logics are at play in us, and how we might bring them to the fore, expose their limits, and burst past their straitjackets. How might these lessons be used to reconnect academic thought and lived experiences, to reconcile body and mind, individual and community, doing and speaking, desiring to overcome and learning to live with trauma? To arrive at answers, I analyze the first five years following my rape, my own reactions and process and those of the people around me, chronologically rather than thematically. This journey offers insights into how differently we reacted and conceived of ways forward but also how similar were our underlying perceptions of trauma's harm and the needs of those who suffer from it is.
FROM A WORLD BELOW TO NORMALIZING PAIN IN THE COLLECTIVE WOUND
to experience is to engage in a process of perception, action, and reflection couched in mindful introspection…A good day for someone who is experiencing might be one in which there is a novel integration of personal undertakings…The features of such a day build on the stuff of novelty, continuity, transformation, plots, and movement. A good day for someone who is struggling along, in contrast, might be a smooth one…not too bad. The ingredients of such a day draw from the forces of contingency, expediency, equilibrium, and stasis. (1997, 22)
humiliation … has the potential to fix the self in an abject relation in which it is displayed before itself merely as a negation, as not only unworthy but indeed incapable of freedom, for if one experiences oneself as unworthy of self-transformation, why would one endeavor to transform oneself? (2018, 439–40)
However, while I existed in negation, disgust, humiliation, and unfreedom in this sterile place below the ground, my Sierra Leonean research collaborators and friends focused their attention on reverting such removal. I remember lying on my bed not much more than an hour after the rape, listening to Darren's propositions.
“We need to tell people,” he said.
“I don't want anyone to know,” I responded.
“You should not be alone now. Everyone should be here with you, grieve with you.”
“I don't want anyone to know,” I repeated.
“Kadiatu, Eleanor, Papani, they need to be here with you now.”
“I don't want anyone to know,” I maintained.
Our immediate concerns were different. I could not bear the humiliation before myself—a self that I had previously perceived as concrete, stable, and whole but that had now been attacked and unmade. Hence, the idea of letting others know what had happened was inconceivable.4 Darren wanted to bring it into the collective conscience. He understood me as intrinsically fragmented, relational, and fluid. For me time stopped, but for Darren every minute counted. My conception of trauma was event-based. I treated rape as an incident that affected only me and was now in the completed past, an incident that, if spoken about and shared, might bring pain and stigma not only to me but to my loved ones, too. This met and rubbed against a notion “where interdependence and interconnectedness are considered the foundations of well-being” and where “the impact of a traumatic event, though personally experienced … [can] be felt by … family and community” (Fofana-Ibrahim, 2009, 253–54). If well-being is connection, withdrawal is a threat. Indeed, in the Allentown community in Eastern Freetown where I lived, when someone fell ill, suffered a loss, or got hurt, family, neighbors, and loved ones came to keep them company and endure together. A few days after a loss, the women would clean the house, beat the carpets, dust the shelves, and reintegrate the hurt person back into the rhythm of work that shapes the day. They picked them up in the morning, got them out of bed, and brought them back home in the evenings, knowing that eventually roles may reverse. People who have been ill are encouraged to sit outside, walk around, and slowly regain their bearings, and those who have been hurt are asked to let go of negative emotions so not to become bitter. There is a ritualistic aspect to this rhythm of being there after or, if possible, while something painful is occurring, bearing the weight of the emotions—be they active or passive, silent or loud, angry or accepting—only to then clean the house of the residues of this pain and ask people to go back to living, working, and taking on responsibilities. This is similar to how, in Germany, people who have been sick take a long shower or a bath and change their clothes when their health improves. Cleaning the house, dusting off the old, opening the curtains to let the sun in are all forms of pointing to the world beyond trauma. It reflects the workings of an organism that focuses attention on a suffering tissue but does not allow the person to become the suffering tissue or to infect the organism. Asking people to continue equals showing them how much they matter to the organism's functioning. Laura Murphy (2012, 170, 171–73) so aptly shows that trauma involves “the suffering of survival” but also, as Cathy Caruth (2013, xi) puts it, the “imperative to live.”
The Sierra Leonean approach demonstrates a nuanced understanding of the dangers of individualized suffering. It acknowledges that suffering is inevitable but does not make people “less” and should not and need not be carried alone. Hence, while people can, of course, not experience in the same way, they nevertheless engage in interexperience (Porter, 2013). This requires not sympathy but instead a focus on empathetic distance (Enria, 2015, 40–42). People acknowledge pain irrespective of responsibility and blame. Mediation, sanctioning, or punishment for wrongdoing occurs in other spaces and at different moments (Schneider, 2018). Practically, such care is a form of suicide watch, preventing people from taking drastic measures or climbing down into a world below (depression). It is a direct confrontation with the “excess of life” (Biehl and Locke, 2010) with loved ones, with kin ties, with community. I have seen people long for this connection, while others turn their backs on their visitors, go mute, or send them away. However, while no one judges or influences if such visits are appreciated, no one is left alone in a state of acute pain. Focusing intensively and communally on pain makes it difficult for individuals to claim their pain for themselves, as it is now part of public consciousness. This centers the pain and foregrounds its urgency, but it also makes people more than their pain because they neither have a monopoly on suffering nor can be reduced to an experience. This limits pain's reach and durability. Process-wise, then, pain is first focused on and then put in its place so that it may, in Darren's words, “be with you but not become you.” This initiates the process of learning to live with and bearing pain rather than pushing it aside, or seeking to overcome immediately and entirely. In Allentown, the collective attention devoted to pain normalizes and deindividualizes the pain. If pain becomes part of the collective wound, with time, no one is exempt from it. No one is perfect. No one is unscathed. Pain is part of life, part of you. But pain is not all of you.
Not only pain but many other emotions, practices, and experiences that may be considered private and individual in some places are communal in others.5 This points to an understanding of self that is intrinsically fluid and relational and that can therefore not be undone by an experience that shatters its core. Decentering the Eurocentric perspective of trauma and its individualistic approach to healing is imperative to make space for the wisdom that alternative perspectives and community approaches to healing offer. This allows for the practice of multiple, multivocal approaches that move us toward a decolonizing ethics of care.
COPING INDIVIDUALLY AND A SEPARATION OF BODY AND MIND
By refusing a collective response, I stayed alone with my pain. I left the place below only because I felt undeserving of self-pity and thought that otherwise my rapist had “won.” In Aftermath, Susan Brison (2011) analyzes the difficulty of living in a space bereft of feeling after having been raped while shouldering the weight of continual societal demands. Because I was conducting research for my PhD, I needed to disclose the rape to my supervisors (Schneider, 2020). I also told three female friends, my then partner, and my mother. I then began compartmentalizing the rape as an incident that I could isolate and separate from life and people, stuff into a locked box in the most remote corner of my consciousness and starve of all attention until it died. That made speaking about it or engaging with it impossible.
My process of coming to terms with what had happened to me was an individualized cognitive one that began about six months after the rape. I wanted to give voice to this experience. I now sought to “regain my power.” I hoped to define what had happened to me rather than have it define me. By renaming the rape “my rape,” I sought ownership over the event and its consequences. I thought I might be able to live on if I refused to be silenced, refused to bear my pain alone. I became preoccupied with reading blogs and forums on surviving rape. I also turned to writing. At the same time, however, I discarded my body. The encounters I had with my body during this period were violent ones, moments when the fear that lived there spilled over, when my body responded to memories and sensations. I had flashbacks and started shaking when I felt a hand moving up my spine. This hand on my back became a constant and made me feel as if my rapist was always with me, living through my body and experiencing every part of my life. I tried to limit his control by only sitting on chairs that backed against a wall and were far away from doors and windows, and by using public transport only if there was a space where I could put my back against a wall. I replaced my double mattresses with a single bed that I pushed to the wall, and I hardly went shopping—to this day, I still don't. The open aisles make it impossible to put matter between my back and the invisible hand that grabs at it. After the rape, I no longer looked at myself naked, I no longer took care of or nurtured my body; I did not touch myself and others could not either, and sex became an out-of-body experience. When my body revolted against this neglect with desire, I suffocated it under a cloud of darkness and disgust. It took me a long time to understand what I had done to by body by neglecting it and what I had done to my construction of self (concrete, whole, stable) by focusing my trauma entirely on my mind. It is remarkable that while I felt the trauma in my body, I believed I could only lessen its impact by working with my mind. I was living in the residue of a Euro-Christian conception of mind and body (see Descartes, 1984, II 275; 1996, VII 213) wherein the body is but the shell of the eternal soul, the latter being the only thing that must be nourished for it transcends living on earth.
A CONCRETE, STABLE SELF: MOVING TOWARD NARRATING, RESILIENCE, AND OVERCOMING
The demand I put on myself to overcome was due to seeing myself as a concrete, stable self that had been split by the rape. I thought of the rape as a rupture between myself before and myself after. I felt humiliated and ashamed (UN Security Council, 2017) and I wanted to shed these feelings and return to how I had previously felt about myself. I constructed the process of healing around a modern notion of resilience and overcoming, whereby I would be healed once I returned to my previous notion of self (whole, stable, concrete). The conversations about and reactions to my rape showed that my family and loved ones in Europe shared this notion, whereas my Sierra Leonean friends and research collaborators perceived what had happened to me differently (following a fragmented, relational, fluid sense of self).
While I tacitly subscribed to elevating thinking and talking “above bodily engagements” (Mol, 2021, 1–2), Darren did not need me to talk. As I walked to my room through the parlor where he sat with his two sisters, just wanting to crawl into bed, Darren followed, asking, “What did he do to you?” I did not reply. “Did he rape you?” I shook my head. He tried to take my left hand, which I jerked away from him. “Please,” he said, taking it again. “I just wanted to check something.” Then he moved his index finger up my wrist and forearm. My entire body began shaking. I saw the rape in front of my eyes and I could no longer breathe. The whole scenario took no more than a few seconds but Darren knew what had happened by decoding the signs of my body.
Six months after the rape, I accepted Darren's suggestion that he disclose what had happened to me to the other members of the Allentown household. No one was surprised. “Yes, we knew,” they apparently said. “We could see it on her. We just didn't know who it was.” Until about seven months after the rape, I did not speak with any of the other members of the household. Respecting my approach, no one ever asked me about it, partially because in this context, understanding does not necessarily require words. But they did begin sharing their experiences with violence while never making me talk about mine unless I wanted to. This approach built bridges between us. Eleanor once put it in the following words: “You were hurt and will always be hurt, but it does not make you less or different; if anything, it makes you more.” By contrast, however, the few people I told back home in Germany or the United Kingdom worried that the rape would irrevocably change me and somehow make me less. They focused on the “everything will be OK, you are OK” narrative, with “OK” meaning “like before.” I did the same. When I disclosed what had happened, I did so by intertwining a statement about my well-being with the story: “Something happened to me but I will be OK.”
Yesterday dancing. Went well at first. Then approached by a man who wanted to dance. He came too close and I froze. M said I looked like I collapsed into myself, like I lost all of my power and became very small. What a disappointment. I believe I ruined everyone's night. They all had to walk me home after this. I told them not to bother and to stay. I know they hated going. I had been further than this. It's a f***ing disgrace. Then they look at me, the broken one, ask over and over whether I am OK. And I say yes, over and over because what else would I say? Their world and mine are worlds apart.
For Ann J. Cahill, the serious and potential lethal damage rape can cause lies in it being an “assault on a woman's underlying conditions of being” that “not only denies but also, at least temporarily, negates their capacity to act at all, let alone exercise their capacity to become other than what they currently are” (2001, 132). Rape, an act where something was “done to me” without my consent or participation, had dismantled “the reciprocity of intersubjectivity.” (Taylor, 2018, 441). Rape “broke” me “by destroying [my] personhood and hence the grounds for [my] own intelligibility” (Taylor, 2018, 441). After my rape, I internalized this individuation. I could no longer relate to others nor myself. When I felt an emotion, it was humiliation. Taylor describes humiliation “as a manifestation of the relationship one has to oneself” (2018, 435), with rape leading one to internalize the humiliation one experiences. Consequently, one does not only feel humiliated but becomes humiliated and cannot see oneself in any other way. All I was was stuck in the moment of being a person who is being raped. Unsurprisingly, my notion of overcoming was tied to the capacity to “act” and “to become other,” to become more than this event and feel more than humiliated. The continued self-blame and guilt (Gilligan, 2003), both toward myself and others, connected to setbacks in my progress.
There is an obvious contradiction here. I did not treat self as self-contained. Instead, I did appreciate that I am formed and shaped by that which is around me and with which I engage (experiences, opinions, perspectives, norms, relationships, behaviors) (Margalit, 1989, 125, cited in Taylor, 2018, 439). However, rather than appreciating that every experience shapes me and I can therefore not be reduced to one experience, I gave my rape near complete power to define my self-relation and stripped other experiences of the possibility of having any effect. Hence, while my rape was a defining moment that established myself as disgusting, the desire of someone who loved me could not change this self-relation. For years, I could not look at my hands without seeing my rapist holding them, much less other parts of my body. Avasahai Margalit illustrates this when he describes how victims internalize seeing “through the eyes of another” while still “respond[ing] from [their] own point of view” (1998, 121, cited in Taylor, 2018, 439). In the years after my rape, no matter how much love and desire people extended to me, I threw it back, explaining my self-relation as one of revulsion, making it inconceivable that I could be either loved or desired. When I had to lean on friends and family, this leaning made me feel like a burden, a failure, and a disappointment. I kept silent when I could and I never repeated myself.
But humiliation was not the only logic at play. Colonial and white ideas of safety and security as property played a role, too (Garland, 1999). Coming from a white, German, middle-class household, I had grown up in a world where safety and security were stable constants (Harris, 1993); where insecurity, violence and harm were, if at all present, somewhere in the shadows and befalling others. There are several reasons for this. The widespread lack of empathy with trauma victims can “result from an active fear of identifying with those whose terrifying fate forces us to acknowledge that we are not in control of our own” (Brison, 2011, xi). This is also due to a “cultural repression of memories of violence and victimization” (Brison, 2011, xi), especially concerning slavery, war, genocide, and forms of structural oppression and marginalization. Moreover, it is due to the colonial imposition of the European gender system, normalized and racialized (sexual) violence as part of the lives of women who have been dehumanized to fit the “coloniality of gender” (Lugones, 2010, 2016). Women of color and other women who resist such oppressive categorization are subordinated due to their gender and also racially understood to be semi-humans or nonhumans (Wynter, 2003). Thus, the enmeshing and interlocking (Adefarakan, 2011) of racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression make such women a “valid” target of violence (Berry et al., 2017; Stephen and Speed, 2021; Velásquez Estrada, 2022).
Acknowledging that the problem of sexual violence is collective and political requires examining the colonial makeup of perception. My starting point from a position of “safety”—or, as Brison calls it, from living “in a just world, in which nothing that is both terrible and undeserved will happen to us” (2011, 75)—is a position I had occupied without questioning what this “we/us” entails. I did not consider that it was due to my privilege that I thought this perspective is universal when it is not; it had been possible because of my lack of understanding of the inequalities I helped sustain. Getting hurt ruptured this house of cards and exposed me to the frailties of the world I had so carefully shielded myself from as part of a colonial and global violence paradigm.
Rape ripped to shreds this subconscious idea of safety as property and exposed the pitfalls of constructing inviolability as rights that one was entitled to, or even as properties to own. Looking away from violence, seeing it as something far from life, does not encourage preparation for or acceptance of the inevitability of pain, nor does it enable the integration of coping mechanisms into the rhythm of life. The collaborative immediacy of the Allentown response treated harm as an inevitable part of life that one cannot rise above but that one does not need to bow before either. There, no one saw me differently and no one made a big deal of it either. I, in contrast, put intense pressure on myself by way of the constant comparison with a highly unrealistic and unachievable “imagined image” (Carlbom, 2003) of a self that was “above this,” a self (whole, stable) I was not measuring up to.
OVERCOMING COLONIAL LOGICS AND BODY–MIND SPLITS
If you cannot look, then close your eyes. Explore your body with your own hands, see how it feels, see how nice it is. And then when you are really brave begin using a sex toy. It is an object, yes, a foreign party you introduce to your body but one which you can control. Only when you have new memories, then look at yourself again.
For the first time rejecting the emphasis I had put on seeing/witnessing, hearing, and speaking, I began to work with my body through touch and, slowly, my self-relation changed. With time, moments when I felt my rapist's hand on my back, when men who came close suddenly had his face, or when the rape started playing before my eyes as if someone had turned on a movie and then taken away the remote control, became less frequent. The persistence of these moments can be attributed to the one-sided power dynamic between myself and my rapist. Although I am subjected to his gaze, I am unable to influence his perception of me (Guenther, 2011, 61). By reestablishing a personal view of myself that was no longer stable, concrete, and whole but beautifully fluid and multirelational, I could slowly begin to see how others saw me: they did not see his hands when they looked at my hands, they saw no hand on my back, and to them, my body was a canvas they filled with their own interpretations, which were free of rape. Most importantly, I could begin relating to myself in new ways that had nothing to do with rape.
Understanding the concept of self (whole, stable) I had created and stuck to has helped me navigate the violence that was done to me and the violence I did to myself. I also became aware of the double logic I was applying to myself and my rapist. I stopped accepting my rapist's inhumane treatment of me as my permanent subject position by learning to view myself and my rapist as fragmented individuals. No longer seeing him as a concrete whole took away his ability to exercise his power and render me “less than human”. I began understanding that his perspective was likely inspired by systemic patriarchy, which led him to perceive a woman's body as an extension of his territory and placed me in an inherently subordinate position in relation to him simply because I am a woman. This led me to see his weaknesses, his shortcomings and failures, instead of his strength. It reconstituted my rape as a terrible experience but one that need not define me. Learning how to live with rape, how to love my body and mind despite the dark flashbacks, allowed me to move away from a notion of overcoming by erasure or rejection. Instead, I began seeing the humanity in my struggles to live on and appreciate trauma as the “product of an inexperience of inhumanity and the proof of the humanity of those who have endured it” (Fassin and Rechtman, 2009, 20).
I could now finally deindividualize the rape as “my rape” and see the wider sociopolitical issue. Overcoming rape would have meant compartmentalizing my rape as something personal and individual that was an attack against me, and from which I now needed to heal (stable, concrete self). This would have required me to distance myself from the fact that rape, like other forms of oppression, is a sociopolitical issue and an attack on the entire human organism that requires collective solutions. Indeed, as Taylor argues to combat sexual violence we must move away from capitalist individuation which facilitates the blaming of women and an idea of the inevitability of sexual violence but instead see it as the “effect of human-generated sociopolitical conditions” which gives us the possibility of resources to combat it (2018, 443; see also Hall, 2004, 6). Such a process requires examining harm along intersectional lines and globally dismantling one-dimensional individualizing paradigms of suffering. I am now acutely aware of the role and place of rape in the world, its manifold manifestations, and its consequences, from acceptance to impunity to putting the burden of proof on victims. I have educated myself about the ways I had contributed to harm and how I can do my part in lessening violence. And I found comfort in alliances. I have received manifold gifts from postcolonial literature on trauma, particularly on embracing wounds rather than hiding them away. After moving beyond self-help blogs and forums that told me to center myself and become a strong survivor, I began reading Jay Rajiva's (2021) brilliant writing on trauma and animism. Now the panther that had dominated my dreams for years began making sense. When I consumed the words of Patricia Grace, who in Baby No-Eyes (1989) likens the narration of traumatic memories to unwinding bandages, or the powerful contributions to This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga (1981), which speak of vulnerability and power as collective resources, the hardened, packaged, ordered, and hidden-away parts of myself began flowing again. Such work made trauma accessible, expressible, unique, and shareable at the same time. It showed me that we can relate, we can connect, we can support and strengthen, while never assuming to experience in the same way (relational, fluid selves). It was postcolonial studies and social sciences that helped me see that trauma can have both “centripetal and centrifugal tendencies” that, despite their immense negative effects, can also render possible belonging, kinship, and mutual trust (Erikson 1994, 236).
I began seeing the barriers I had built between “my way” and that of Mohammed and Darren. Is there really that much difference between trauma-induced flashbacks and the “bond”? I am connected to my rapist. He comes to me in my sleep, approaches when I sit on freestanding chairs, glances at me through the windows of malls and trams. Maybe the proposed ritual had less to do with him and his semen and more to do with giving me the possibility of closure by confronting what he had done to my body and then reclaiming it. While to me the medicine man is a stranger to whom I did not want to tell “my secret,” to Sierra Leoneans meresin and alfa men (herbalists and spiritual leaders) are, as Aisha Fofana-Ibrahim writes, trusted experts whose approaches have been proven to be effective. They “are already in the lives of those traumatized; they are their neighbors and relatives and have been there lending their support in sadness and in joy” (Fofana-Ibrahim, 2009, 262). Additionally, they “understand and attribute problems in a way that increases social status, rather than conferring a stigmatizing label on mental illness” (Solomon, 2013, 3, cited in Fofana-Ibrahim, 2009, 262) and they can “provide continuous care through visitations” (Fofana-Ibrahim, 2009, 261). In a society where the communal is held above the individual, turning to community members makes as much sense as relying on psychologists and counselors in Germany, and thus on strangers who are removed from our lives. Yet, regardless of where one is from, individuals may find such approaches more or less helpful, and prescribing how one should respond to rape or trauma is neither helpful nor appropriate. Hence, such comparisons should not be done to cement culture or hyperparticularize ways of coping. Offering an analysis of different ways of coping is not then to argue that A people cope in A ways whereas B people cope in B ways (such notions of personhood do not exist, in my view, and “local” and “global” are deeply mutually influenced rather than separate). Instead, they demonstrate that there is not just one way of experiencing, expressing, or healing from trauma. The registers mentioned here like withdrawal, silence, PTSD, therapy, individual resilience, ritual, communality, suffering together, and bearing are just some out of many other possibilities. I have foregrounded cultural and subjective frames here, but I could have also focused on the various roles we occupied or on the relationships between us. I could have examined my role as researcher and rape victim, the role of my collaborators, friends, family and so on along the lines of, for example, gender, age, or experience. This work is not then about foregrounding a parameter as the parameter but about showing that responses to rape vary. People respond differently, they have different needs and may find different things helpful. I believe that we can build on the knowledge and experiences we have together to best support those who suffer. Having access to a multitude of coping registers may help prevent further harm to those who experience trauma, and therefore aid their recovery. This may allow us to deconstruct the hegemony of individualized suffering.
DECONSTRUCTING AN UNDERSTANDING OF SAFETY AND SECURITY AS PROPERTY AND SHEDDING THE VIOLENCE OF A CONCRETE SELF
My rape and the five years thereafter show that my habitual response to trauma, and the responses of my family, university, and so on, were aligned with the Eurocentric, individualized formulation of trauma theory of the 1990s. Rape causes a moment of “moral breakdown” (Zigon, 2007), which disorients and shakes us. At such moments, taking a step back and reflecting on how one acts is hardly possible. Instead, the habitual takes over. In contrast, decentering requires us to render subconscious assumptions and reactions conscious.
Two factors allowed me to begin recognizing the harm of my approach and working toward decentering it. Being raped in Sierra Leone and remaining in the country for 11 months after but then battling the long-term consequences in the United Kingdom, Germany, and now the Netherlands has allowed me to reflect on the differences and meeting points between the various approaches I came to learn about, and their colonial and postcolonial logics. I thereby answered Michael Rothberg's (2008), Irene Visser's (2015), and Aisha Fofana-Ibrahim's (2009) call to undertake comparative analyses beyond Eurocentric frameworks. In this article I have showed that whereas Mohammed and Darren saw the rape as the beginning of a relationship between my rapist and myself, I saw it as the end of my relationship with my sense of self as “being OK.” Whereas I individualized my rape, Darren and Mohammed saw coping registers rooted in community. We had different temporalities, too. My reaction entailed a complete refusal to engage with what had happened at first, withdrawing instead to a place below the world, where life remained bearable. Only much later did I slowly begin the hard work of removing myself from that place, constantly putting pressure on myself to “improve” in a linear fashion.
In contrast, Darren and Mohammed had urged me to confront what had happened immediately, to avoid a separation from the world, and to share my pain with the community so as not to “feed the darkness.” Additionally, while my Sierra Leonean friends read the signs of my body, I discarded my body and focused instead on healing my “mind” by “thinking through” and, much later, “speaking about.” These differences expose the fact that despite me having deconstructed a mind–body split and a concrete self in my work, I had not done so within myself. I still held onto a Eurocentric, colonial conception of self that is protected and, while constantly evolving, has a stable core. I saw rupture, they saw continuity. I saw the rape as a defining moment that had shattered my previously intact being, while Mohammed and Darren saw wounds as integral parts of fragmented, relational selves.
How does thinking about individual experience in terms of trauma, and collective memory in terms of wounds, transform our vision of humanity? How does representing social responses in terms of healing, whether in the literal terms of psychiatry or as a political metaphor, alter our way of interacting with the world? (2009, 22)
The approach of the Sierra Leoneans I engaged with was very different to mine and that of people who sought to help me in Europe in their temporality, focus (individual versus communitarian), and perception of trauma (Cartesian, event-based versus embodied, processual), and self (concrete, whole, stable, fixed versus fragmented, relational, fluid). Yet what I have come to understand as PTSD and what they understand as a “bond” is much the same. Underneath our different approaches, we share an understanding of the longevity of trauma and the impact it has on how we see ourselves and others, and how we engage with the world we live in. Hence, I would add to Fassin and Rechtman's questions a question about the communalities between such apparently different mechanisms. If people were no longer confined by their embodied subjectivity and weighed down by cultural registers that seem to have no alternatives, if people could profit from accessing different ways of coping as I fortunately could, what ways of living, feeling, and doing may become possible? If we would treat cultural repertoires of coping not as hierarchical but as a necessary and enriching multiplicity on a level playing field, how may we then enhance our understanding of trauma?
This brings me to my second reason. I firmly believe decentering to be one of the most important tasks of my life, or arguably of any life, so I work on bringing the logics and undercurrents behind my (in)actions, reactions, and presuppositions that have not often been reflected upon to the fore. Why, one could ask, would I write an article about my coping with rape over the years? Why would I make myself so vulnerable to the reading eyes of strangers who will now know how I see myself naked and what my deepest fears are? I do it because if we seek to move toward a fugitive anthropology that holds embodied aspects of thinking and doing accountable and “centers an embodied feminist ethos” (Berry et al., 2017, 561), we must begin with ourselves. This piece is, therefore, not written as a reckoning with Euro-American logics “out there” but within me. It is part of my journey of understanding the violence I subjected myself to by the logics I embodied and helped sustain. It is an attempt to decenter and open up my constrained views. Only if we begin with ourselves can we bring to life pedagogies that support collective re-existence, plurivocality, and multiplicity; pedagogies that are not conditioned upon “the theoretical tenets and conceptual instruments of Western thought” (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018, 7). This is necessary not least because, with rape being a fundamental problem in academia and fieldwork, it requires as much a disciplinary—here anthropological—solution as it does a personal positioning (Shandy and Torres, 2021).
Rendering subconscious assumptions visible is no easy or straightforward process. It cuts the ground from under one's feet. It is forever unfinished, painful, and confronts one with one's complicity in and embodiment of colonial violence. Conceiving of alternatives is hard work when the habitual is colonial. Yet, it can be a path toward healing. Indeed, the violence of colonial logics also affect those who benefit(ted) from them. I am stuck in colonial violence if my mother and I cannot have a conversation about my rape, if I feel that I need to hide it, or am dirtied by it. If I feel the self-created pressure to solve my trauma on my own while the logics of resilience make me feel like I am constantly failing. If I am unable to see that my Sierra Leonean friends’ approaches to the bond and my experienced PTSD have similarities, and that their approach to dealing with trauma communally and together is not insane (see Quijano, 2007). If I constantly evaluate these responses against my own, I am unable to escape the colonial binary in which I am the standard. If I constantly reproduce such colonial violence it limits, blinds, and confines me (see Dussel, 1994; Grosfoguel, 2011). The colonial is then in me and, so long I do not decenter it, it will live in me and I will pass it on. Beginning with our own practices and ways of being and decentering singular perspectives, (e.g., Mignolo, 2000) hierarchies and binaries, will make room for advancing the path toward fostering a greater ethics of care. Ultimately, this can show us that another world is possible (Gordon, 2014; Lorde, 2007), both in how we respond to the trauma of rape and how we treat the role and place of rape in the world. Rape responses, therapy, and healing are then not about “single stories” or universalist tropes but about treating one another seriously in our own individuality and subjectivity, about learning from cultural repertoires, not to focus on and cement differences but to help each other figure out what works, together. It is, in short, about fostering dignity and respect through a “balance of stories” (Adichie, 2009, referring to Chinua Achebe) that may be expressed by various means, whether spoken, written, drawn, practiced, embodied, and so on. This can then help formulate a multidirectional, plural response.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I cannot provide a complete list of people whose presence or works helped me survive, who offered me glimpses into a world that can be possible, and who cared, but I am deeply grateful. I especially thank Darren, Mohamed, Papani, Eleanor, Kadiatu, Micha, Chris, Marcin, Vera, Anna, Mailee, Ashlee, Anastasiia, Youri, Roland, and Karin. I thank the anonymous reviewers for their nuanced feedback, which helped me further improve the piece and sharpen my argument. I am also grateful to the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology for supporting the publication of this work.
ENDNOTES
- 1 For example, Erica Caple James (2015) shows how in Haiti, many people suffering from trauma continue to work and perform childcare and daily routines, and Carl Gutiérrez-Jones (2003) analyzes the significance of humor in relation to trauma in Chicano culture.
- 2 The definition of trauma has also become more inclusive in the later editions of the DSM, namely DSM-IV (1994), DSM-IV-Text Revision (2000), and DSM-V (2013). It now includes sexual violence within the core premise of trauma, encompasses a continuum of responses, enabling trauma to occur in varying degrees, and extends to vicarious trauma, which pertains to individuals who witness or receive traumatic events. Furthermore, these later editions have eliminated the emphasis on individual traumatization, thereby expanding the scope of the definition (Visser, 2015, 252). DSM-V-Text Revision (2022) made further changes.
- 3 Being “below” and “severed” also meant I did not realize I needed medical attention and somehow managed to get home despite being seriously hurt.
- 4 Similarly, Susan J. Brison (2011) writes about how she initially said no when loved ones asked her whether she had been raped.
- 5 For example, Lila Abu-Lughod (2005) on “the defloration of the virgin” in Bedouin society, or Roseline K. Njogu (2016) on how patriarchy and the internationalization of English monogamy shape rape law.
Biography
Luisa T. Schneider is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and a Research Partner at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.
