Lacuna Read online

  I know this because I’ve tried. I’ve pushed the envelope so far it has fallen off the table. Take the last conference I went to. It was a colloquium on sexual violence convened by the well-meaning people of Rape Awareness South Africa (RASA). I was invited to take part in a panel discussion on victim blaming. It was called, “She was wearing a short skirt—seeking a discourse beyond patriarchy for rape survivors.”

  My fellow panellists included a medical doctor who had a lot of experience treating rape victims in state hospitals, an academic who wrote about sexual violence, and another rape victim like myself. The panel was facilitated by a member of RASA. We were all educated women, capable of speaking at the most sophisticated level about this topic. RASA hadn’t wasted its time with your common or garden rape victims who don’t know Derrida from a hole in the ground. We were talking the same language and we were fluent in it.

  Well, most of us.

  I caused a stir at the beginning of the session by refusing to call myself a rape survivor. I insisted on referring to myself as a victim instead.

  “They didn’t try to kill me,” I explained. “I didn’t do anything heroic. I couldn’t escape or fight back. I was a victim. They made me into a victim and refusing to acknowledge that doesn’t change the truth.”

  The survivor next to me shifted in her seat, and managed not to say anything. The facilitator nodded earnestly and spoke about the plurality of experience and the need to allow rape survivors to craft their own narratives. I got a pass. For the time being.

  There was some general discussion about the way rape is reported in the media, and the words that are chosen to describe the victim, her behaviour, and her clothing choices. I caused another awkward moment by asking why we don’t call it “survivor blaming” instead of “victim blaming.”

  “If there are no victims any more, how can we speak meaningfully about victim blaming? We should call it survivor blaming for the sake of consistency. But it doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it? For the sake of our agenda, we need to decide when to cast women as heroes and when to cast them as victims.”

  This led to a discussion about how to be more strategic in our activism without denying the subjectivity of lived experience. The subtext was that my words were seriously off-message, but that I was allowed to say them because I had earned my stripes in the trenches of sexual violence.

  We came to the moment the audience had been waiting for. Each panellist was invited to describe what had happened to her in her own words. “Reclaiming our stories in a safe, non-judgemental space” was how it was billed. Am I wrong to suspect the audience of voyeurism? This was the most popular session of the entire conference. The venue was bursting with delegates who had come to watch us “reclaim our stories.” No other session had attracted such numbers.

  There were at least as many men present as women, and possibly more. The other sessions had been overwhelmingly attended by women. This didn’t feel like a safe space at all, but what did I know?

  We kicked off with the doctor who came right out and said she had never been raped. She was attending the colloquium for two reasons—to share her expertise as one who had treated, patched up, and counselled any number of rape survivors, and to learn more about the survivor’s point of view with the intention of improving the service she offered. Her words were met with quiet respect, even from me. This was a woman who had seen horrors we couldn’t contemplate. She had treated babies and toddlers. Her emotions were assaulted every day, and she kept going back for more.

  The academic writer had a drearily familiar story. She was over fifty. Gravity had grabbed spitefully at the skin on her face. The pouches under her eyes drooped and the skin of her jawline hung in soft folds. Only her hair defied middle age with its mahogany resilience.

  While she was at university, a boy had walked her home after a party. They were deep in conversation about the respective methodologies they had chosen for their Psychology Honours dissertations. He came in for coffee so they could continue their conversation. Her housemates were out, and they were alone in the flat.

  After coffee, he tried to kiss her. She responded with surprise and indignation, having had no idea he was contemplating any such thing. She asked him to leave, but instead he held her down and raped her. When she screamed, he hit her hard in the face with a closed fist. He failed to achieve orgasm and blamed her for this, saying he would tell his friends she was a lousy fuck. Then he left.

  She sat in class with him every day for the rest of the year.

  “Why didn’t you report him?” the facilitator asked.

  She shrugged. “This was the eighties. Girls who made rape accusations on campus were systematically shamed, even by other women. They called it slut’s remorse. They would have said I felt guilty for being easy, so I was ‘crying rape.’ They would have accused me of trying to ruin the poor boy’s life.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He’s married with three grown-up daughters. He has a successful psychology practice in Maine. He’s even sent me a few friend requests on Facebook. We know a lot of the same people, so he pops up on my timeline all the time.”

  The facilitator made sympathetic noises about the secondary victimisation of rape survivors, and how this can go on throughout their lives. I reflected on the fact that my rapists didn’t appear in my social media feeds. We had no mutual acquaintances, no overlapping social circles.

  I am that rare creature—a woman who was raped by strangers. This puts me in a tiny minority. Most women are raped by people they know.

  As a case in point, the next survivor began to tell her story. It was also set on a university campus—that flashpoint for sexual abuse. This woman was much younger than the academic, but not quite as young as me. I guessed her to be in her early thirties. She was almost transparent with her milk-white skin and gingery-pink hair.

  “He was my sister’s ex-boyfriend. They only went out for three months, but I’d seen him at family functions and we had always got on well. I knew he was a cat lover like me and he was also studying Fine Art. I’d always liked him, but obviously he was off-limits. I would never consider hooking up with my sister’s ex.”

  The facilitator nodded, and we nodded too.We knew the rules. One’s sister’s ex-boyfriend was off-limits. Naturally.

  But sometimes, things happen. In fact, things happen quite frequently.

  “I ran into him at the pub one evening. I didn’t even know he was in town.We got talking, and soon the group of people he was with merged with the group I was with and we ended up chatting for hours. I told him about the two kittens I’d just got, and he said he’d love to see them. So at closing time, I invited him back to my place.”

  “Did you have any flatmates?” asked the academic. Like the rest of us, she was seeing the parallels between this story and hers.

  “No, at that stage I was living alone. I was already a postgraduate and had enough bursary money that I could afford not to share. Anyway, we’d both been drinking all evening, but when we got back to my place, I opened a bottle of wine for us. He admired the kittens and we sat on the sofa together to let them climb all over us. I remember him saying something about being attracted to me, but I immediately said that nothing could ever happen because of my sister.”

  There was more nodding and murmurs of agreement.

  “After that it gets fuzzy because I’d been drinking so much. I think the cats settled in their basket and went to sleep.We stayed on the sofa drinking and talking. I remember putting my feet in his lap, so he could rub them. My sister always said he gave the best foot rubs. Then we started kissing, but I said, ‘This is wrong. We mustn’t do this.’ So, we broke apart. But then after a while we were kissing again.”

  There was silence in the venue. The delegates were leaning forward, straining to catch her words as her voice got softer and softer. She rubbed her hands over her face and
took a deep breath.

  “Then it gets really fuzzy. I remember us having sex. I remember saying my sister’s name. Someone was laughing. For years, I thought it was me, but my therapist says it must have been him. We woke up in my bed the next morning. I don’t even remember how we got there. There were two used condoms—one in the sitting room and one in the bedroom. I flushed them away without thinking. I flushed away the evidence. Things were awkward between us that morning. He had a cup of coffee and a bowl of cornflakes and left. I knew he was flying back to Johannesburg that afternoon.

  “I spent most of the day lying on my sofa with the curtains closed. I felt terrible. My mouth was dry. I had a pounding headache and my eyeballs throbbed. I couldn’t stomach any food. My therapist says this was my body’s way of telling me I’d been violated.”

  “What happened next?” asked the facilitator.

  “It was only years later when I was at a sexual violence rally that I realised what had happened. We were listening to testimonials from women who had been raped. They were so brave. They were like heroes. As I listened to their stories and heard the crowd applauding, I realised it had happened to me too! I had been raped. I was a survivor, just like them. I had been denying it all those years.

  “I can still remember the chill of the floor through my shoes and the way the noise of the crowd sang in my ears as I got up from my seat and walked to the front of the hall to tell my story. Everyone gasped. They knew me as a sexual violence activist—a sympathiser and advocate—but none of them had suspected what I really was—a survivor, just like them. They roared in solidarity, and the love I felt in that hall gave me the strength to tell my story for the first time. After I’d finished speaking, I began to sob as years of pain came flooding out of me. I thought I’d released all my pain and anger. Little did I know that was just the beginning. For two years afterwards, I suffered from severe post-traumatic stress disorder and depression as I finally allowed myself to feel the violation of what had happened to me on that night.”

  She sank back into her seat as though exhausted and took a sip of water. Spontaneous applause broke out in the venue. Some delegates rose to their feet in recognition of her bravery and honesty.

  “That’s an incredible story, Marion. Thank you for sharing it with us.” The facilitator smiled at her. “And now we have Lucy, who will also tell us about her journey.”

  I could tell from the start that I didn’t have the audience’s attention. They were still swept up by Marion’s narrative. They couldn’t keep their eyes off her. She sat next to me, glowing palely under the fluorescent lights.

  Next to her, I was a creature of rude health and robust appearance. My hair was brown and my cheeks pink. My eyes shone with vitality. Sometimes I looked in the mirror and knew exactly why Coetzee chose me as his model for the bovine, unflappable fiction-Lucy. We were both sturdy of calf and thick of wrist.

  I didn’t have Marion’s gift for storytelling.

  “Six men broke into my father’s farmhouse and raped me.”

  See? No narrative arc. No character development. Just ten words dropped into the auditorium where they sank without trace. Is it any wonder the audience were restless and whispering? The facilitator had promised them a journey, but this was more like a mid-air stall. I had no progress to report, no growth. I wasn’t even able to refer to myself as a rape survivor. I was still a victim. It remained to be seen whether I survived this in any meaningful sense.

  The facilitator nodded encouragingly, giving me every opportunity to develop my story.When it dawned on her that that was it, she smiled and turned back to the audience.

  “Thank you, panellists, for sharing your stories with us. At this stage, I’m going to throw the discussion open to the floor. I’m sure the audience have many questions to put to our panellists.”

  A forest of hands shot up.

  “I have a question for Marion. First of all, I want to say how inspiring I found your story and how incredibly brave I think you are. Then I wanted to ask if you have been the victim of any negativity from friends or family since you came out with your story? Or have they mostly been supportive?”

  Marion shook her head. “I’ve encountered plenty of negativity, I’m afraid. Mostly in the form of victim-blaming, which, as we all know, is patriarchy’s way of attempting to silence women. I’ve been asked why I let him into my home if I didn’t want to have sex.What was I wearing at the time? Why did I drink that much? The usual questions women get asked when they report a rape.”

  “Yes, Lucy?”

  I looked at the facilitator in surprise. Then I realised I had my hand in the air. This is not protocol. You don’t have to raise a hand when you are one of the panellists. Some long-dormant classroom instinct had reared its head.

  Why was my hand up anyway? What did I want to say?

  Then I opened my mouth and my tirade came spewing out.

  “Marion, do you really think you can claim rape victim status equal to mine? You think your experience is even one fraction as traumatic as mine? You think that because some vague question mark hangs over how meaningfully you were able to consent because you were drunk at the time, your experience was anything like mine? Your so-called rapist was drunk too. Maybe you were the one who raped him—have you ever thought of that?”

  “Now just a minute . . .”

  “You want to claim survivor status to give yourself legitimacy as an activist. But by putting yourself in the same category as me, you are denigrating my experience. You are trivialising it. You are dragging what happened to me down to the level of a drunken university bonk that you later regretted. I won’t let you do that. If they gave marks for rape trauma, mine would get an A-plus and yours would get a D-minus.”

  * * *

  My therapist stares at me. I have told her about the conference, and what I said to Marion the Pseudo-Rape-Survivor.

  This isn’t the first time I’ve felt her disgust. She tries to keep the non-judgemental facade intact, but I keep crumbling it.

  L. BASCOMBE: You didn’t really say that, did you?

  ME: Okay, no, I didn’t. I wanted to. I wanted to say it, and I’ve fantasised about saying it ever since.

  L. BASCOMBE: Well, that’s something at least. A while ago you were obsessed with rape survivors whom you perceived as having a harder time than you. Do you remember? Women who were poor and struggling and had no access to medical or psychiatric care?

  ME: I remember.

  L. BASCOMBE: Now you seem to be concerned with survivors who have an easier time than you do—women who weren’t violently attacked, or who were raped by only one man, or whatever the case may be. Why do you think you have this need to compare yourself to others? To situate your own experience within a hierarchy of rapes?

  ME: I’ve never been a high achiever. I never got the best marks or the highest praise, or the most prestigious scholarships. Why can’t I be allowed to excel at this one thing? Why can’t I be the most tragic rape victim?

  L. BASCOMBE: I don’t always know when you are being facetious. Your rape was appalling—you know that. It was in all the newspapers. It was turned into a bestselling book. You’ve said yourself that your friends and family are struck dumb by the awfulness of what happened to you. They don’t have the words to begin to talk to you about it.

  ME: Then I should have been the star of that panel. Not Marion Whatshername. She should have deferred to me. The audience should have been more interested in my story than in hers. Instead they fawned on her and ignored me. And she wasn’t even raped. Not really.

  L. BASCOMBE: She had her agency taken away from her at a moment when she was in no position to consent meaningfully to sexual intercourse. It is probably the very ambiguity of the situation that troubles her the most—and the fact that there are gaps in her memory.

  ME: I’m sure there are gaps in his memory too. They were both d
runk as skunks. Who’s to say she wasn’t the rapist and he the victim? He wasn’t in any position to consent either.

  L. BASCOMBE: By the very nature of sexual intercourse, the man is more likely to be the aggressor. You know that, Lucy. Your feminist studies must have shown you that.

  ME: So, are you saying that every act of sexual intercourse with a drunk woman is rape?

  L. BASCOMBE: If her consent was not fully or meaningfully given, then yes. No one should have sex with a woman whose judgement is impaired by alcohol or drugs or mental challenges. You know this.

  ME: But still . . . my rape was worse than hers. Wasn’t it?

  L. BASCOMBE: This is pointless. It is meaningless to apportion degrees of terribleness to rape survivors. Trauma is a personal thing. One woman may process an event more quickly than another. PTSD can manifest itself immediately, or only years after the event. There is no correct or appropriate response to rape. There are as many responses as there are survivors.

  * * *

  And so, I am in the wrong again. My feelings are invalid and my responses inappropriate. I can’t even get this right, this business of being a rape victim. I am the wrong kind of victim—the kind that goes off-brand.

  People are particularly shocked by my wrongness because fiction-Lucy is so very right. She is a noble creature who harbours no bitterness. I, on the other hand, am a tightly wound ball of bitterness. I seethe with resentment. People expect me to be calm and forgiving. It is a great disappointment to them to discover that I am a rage-filled harpy.

  I should take fiction-Lucy as my model. Whenever I don’t know what to do, I should ask myself, WWFLD? What would fiction-Lucy do?

  My friend Moira thinks this is a good idea. She thinks I could sort my whole life out like this.

  “Fiction-Lucy wouldn’t live in this chaos.”

  She has come to my place to help me track down John Coetzee. She has access to departmental websites and online bulletin boards that are now closed to me. My status at the university has been downgraded to “inactive.” First, I was on leave. Then I was on sabbatical. Then I was on leave-of-absence. Now I am inactive.