Screaming is Required
(c) Melina Magdalena 2008
Re-reading Alice Walker this week - The Complete Stories - and in particular Advancing Luna - and Ida B. Wells (You Can't Keep A Good Woman Down, 1982), I vacillated between blazing anger and utter despondency. As usual, it took a day or two to recognise my anger. Despondency is still the far easier reaction for a socially conditioned middle class white woman in 2008.
Luna, the central character of this short story, is a white woman who didn't scream when a black man raped her as she worked for the Civil Rights Movement in southern USA of 1965.
What makes me want to scream, and LOUDLY, is not the idea that pale, patient, passive, unattractive, flat-chested Luna martyrs herself in the apparently misplaced notion that in so doing, she might spare the idealistic Civil Rights Workers the possibility that yet another young black man lose his dignity and his life by getting lynched as a rapist (even though in the scenario painted by Walker he might well have deserved such a fate). Yes, Luna's reply to the question
"Why didn't you scream?" is "You know why." And yes, we are told that subsequently, Luna goes on to date and sleep with exclusively black men including the rapist himself, though Walker leaves the circumstances of this night purposefully ambiguous. Luna appears to suffer from the idea that her duty is to count herself out as a human being with rights or feelings or opinions, because she is white. Like many a rape survivor, she suffers from a grandiose idea of her own personal responsibility, and she continues to punish herself for falling prey to the violence of someone she was trying to help. Walker's questions Luna's belief that she did the right thing by not screaming. This issue looms as the divisive catalyst for the destruction of a close friendship between two women - one white, and one black.
What angers me most is not the idea that a black man might use rape as a weapon to vicariously take revenge on white man for the wrongs he has suffered. Walker does not trivialise this idea; nor does she discount it altogether. In fact, she raises the idea that white men may have hired black men to rape white women in order to prevent the peaceful modelling of interracial projects to further the Civil Rights Movement of the times. I am neither shocked, nor offended by the idea that rape might be used by a man of any colour as a weapon of power. This is commonplace.
I am aware that anger as a destructive force invites people to make scapegoats out of others who are perceived to have less right to power than those who are acting out of their anger, no matter what its source. A person who is complacent and smug; comfortable with himself or herself, and who goes about the world with confidence about his or her place in the world, appears to be powerful. Such a person is less often prone to being attacked by someone looking to do something with his or her anger. The projected idea of "less right to power" is instead quite often manifested in a person who seems frail, harmless, vulnerable and weak. A person whose anger is a blazing fury, will target the vulnerable, failing to recognise that this in itself most often constitutes revictimisation. Luna fits the description of victim nicely, thank you very much.
But this also, is beside the point. I do not seek to excuse or understand a rapist.
What angers me most is this idea that for an act of cruelty, violation and annihilation to constitute rape seems to require the person who is a victim of this crime, to scream. Once again the onus is upon her to manifest the crime. If she fails to scream, the idea that she was raped at all is called into question, no matter what the circumstances, and no matter what her reasoning for not screaming.
I acknowledge that making a noise to alert passersby, neighbours and people who may be able to stop an attack is extremely important in some circumstances. Furthermore, a woman who can scream and shout and who defends herself against her attacker is sometimes successful in scaring him away.
While we continue to be silent about rape, on the pretext that we are protecting the victim from being further humiliated or injured, rape continues to be a hidden, private crime. We need to scream! We do! But to question the validity of a rape survivor's experience on the basis that it may not have been rape at all, if she failed to scream and struggle in the moment that she was being violated, is a surefire way to revictimise her. Survival constitutes responding appropriately to the situation. It is not always appropriate to scream, and she should not be held responsible for the rape, if in that moment of surviving, she chooses not to scream.
So I thought I'd make a quick list, off the top of my head, of reasons it might be entirely appropriate that a woman notscream. Perhaps my readers will add to this list.
- When a knife is held to her throat, a woman need not scream.
- When her tongue has been cut out, as was done to the young El Salvadorean woman in Romero, she need not scream.
- When she is only a few months old and a man bought the right to take her virginity on the basis that raping her will take away his HIV, we cannot accuse her of failing to defend herself if she does not scream.
- When the rapist is one of a group of sadistic men, screaming is likely to not only incite worse physical damage, but excite these sadists. In such a situation, a woman need not scream.
- When her sleeping children are being threatened with violence and murder should she make any noise to wake them, a woman who is being raped, need not scream.
- When past experience has taught her that screaming will cause her rapist-husband-uncle-father-grandfather to choke her as well as raping her, she need not scream.
- When she has been drugged senseless and is unaware of what is being done to her, a woman need not scream.
- When the rapists are holding her younger sister, or her husband, or another family member hostage, in order to force her to submit quietly, and they are threatening to kill this person if she should struggle against them, a woman need not scream.
- When a rapist has done his worst, and believing she is already dead, is about to dump her body and flee, and if screaming were to alert him to the fact that she is still alive, a woman need not scream.
