Ars Poetica — American Ontology

FEATURE

Ars Poetica of a Survivor Story
London Pinkney

Poesis

There is no good way to begin a story about abuse. It always feels like a disruption, like a rock through a window. My therapist says that I intellectualize my feelings too much. It’s taken work to say I’m traumatized, rather than curving my pain into some kind of metaphor or becoming hyperbolic. But even six years after the last time I was raped, I still find myself grabbing for figurative language to describe how catastrophic abuse is.

Abuse is a stone. A weight. It’s my shadow. Even now, regrettably, the unhealed parts of myself believe it is still my fault. This pain is something I’d return if I had the receipt. But it’s mine — to live around, to speak about, to hold.

I have always told myself I would not write about this. It was too hot to touch, primarily because I feared retaliation from my ex (let’s call him XXXXX). Much like in our relationship, my silence kept me safe. Being an artist makes having trauma difficult because both writers and sane folks¹ alike treat my life like fodder for the work. And as an essayist, this is true. To quote Oroma Elewa, I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to better. But when I am met with the idea that my abuse would make a good story, I know the audience is not interested in me, but rather, the details of my pain. I become an icon of resilience, pathologized, Lifetime Movie-ified to hell and back.

And I can’t blame them for this. I do it, too. I grew up in a house where my mama would turn on local news and say, Lemme watch something to feel better about my life. Whether it was true crime or chisme, I thought I was participating in an exercise of empathy, but rather, I was engaging in a necrophilic apathy. And as a writer and reformed emo-grrl, I was trained to find artfulness in trauma, to examine how people fall into situations, to tie narratives off with a bow. Every word, every character is of importance and design. Abuse doesn’t work that way. There is no lesson — shit just happens. Some days I wonder if my callousness led me to forever be viewed through the lens of the hellscape someone else created for me.

Though there are times I find safety in that lens. Some days I go back to the nine hundred and twenty-five pages of evidence I had for my Title IX case against XXXXX because that world feels like the only life that is real. Sometimes, I am still a twenty-one year old girl who woke up between the wall and a mattress, covered in cobwebs, having just been raped by her boyfriend days after she graduated with a bachelor’s degree. I can still remember banging my fists on his hairy chest, wailing I’m afraid, before he thrusted into me three times.

What did I learn from that?
That saying I’m afraid to a person who is determined to rape you will not make it stop.
But then what?

Seriously, what is next?

The next morning, I pulled myself up from between the wall and bed. I took two Advil because I slept with a jammed shoulder, then took a shower. I washed the cum out of me and was careful to hang my towel over the side of the shower curtain the way XXXXX liked — folded over once, hotdog style. He told me the way I folded towels shows I didn’t have any house-training. During this time of my life, I wasn’t present, just an entity experiencing the world through vague senses and cues.

Pancakes. I went into the kitchen, and saw he made scrambled eggs too. I hate scrambled eggs, but I ate them to not be called ungrateful.

You were a bad girlfriend last night, he said.

I’m sorry. This was my line, I always hit the mark. And while I didn’t know what I did, I knew better than to ask, because he’d tell me. He always told me.

You slept wild. Kept kicking me. I had to sleep on the couch.

I’m so sorry, I said. Now you’re making be breakfast. It was always good to point out the obvious. He turned on Mystery Science Theater, Venture Brothers or some other Adult Swim bullshit that came out when he was my age, and I concentrated on my chewing. The sound of the TV fell away. I barely registered him sitting next to me, too focused on investigating the dull, hollow ache of my pelvis.

You didn’t laugh, he said. You’re doing it wrong. He jumped up from the couch, and sounded like he was going to sob. Why do you always have to do this? Why do you always have to hurt me? Why can’t we be happy?

I’m sorry, I’m just hungry. I remember making the calculated decision to voice a want. Do we have any hot sauce?

His face fell. XXXXX walked to the kitchen, the wooden floors lurched beneath him with each step. He came back with a bottle of Crystal Hot Sauce. It’s my favorite, and I remember bankrolling the fact that he bought it as a reason to stay in this relationship for months too long. See, I’d say to myself, He cares. He didn't hand the bottle to me, but poured the hot sauce himself. The bottle disappeared around his fist as he shook it onto my eggs. There’s no more hot sauce. I looked at him, too afraid to acknowledge it was empty, doing so would be admitting there’s a fault — with him, with this relationship. He licked the crusty rim of the Crystal bottle and spat it on my eggs. His spit bubbles and the red flecks of hot sauce covered them. I ate anyway. My body was there, but I had left. He preferred it that way.

Something funny happened on the TV and I laughed and laughed and laughed.

See: this is not my first rodeo. I have been purposely unloved before and I know how to survive. When someone is abused there are four ways to respond: you can flee, you can freeze, you can fight, and you can fawn. I have always chosen to fawn. I’d transform myself into a fun-house mirror and I tell myself I’ve always been like this, distorting my memories and desires to reflect the best in others. This was my sleight of hand, my way to stay alive, not realizing with every refraction I lose myself.

That is a story — one I am trying not to assign meaning to. I have shared enough of myself with therapists, stenographers, judges, college advisors, at least two pro-bono lawyers, RAINN phone operators, suicide hotline providers, and a rotating cast of friends and lovers to know that I don’t need to interpret this. My job is to give. I’ve learned how to curate this narrative for an audience: how long it should be, which details to include, which to soften or withhold depending on their tolerance. I never consider myself in the telling. I am an endless well, an open book. Everything about me is open. Everything is endless. And that is why I am writing this now. My life is stitched together in fragments and gestures. I live somewhere between forgiveness and rage. This is that third space. And it is mine. I reach into my chest and pull out the stone I carry. There is nothing to do but hold it.

Here — this is for you.

Poema

The most dangerous time for victims is after they leave. When you’re still with them, you’re giving your abuser what they want, access, a possession. By then you’ve probably mastered your coping mechanism, learned how to perform it. I was good at making my fear look like love. I was used to the cycle of abuse, hinged all my hopes on our good days. The known horrors are bad enough. Once you leave, there is no telling what they will do.

Once that role is done, you take on a new one: domestic violence survivor.

The first step was learning to name it. I remember being prompted to talk with my friends, cutting the tension by saying, Hello, my name is London Pinkney, and I was raped, as if I were in some saccharine AA meeting. Then I attended group therapy for domestic violence survivors, and that was how we all introduced ourselves. Having to admit that to a group of people didn’t make it feel real. Much like in my relationship with XXXXX, if I kept repeating it enough, I could believe it. But, this time, the truth was my tether. It was a very Red Fish / Blue Fish period of my life, all blunt facts and primary colors. I had to line them up and look at them plainly.

I began dating XXXXX when I was twenty years old. He was thirty-seven. Separated, but not divorced.

Dating someone seventeen years older than me — that was bad.
Was I mature for my age — no.²
Being fingered without my consent — also bad.
Saying sorry more than saying I love you — not ideal.
Did he punch a cabinet next to my face — yes. Do I think he wanted to punch me?³

Once the memories were placed back in order the next task was learning how to live with it.

It was the spring of 2020. It has been two weeks since I left him. One week since he doxxed me on Twitter. I was twenty-two years old and just finished my first year of the MFA program. All I wanted to do is learn how to master in media res. On the TV, I watched as thousands of people died each day. In therapy I had a gratitude journal where I’d write It’s a blessing to be alive knowing that was a lie. Stuck inside, my cohort and I were cobbling a community together with group chats, Instagram infographics, and nebulous boundaries. I felt right at home.

I learned tons of new words that summer: Intimate Partner Violence from the university’s counselor; DARVO⁴ from WebMD, and Battered Woman Syndrome from my thesis advisor. The psychopaths in my MFA program would call these tropes. Containers make people feel safe. The pandemic uprooted any sense of normalcy or place, so we all needed to find something to cling to. For some it was sourdough bread. For me, it was the MFA program and my abuse. When the world stopped, that pain continued. It was the only thing happening in my life. I didn’t have an identity outside of being abused and being a writer. I spent my days trying to repackage myself. I transformed into a DV Oracle, trading details about Cycle of Violence with girls for astrology readings. If you tell me what my Leo Moon means, I can tell you why he only fucks you after a fight.

The language gave me a sense of groundedness. The only word I struggled with was survivor. When I first sought help, people were careful to call me a survivor. When discussing abuse, the word is used for two reasons: first, as a term of empowerment; second, to distinguish those of us still alive from those who were killed by their partners. I have never felt like a survivor because I don’t feel as though I survived that period of my life. Still, I never corrected anyone. They were trying to offer me a sense of control while my life was spinning out of it. And besides, I didn’t want to be a fickle rape victim — people already don’t know what to do with us. Since twelve million people experience Intimate Partner Violence each year in the United States, I have become a confidant to friends who’ve experienced the same things I have. I call them by their names, deliberately, as if saying it aloud might anchor them back to themselves — the way I wish someone had done for me. Because who I was — that stringy first person, the author of that life — is dead.

In June, I received an email from the Title IX office. XXXXX has filed a claim against me, alleging I was the abusive partner. If found responsible, I will be expelled from all California State Universities. Once the Title IX case presented the idea that I may be kicked out of the MFA program, my identity crumbled again. I was not a DV Oracle or a writer. I just became his victim.

In the poem “Ars Poetica,” José Olivarez quotes a line from Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others:

“Susan Sontag: ‘victims are interested in the representation of their own sufferings.’ Remix: survivors are interested in the representation of their own survival. My work: survival.”

Sontag’s full quote reads:

“Victims are interested in the representation of their own sufferings. But they want the suffering to be seen as unique… It is intolerable to have one’s own sufferings twinned with anybody else’s.”

And it is.

I spent my nights preparing for the case, screenshotting all our conversations in a pitch dark room, my eyes stinging against the white glare of the monitor. After being doxxed, I had to track XXXXX’s Twitter in fear of him continually speaking about me. I read that he believes he was a victim of domestic violence and that he⁵ wanted to call the cops on me⁶, but won’t because I am of value to my race. In his profile he wrote that he is Working towards Post-Traumatic Growth. I drink tequila to fall asleep. I take four Tylenol PM every night. I am receiving rape threats from one of his followers, a bald white man who lives Tempe, Arizona. I start sleeping with a knife under my pillow. The video of George Floyd being murdered is everywhere, people are sharing like baseball cards. I do not have to see a victim’s suffering to believe them. He is calling out for his mama, and my mother called me a whore after I tell her about being abused. And I, a Black woman, have the gall to try to hang myself in my closet. Then I, a Black woman, have the gall to survive. A month later I tried again, this time with pills. I knew he wasn’t going to stop until I was dead. I woke up on the floor, faint memories, my chest seizing, of my back arching to the ceiling, of darkness. It is only August. In a nonfiction class, I use erasure poetry to turn one of XXXXX’s appeal letters into the apology I will never get. I’m told my life needs a trigger warning. Boxes of white people tell me we do not see where you have been raped. We need the rape. Armed with metaphor and a body I am slowly trying to kill, I apologize for my life to everyone but myself. My phone rings, a friend has sent me $18.63.⁷

This is an image of a woman losing grip with reality. London sits on the bed and asks herself: Where does that anger go? It’s a stone, in the belly of the story, refusing to be moved, dragging it down, making her a bitter angry bitch. She does not want to share the page with her abuser. My audience wants more. They want to know what he did, what he said, how he became who he became. That is not my work. I am not going to be a keeper of his experiences. My abuse is his work. My work is survival.

Watch me reach into the narrative and reclaim myself. Let me care for the girls I was. I grab the plate of eggs, I open the closet door. I take their hands, lead them to the bed, and tuck them in. You did good, I say. It’s time to rest.

Poeta

I have learned how to grow my life around this, like moss. These days it’s restraining order renewals and rest. EMDR therapy and compartmentalisation. I’ve got deep breathing on lock. I stretch forward, reaching for what is next. I’m reminded of a Wing Stop date I had with my best friend Nicole, who testified in at least one of the cases I had against XXXXX. It was the fourth anniversary of the last time I was raped and my body knew what day it was before I did. We ordered tenders. The flavor, lemon pepper. As I realize they forgot my ranch, Nicole tells me what she learned from a TikTok: Every seven years our skin cells completely renew.

So you will be a completely different person, she said.

Next year makes seven.

In California, there is a twenty-one year statute of limitations for rape. At least three lifetimes to die and renew. Another refraction, a remix on my own terms. Soon, who I am will be able to rest, next to the other girls. She is getting ready. This writing becomes bloodletting. Born-again, a new woman who has herself and a knife in her back pocket. Who I’m becoming, always becoming, cannot be bothered with the past. I am interested in controlling what happens next —

like this…

or

this,

and this.

And all of it is mine to tell.

Non-writers

You never are.

May 15, 2020: I was making pancakes from scratch in his kitchen. The pancakes were thin like crêpes. He asked me how much flour I added and I told him two cups, like usual. Look at them, he said does it look like you added two cups? I didn’t know why they came out so thin. I told him yes, they did. He called me a liar and punched the cabinet next to my face, the one that held his spices and my bottle of Crystal Hot Sauce. I felt the wind of his punch and the saw how the wood cracked inward, the white paint of the landlord special chipped. Thus began the 24-hour fight that would end the relationship. Twelve hours later, I will be raped for the last time. The next day, after I ran out of his apartment with my suitcase in hand, he called me to apologize about the flour. His pancakes turned into crêpes, too. I haven’t made pancakes from scratch since. There — another story.

Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. A manipulation technique used in abusive relationships where the abuser gaslights the victim into thinking they are the abuser. Coined by psychologist Jennifer Freyd in 1997.

A White man.

A Black woman.

The Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, freeing enslaved Africans. In 2020, many well-intentioned folks virtue-signaled their support of Black people. See: Black Instagram Squares.

BIO

London Pinkney is a writer and editor-in-chief of The Ana. Her work has appeared in NonWoman and White and Black Warrior Review. She is currently working on her debut essay collection examining the history and culture of Black Californians.

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