Carmen Machado wrote recently on the corrosive fear behind the impulse to ban her memoir In the Dream House from high schools: “I understand that for a parent, it’s almost unthinkable to imagine that your child could experience such trauma. But preventing children from reading my book, or any book, won’t protect them. On the contrary, it may rob them of ways to understand the world they’ll encounter, or even the lives they’re already living. You can’t recognize what you’ve never been taught to see. You can’t put language to something for which you’ve been given no language.”
Machado’s book reminds me of how my mind once tricked me because it “[examines] what it means to be so head over heels in love, in lust or both that you let someone treat you badly.” I wasn’t even in love with the college boyfriend who hit me. I was secretly terrified of him, trapped and isolated even while sharing a house with four other girls too immature to help. If only I’d had the chance to see myself in a book like In the Dream House and spoken up. I still feel bad my silence meant he went on to hurt other women. I managed to end the relationship, but ten years and more painful mistakes went by until I realized I was hiding my shame even from myself. Even with a therapist five years after the abuse, it never even occurred to me to tell them about my victimization. Partly that is because I didn’t like to think of myself as a victim — none of us do. But calling myself a victim doesn’t mean I am a victim for eternity. Quite the opposite: naming it means overcoming it, which I did at a Take Back the Night rally after another boyfriend who’s now my husband helped me see how I was hiding the truth from myself.
I hope the media’s obsession with cancel culture doesn’t ruin the momentum of people calling out cruel words and behavior. We are only at the beginning of dragging brutes out of the shadows. Once we drag them out, we need to help them reform and see how they might be lying to themselves about their innocence. I believe books like Machado’s help this cause: she does not name her abuser, but that doesn’t mean the abuser got away. It means her words will lead more victims out of the shadows, or prevent abuse in the first place. Violence is a cycle where abusers were once victims and can’t bear the shame of feeling helpless. Confronting the truth will set us all, abusers and victims, free to live humane and dignified lives.
