"For Steele, we all suffer from the collective trauma of sexism, racism, and homophobia, and she offers through poetry cultural prescriptions for healing."
-Kathryn Kirkpatrick, National Women's Studies Association Journal
Half way through the fall semester, sitting in my basement office in a small Southern college, there is a presence at my door. It is Alicia. She has missed the last two weeks of class and she has come, I assume, to give me an excuse. I put my papers to the side of the desk and ask her to come in. She sits and starts talking. She wants me to know she has something to tell me. I have to promise not to tell. She warns me that I will think she is making it up. She sometimes thinks it didn't happen. She hasn't told anyone. Anyone.
What she tells me, what I have been prepared to hear as a result of writing this book, is that two weeks ago she was kidnapped and raped. She was out late. He abducted her in the parking lot across the street from her dorm. He took her to his house.
He had a knife. And a gun.
She tells me the whole story. I listen. I nod. I tell her I believe her. I feel sick. I remember to breathe. I tell her again that I believe her. Despite my desire not to believe her. Despite my desire not to know that this has happened to her. That it happens all the time. That it could happen to me. All of the power of my deep need to deny that this is true fights against the deeper impulse in me toward compassion. This compassion, I realize, must come from the head and the heart, for my heart is telling me to run away. My head tells my mouth to speak the words that she needs to hear. Later my heart will know I did the right thing by staying. And believing. Witnessing.
*
This book is about the poetry of witnessing. It is written for Alicia. And Anne and Wendy and Maria and all the others. But it is also, and perhaps more crucially, written for those on the other side of the desks, professors and politicians and social workers and all those who are in a position of power, a position to witness. To witness means to decide to participate-- not only with the head but with the heart-- in the experience of another, an experience so painful that it must be shared in order to be confronted. Those in positions of power in our society have a tremendous ability to bring others from pain to possibility. And the beginning lies in poetry, for poetry provides distinctive access to pain.
What I aim to do in this book is to describe and explain and show how the poetry of three American women writers-- Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa-- may teach us how to witness, how to witness to our own and bear witness to others' traumatic histories. The poetry of Sexton, Lorde, and Anzaldúa shows vividly how our culture has hurt women--through child sexual abuse, through the ownership and enforcement of women's sexuality, through the transmission of violence through generations, and through the destruction of non-white cultures and their histories. In showing us the pain that such violence inflicts, these American women writers help us to realize that not only women, but all of us-- men, women, and children-- are hurt by the
horror of such violence. They also allow us to hope that we do not have to continue to be either the victims or the perpetrators of such violence if we follow their lead, if we heal from memory.
--from the Introduction to We Heal From Memory by Cassie Premo Steele
What she tells me, what I have been prepared to hear as a result of writing this book, is that two weeks ago she was kidnapped and raped. She was out late. He abducted her in the parking lot across the street from her dorm. He took her to his house.
He had a knife. And a gun.
She tells me the whole story. I listen. I nod. I tell her I believe her. I feel sick. I remember to breathe. I tell her again that I believe her. Despite my desire not to believe her. Despite my desire not to know that this has happened to her. That it happens all the time. That it could happen to me. All of the power of my deep need to deny that this is true fights against the deeper impulse in me toward compassion. This compassion, I realize, must come from the head and the heart, for my heart is telling me to run away. My head tells my mouth to speak the words that she needs to hear. Later my heart will know I did the right thing by staying. And believing. Witnessing.
*
This book is about the poetry of witnessing. It is written for Alicia. And Anne and Wendy and Maria and all the others. But it is also, and perhaps more crucially, written for those on the other side of the desks, professors and politicians and social workers and all those who are in a position of power, a position to witness. To witness means to decide to participate-- not only with the head but with the heart-- in the experience of another, an experience so painful that it must be shared in order to be confronted. Those in positions of power in our society have a tremendous ability to bring others from pain to possibility. And the beginning lies in poetry, for poetry provides distinctive access to pain.
What I aim to do in this book is to describe and explain and show how the poetry of three American women writers-- Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa-- may teach us how to witness, how to witness to our own and bear witness to others' traumatic histories. The poetry of Sexton, Lorde, and Anzaldúa shows vividly how our culture has hurt women--through child sexual abuse, through the ownership and enforcement of women's sexuality, through the transmission of violence through generations, and through the destruction of non-white cultures and their histories. In showing us the pain that such violence inflicts, these American women writers help us to realize that not only women, but all of us-- men, women, and children-- are hurt by the
horror of such violence. They also allow us to hope that we do not have to continue to be either the victims or the perpetrators of such violence if we follow their lead, if we heal from memory.
--from the Introduction to We Heal From Memory by Cassie Premo Steele