by mai’a
========trigger warning===============
i read that we dont get over it. we just get used to it. i think that the more positive way of saying that is that we have to find. make. create. imagine meaning from terrifying events.
it is that process of making meaning that i struggle with.
this is not a new process. people have been recording their struggle with finding meaning from evil for millenia. i mean one could blithely say that it is that…the searching for meaning in a world of evil that is religion…i would just say that evil is not new.
i should stop and say that i was a philosophy student. my partner was a christian bible student. so that you know that my struggle for meaning is more than a response to sexual violence.
i think that the experience of privilege is the experience of having society give one’s life meaning. that is what i see when habibi, who is white and male and us citizen, economically privileged, christian, etcetc etc, and i go out in public. that people see his life as having meaning. significance. value.
and for me the experience of violence is the experience of having someone else say-your life has no meaning to me.
and by life i dont mean simply biological existance. but the beingness of being here and now.
so how do i find value meaning in rape? domestic violence? war? pregnant women giving birth at checkpoints under the tip of a gun?
when we call ourselves survivors. are saying that the primary value, the primary meaning of the violence was our survival? our biological existance in and of itself has a value that is more powerful than the power of violence?
i used to say yes. my biological existance is more powerful. but now that feels like an empty power. meaning is what we create out of our biological existance. it is not the equivalent of our biological existance. and i must find a meaning from the evil and violence of the world and in my personal life that is not simply survival.
survival is powerful. it just isnt enough. to give meaning to violence.
and it is not even that i cannot find meaning in violence. it is that i am afraid to. if i say that rape, my husband choking me in the middle of the night, all of the times i didnt say no because i was too tired, all of the times that someone yelled at me with a gun in one hand a license to kill in the other, all of the micro aggressions, and ridicule, my dad’s ptsd and schizophrenia, all of it wrapped in one ball, if i say that all of it has meaning other than survival…i am opening the door to justifying the violence in the first place. to letting my x be right and he was really doing it for my own good. doing it so that my life had meaning.
like he said: just write a poem about it.
so i find myself between a rock and a hard place. needing more meaning than simply survival. and afraid that doing so will mean that there is some intrinsic good in violence for the survivor.
i dont know if it is just me. or if others also struggle with meaning and violence. maybe someone has found the key to this. a perspective i havent seen from. a path i havent lit upon.
well, i believe that we make the path (and meaning) by walking it.
- Share
September 21st, 2009 at 9:48 am #
what a great way of seeing it. violence being someone declaring your life of no significant meaning, and acting upon that. yeah. and the privilege given in a culture as bestowing/recognizing meaning of your life.
i see meaning as coming about from a moment, every moment. like you say, “by walking it.” by how we engage it, how we choose to see it..the great thing about this is that it is never over, or has never ended yet. finding meaning in sunlight, in wax, in dust, in cleaning the tub, in resting a moment, in refusing to rest….we are given so many ways to create it, and recreate it.
i can relate to things like being choked into consciousness by hands in the dark. yet in every case…violence, as i see it, was not what hurt me. not in the important ways.
it was always…the cruelty. the willful cruelty behind the kinetic occurrence; that malevolent human consciousness…it was becoming aware of that force, that this world contained such a spirit, and that this life was so open and without limit that this terrible spirit could be brought to bear upon me with more weight than water, with more strength than even my most trusted protector would summon. it was that terrible knowledge that marked me.
violence is everywhere. in fact, you cannot build a strong home without exerting violent force upon the world. eating a meal is violence. cleaning a room displaces so many organisms and changes their lives forever.
“and it is not even that i cannot find meaning in violence. it is that i am afraid to. if i say that rape, my husband choking me in the middle of the night, all of the times i didnt say no because i was too tired, all of the times that someone yelled at me with a gun in one hand a license to kill in the other, all of the micro aggressions, and ridicule, my dad’s ptsd and schizophrenia, all of it wrapped in one ball, if i say that all of it has meaning other than survival…i am opening the door to justifying the violence in the first place. to letting my x be right and he was really doing it for my own good. doing it so that my life had meaning.”
i love “all the micro aggressions.” those spiritual paper cuts that leave you so raw.
i am struggling to grasp what “meaning” means in the passage above. does ‘meaning,’ here mean “positive worth”? in that sense, i’d say sure. i cannot see in your heart, but for myself the suffering i go through always carves a channel through which i can connect to humanity better. some of that may be what i choose to do with the pain. though…i think this shape of awareness is part of who i happen to be. not sure of that stuff. but yes…in the sense of “positive worth” in a long picture, yeah. in the sense of “deserved” or “good for me,” no. violence not good for me. “meaning” in the sense of “fitting into a larger picture and thus might be judged in context of everything else,” sure. in the sense of “fair” or “right,” no. some people have such violence brought up on them, obviously, that they don’t even make it past a few years. ‘meaning’ in terms of “sense,” no. it seems to me violence can as easily chew up a “good” person as a “bad,” at just the right time, or not. (i think now of those bombs planted by the polish resistence under hitler’s car that didn’t go off but could have saved so many lives if they did.)
thanks for the thoughtful post…
September 21st, 2009 at 11:40 am #
Feeling that violence is the assertion that a perpetrator doesn’t value my life is why I’m so stuck in cycles of depression. I mean…I know that it’s “just” their perception of me, that just because “they” deem me insignificant doesn’t make it so…
But after awhile, after so much violence against me and others like me…it’s overwhelming the amount of people who see no value in my life. And what does it matter that it’s not really “true” if my daily existence is full of people who think I don’t matter? The difference between opinion, truth, and lies kind of disappears when someone is physically and sexually assaulting you. It’s like… I know they’re wrong, but that doesn’t stop the violence. It doesn’t stop the daily degradation. It doesn’t make my life deeply, spiritually meaningful. It makes it pretty shitty, actually.
So where do you go from there?
September 21st, 2009 at 4:02 pm #
mai’a, thank you for this post. I think about this so much, and struggle to find meaning in the experience of violence – the despair violence provokes, how many of us don’t survive, the way the magnitude of violence, and the cruelty of it, can sometimes create the feeling that *nothing* has meaning.
and thanks too for the thoughtful comments above – nezua, thank you so, so much for this:
“violence, as i see it, was not what hurt me. not in the important ways.
it was always…the cruelty. the willful cruelty behind the kinetic occurrence; that malevolent human consciousness…it was becoming aware of that force, that this world contained such a spirit, and that this life was so open and without limit that this terrible spirit could be brought to bear upon me with more weight than water, with more strength than even my most trusted protector would summon. it was that terrible knowledge that marked me.”
– and also for the observation that “the suffering i go through always carves a channel through which i can connect to humanity better…in the sense of “positive worth” in a long picture, yeah. in the sense of “deserved” or “good for me,” no.”
The idea of meaning in violence itself is somewhere my brain can’t really go, but i do find meaning in survival. Spiritual survival, not only physical survival – maintaining the ability to love, feel compassion and connection, care for ourselves and each other, resist the terror and theft of humanity that can come with violence, with someone (or some institution) “declaring your life of no significant meaning, and acting upon that.” The knowledge that so many of us do resist and survive, in various ways, and that resistance and survival can strengthen people and communities and movements even in the face of great violence – that’s what feels meaningful to me.
September 21st, 2009 at 6:22 pm #
“…maintaining the ability to love, feel compassion and connection, care for ourselves and each other, resist the terror and theft of humanity that can come with violence”
I know this sounds kind of superficial, but your comment really reminded me of Harry Potter, Tyrone. Assuming you’re familiar with the series… there’s a part at the end when Harry can’t conjure up any happiness for his Patronus, but Luna reminds him that they, his friends, are still there. Still fighting. For some reason that scene helps me function. Which is kinda fucked up. You’d think cosmic battles between good and evil would just make me despair about violence even *more.* But it is what it is, I guess. It might just be the feeling of thinking “beyond” myself–beyond this one perspective– that makes mind-numbing cruelty easier to deal with. There’s something meditative about children’s lit..
September 21st, 2009 at 9:05 pm #
Mai’a, a deeply moving post. Thank you.
September 23rd, 2009 at 8:13 am #
I keep coming back to this post and typing then deleting responses because this — like he said: just write a poem about it. — could be verbatim from the man who abused me. Now, I think of him saying that as a power play, as his way to lay claim to what he knew to be my primary way of making sense of the world, as if it were his idea, as if anything I did to try to work out where I was at belonged to him.
Do we find meaning in the violence? Can we? Should we? I don’t know. I’ve been too busy trying to find meaning in where it left me.
October 3rd, 2009 at 2:04 am #
I’ve grown up on TV melodrama’s of victim/survivor and perpetrator/oppressor roles, always identifying with the survivor. fantasizing that my resilient ending was only possible with the counterpart–the violence/violator. recently I’ve been thinking about the creation of meaning through relationship to image. About self transformation, changing the ways I think, live, love, and handle pain. decoding and accepting the different ways that i desire in relationship to violence. realizing power does not operate as a single mechanism of control, but a web of relationships. allowing agency inside of my social and individual relationships. like an ecosystem with its movements of resistance and destruction in constant flux.
November 22nd, 2009 at 12:48 pm #
In my family, suddenly a lot of people were drawn into our lives at once. And it seemed good, really good.
I remember thinking, when my grandmother died, that thank goodness it seemed all her kids had partners to help them through her death, people who it seemed matched them well. Because for as long as I can remember they had had very few of those.
Then, not even a year later, that same partner killed my aunt.
And we talk, the surviving members of my family, about how wonderful it is, and powerful, that these people have been drawn into our lives (my uncle’s partner, my own partner, my dad’s, etc.) and I can’t help thinking, if these people are really drawn to us, what does that mean for HIM? For THAT ONE?
That search for meaning with regards to violence… Yeah… I don’t know where the boundaries are or should be. I really don’t.