This is the last time I write about this. Goodbye subject. It should be a reason for joy. I say goodbye to something I have written about for ten years, I know the material to the bone, it is simply ready, I have said everything there is to say.
It’s just not true. My anger is just as hard as in the beginning, maybe even harder, but I have learned that life is easier if I ignore her. Under paved soil, with thick layers of greasy mud underneath, I bury my anger. In fact, I have given up, and I blame myself, just as much as I wish myself.
I don’t know exactly what my commitment was when I put the essay ten years ago Abuse wrote. In it I spoke about a rape that was done to me at the age of sixteen. I don’t believe I had a goal. The only thing I wanted was that something I barely spoke about, no longer had to patch in my body. It had to go outside above all.
I tapped the story in a few hours, the words had had fourteen years to mature, everything flowed out effortlessly. There was no doubt, it was a declamation about what had happened in silence. I emailed it to my best friend, I warned my mother, who knew nothing yet, and then sent it to the newspaper.
Promise
Two years later, October 2017, #metoo burst loose. I wrote several pieces and joined television and radio. When a talk show called while I was in a writing residence in New Orleans, I thought it was enough to say that I was on the other side of the ocean. But they offered to let me fly for one broadcast. Although I had to do my best not to feel a bit flattered, the request also indicated an underlying assumption. Speaking behind is a promise for an experience expert: if you talk it will get better.
I made myself sicker by writing about it
I spoke about it because there was a fire burning in myself, there was a spark of hope that something could really change and I wanted to contribute to that. Everything I did, every piece I wrote, every time I received a microphone, I used that fire. I for granted that I was unable to work the following days. I thought it would fall easier for me in the end, but it became more difficult, the aftermath heavier. I made myself sicker by writing about it. My arms felt slippery and brittle. Sometimes I wondered if I still had a skin.
No Go Area
More and more people got up and wrote intensely beautiful pieces in the light of #metoo. What did I love women like Delphine Lecompte, I almost cooked from fighting skills when they are in Humo wrote: “I am an unattractive no longer so young baskety rebellious egocentric poet with an abominable head and a rock character, but also my story can be heard.” And then: “A victim can safely be a scabbing foam -peaking irrational, nasty unkindly unkindly dislocated misfit and asshole!” I wanted to break a lance for Hasna El Maroudi when they are on Joop wrote: “When your employer grabs you at the chest, your uncle squeezes you in your cunt, the bus passenger presses his hard dick against your ass, there is no question of a gray twilight area. It is an ink -black no go area. You can talk about it and you can make your humorless rabies angry about it.” Together with Sarah Sluimer I wanted to scramble the barricade when she reflected on the backlash of #metoo: “I thought I might just be Jeanne d’Arc, but the stake (in my case a somewhat too hot radiator).”
God, I loved all those women. Each of me I have not seen them write about this topic for a long time. It has become quiet. I hid my anger in my novels, there she is only found by people who are looking for it.
Keizersgracht
I have twelve versions of this piece between my stored documents. Once every few months I pick it up again to see if I have found the right words. But every time I fail. The opposite of ten years ago is taking place. That’s because I can’t choose. I bother between two worlds.
One day I am convinced that it is possible: in 2051 the last rape will take place. I don’t know why I choose 2051. It is the first year that came to me. Then I am 67 years old, I want to consciously experience that year.
The next day I know for sure that humanity is rotten: we steal other people’s body to do what we want to do with it.
The news gives a new reason every few months to make the courage flowing out of my body with a rotten shipping. This time it was a rape in the capital on King’s Day. On the Keizersgracht, in the sight of the four -way crowd, a woman has worked to the ground. The videos were frequently shared, the Amsterdam mayor Halsema had to call on it to stop. And although people have tried to stop the suffering, the tragedy is not prevented. A few months before, the news came to light that dozens of men have raped Gisèle Pelicot for decades while she was drugged by her husband.
No regrets
I am slowly accepting the world as it is. Maybe that is a bit older. At the age of thirty I was able to make myself furious about the state of humanity, because I believed in improvement. Now I don’t know that for sure anymore. At the same time I don’t want to become cynical. I want someone to shout that the last rape actually takes place in 2051 and believes it heartily in it. But at the moment there are care providers who say that sexual violence can never be completely eliminated. If those who have to help us don’t even dare to believe in an ideal image, then I don’t know where to look for hope.
I just don’t want to use my own trauma anymore to show that people suffer in silence
I am in a split in every possible way. Because I don’t regret what I wrote down, I would never want to take it back. Paper is generous, on that I have always felt freely to rage. To run into all corners of my brain and throw everything down. Only here I am completely human, someone who is free, someone who can be ugly and big, someone who wants to be eaten and eat others. I just don’t want to use my own trauma anymore to show that people suffer in silence.
I wish I was tireless. That every time I could explain at rest why it is so difficult to break the silence. Why people who have experienced something like that hide that ten, twenty years or more. I wish I could roar about the need for talking forever.
Survival tactics
But I can’t do it anymore. It costs me too much. And I wish myself the right to silence. I’m tired. The fire that I have been on for years to be able to fight is extinguished. Now I write the piece that I don’t want to write. I don’t want to argue for silence, I don’t want to believe that silence is better. Yet sometimes things are not different, it is a survival tactics. I was quiet from the age of sixteen, at the age of thirty I found my voice and now I am too tired to make it sound. In addition, I do not want to be defined by an incident that my life has already determined.
There are still writers who remain furious. Those are the people who need our protection, those who have not yet been extinguished, who still cherish hope. I will burn candles for them. Because every walk deserves reprisal. Every rape earns 24 essays. Deserves a counter -poem, perhaps 120. deserves a spectacle, a painting, and 60 novels. Without noise, the status quo wins. I want fighters to continue singing for people with brittle skin, who hardly dare to believe that it will be even better someday. And I hope those who know what it is may keep their mouths shut once. Let the people who call themselves resistant to solve it. I withdraw.