Our mothers’ rapes were things unspoken.

Preamble

Whenever we can, we gather. We gather to imagine the possibility of a world that grants us freedom — full freedom. We envision the shaping of a world formed by the unmaking and the undoing of all the structures and conditions that sustain our unhumaning. We, whom the world does not imagine as agents, or subjects, or full human beings. We, whom the world does not think deserving of a legally promised, yet highly unenforced constitutional freedom. We, who exist in a perpetual state of unfreedom.

Often, despair accumulates — clustering and coalescing and piling up — archiving with no means to disperse. Yet we persist. We persist with this thankless work hoping, yearning, praying it will someday create a world that does not leave us with this impossible choice: freedom or safety?

K’eguro Macharia marks this a false choice. A killing choice. Therefore, no choice at all.

The occasions

Men’s sexual violence against women is a global pandemic. Fewer than 3 percent of rapists, the overwhelming majority of whom are men, are ever prosecuted and imprisoned.

In 2020, during the first quarter of quarantine, in my country, Kenya, around 4,000 primary school girls between the ages of 8 and 15 were raped and impregnated. The NGOs that showed up to offer “help” advised the child-victims to close their legs and to learn to use protection.

43 percent of all reported sexual assaults happen before victims are seventeen, which means that a significant number of them involve incest.

In 2016, the case of an 18-year-old college woman who was raped behind a university campus dumpster while unconscious went viral. The rapist was identified as a fellow student who was also a well known swimmer. Although found guilty, he was sentenced to just six months in prison. The judge explained that any time longer than that would have a severe impact on his career.

Almost 80 percent of victims know their rapists and are attacked in familiar places where they feel safe.

What are we to do when the same institutions that are meant to protect us perpetuate, legitimise and at times legalise harms done against us instead?

Veena Das in her work Life and Words teaches me that male desire is considered “natural” and the female body as the natural site on which this desire is to be enacted.

I quote: in judicial discourses on rape, “male desire” is seen as a natural need, so that whenever the cultural and social constraints are removed, men are seen as falling back into a state of nature they cannot control.

Soraya Chemaly in her book Rage Becomes Her writes: all over the world, sexual violence continues to be treated, in public as well as in courts, as a matter of opinion and bad behaviour instead of the profound violation with terroristic effects that it is.

Every woman has a rape story, even those not sexually assaulted. All women live under the threat or fear that they might be raped in the course of their lifetime.

At times there is silence. Persistent, terror-borne, rage-filled, suffocating silence. Silence here as security, as safety, as self-preservation, as a last attempt at psychological survival. In a world of patriarchal institutional power women who dare to tell the truth risk their lives.

In If I could write this in Fire Michelle Cliff writes: our mothers’ rapes were things unspoken.

When nothing is said, the silence often extends to nothing being done and matters remaining unchanged. Violent histories persist into the present. Violence continues. Unfreedom intensifies.

Rape is the most under-reported crime in the world.

In pursuit of freedom

When we gather, we gather to envision our living in a state of full freedom. We who have never known, never experienced freedom.

We ask: what work should go into shaping this concept we call freedom? How do we pursue it? Incline, move and work toward it? How should we sustain and intensify it?

What strategies apply? What resources should we mobilize? What words, what language, what images, what scenarios should we use? What possibilities, if any, do we foresee?

In our gathering, in our extending tenderness and comfort to one another, in our creating safe spaces to have these difficult, complex, painful conversations, in our sharing all the ways in which patriarchy has inflicted harms and left us permanently bruised and callused, in our finding courage to speak up, we who are deliberately marked invisible and inaudible — we do the difficult and dangerous work of daring to think against patriarchy and working toward building alternative futures.

In gathering, we are reminded we are not alone. That our pursuit of freedom is a collective practice. That, here, amongst one another we can take a small pause, we can breathe, we can linger with safety.

When we gather, we leap into an unfamiliar, unknown territory where we dare imagine our freedom as ordinary.

REFERENCES:

Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her (including all the mentioned data on rape)

Veena Das, Life and Words.

Michelle Cliff, If I Could Write this in Fire.