My Country Is Being Raped
I know rape. I know it way better than I’d prefer.
Four years ago, I was in remarkable shape for a woman who was almost 70; today… not so much.
The physical aspect didn’t happen right away… but the bad dreams started pretty fast. I’d wake in the night, running in place, trying to get away form the men who were going to rape me… and my sister. I was holding her hand tight, practically pulling her. I was a kid in the dream — in second grade or thereabouts — my sister, a year younger. I’d awake, my body thrashing, crying; my husband attempting to hold and calm me.
I had repressed the memories from my childhood until 1992 when, triggered, I suspect, by my father’s death and a random comment, the memories came flooding back in one awful waking nightmare. The memories of incest were disturbing but the memories of what had happened — and had happened more than once — in the woods, in the hills of Pennsylvania, under the watch of my grandfather and grandmother were terrifying. I could find no words to speak what I’d seen, so I made ink-blot-like images that no one, save I, could interpret. But I couldn’t say the words out loud under penalty of I-didn’t-know-what.
I thought hypnosis might help but I ended up literally trying to climb the wall of the therapist’s’ office in an attempt to get away from what I saw happening. I was so scared by what I had seen that I never went back. I could deal with foggy visual memories but seeing the actual reality of what I’d gone through was more than I’d been prepared for.
I began to understand why my sister had gone mad. Diagnosed as a delusional paranoid schizophrenic when she was a freshman in college, she had dropped out and spent most of her early life moving from one place to another, ultimately joining a religious sect. Her diagnosis had been the result of her telling a psychiatrist friend of our mother about the memories she had.
“Delusional,” like hell.
I had been easily twice the age my sister had been when my memories came back; in ink on paper, I painted out as much as I could, then sought assistance from female professionals my own age. My mind began to relax into the process a bit, and coughed up some dreadful stuff but the mind isn’t all there is to memory. The body has its own memory and my body’s memory, triggered by the presence, in the White House, of a man who was the exact type of man that had been a part of my grandfather’s coterie, began to get my body very nervous. The bad dreams began, my blood pressure rose.
My grandfather had been a member of the 1% of his day. He’d lost everything in the crash of 1929 but was not about to give up the lifestyle to which he’d become accustomed. He’d driven expensive cars, had one house on the Jersey shore, another in the hills of Pennsylvania, and a third in Beverly Hills. After the crash, he’d supported himself on insurance from an accident that had supposedly left him crippled. He walked with canes… everywhere anyone could see him. But in the privacy of his own workroom at home, where he ‘tinkered’ with things, he hung those canes on a hook on the wall and got around just fine.
I was told — by now I can’t remember by whom — that when his sons had been at war and the government sent their paychecks home to mom and dad for safekeeping, that he’d spent them. One of his sons chose never to speak to him again and relented only as his father neared death, visiting once. I visited him once as well… just to make sure that it was true… to make sure that he really was dying. I had grown to recognize the energy of death when I was in the woods because it happened sometimes. Even though, at the time, I seemed to have no reason for it, I hated him with every fiber of my being and I trusted him not at all.
My mother, who’d wanted to be a librarian, had been made to attend college and then enter medical school so that she would have a reliable income for life. Her brothers had been commanded to do the same. One had done as he was told; the other had fled across the country.
In medical school my mother fell for “a foreigner.” While her father was displeased, he became a lot less displeased when he discovered that the family of the dark-skinned man was the wealthiest family in his country. That was good enough for him. But what was even better was that their first two children — my sister and I — looked just like their father, big brown eyes, dark brown hair, and olive skin that darkened to a deep tan every summer. They looked like little island girls and, by golly, they looked like a potential source of income and they were, after all, dark-skinned and, therefore, disposable. The third, peaches and cream little girl was not touched and was, in fact, celebrated.
That is how I come to know how it feels to be serially raped by incredibly wealthy old white men. And that is exactly what the current political situation feels like to me, to my body, and to my soul. It’s my damn childhood haunting me… and just like then… there seems to be no way out. The nightmares just keep coming and, yes, I am glad, after all these years, to be vomiting that bile out of my mind and body but the repeat performances are wearing me down.
My country is being raped every way there is to get raped… and I would know.
