Responding to Violence

‘To write directly and overtly as a woman, out of a woman’s body and experience […] to show us our true faces – all of them, including the unacceptable; to speak of what has been muffled in code or silence’. Adrienne Rich in Blood, Bread and Poetry 

From a young age, I was aware of violence. One man tried to force me into his car at the school gates. The first murder that I remember was of a teenage girl. Her body was left on the fields near my school (I was five). I knew that women were hurt by their husbands or partners. The first time I was aware of any danger to my mother was when she had a new (violent) boyfriend, when I was nine. Such episodes may not be especially unusual occurrences for a child but I was sensitive to them. I later learnt that my mother had been raped as a young woman. I went on to be attacked in the street several times – one of these attacks, as a teenager, would be an attempted rape. Reading Sharon Olds and Pascale Petit, I realised this attempted rape was something I might write about. This article discusses three of my poetic approaches.

Fightback

I’d always suspected it would happen,
sometime. I was 17, when it did.

I was cycling back south from Carnival,
when he rammed his racing bike into mine.

He was white. Blond spiked hair, good looking, cute,
before he hit me in the face and ribs,

knocked me off the saddle to the pavement.
I wouldn’t ever want it like this, his

ferocious tearing at my clothes, forcing
my shirt up to my neck, mauling my pecs,

busting the buttons of my flies, grabbing
my balls, pulling my hair, yanking the back

of my jeans down, down. I fought him as best
I could, bit into his white skin real hard.

He hit me again. Then stopped. Climbed off me.
Spat: You’re not fucking worth it anyway.

I’ve set out to prove just how wrong he was.
(First published in Magma 37, 2007).

At first, this poem felt like a breakthrough, because I had written it as someone else. At the time, I believed that writing in my own voice would not lift the experience into poetry and feared I lacked the necessary skills. I also tried to disguise my experience to make it more ‘interesting’ – and, no doubt subconsciously, I found it difficult to write about the attempted rape as myself. The poem’s narrator is male, black and gay. I kept the details of the attack close to the violence I experienced, albeit transposed onto a male body. The attacker’s words, however, are verbatim. While

I question the (political) wisdom of my approach, there are some aspects of the poem that could be worth noting. The couplets encourage the reader to think of a coupling (however unattractive), and several of the enjambed line breaks force the reader on through the poem: ‘his/ ferocious’, and ‘forcing/my shirt’, etc. These line breaks are inspired by Olds’s tremendous urgency in ‘The Race’ (The Father):

‘See that
elevator over there, well go
down to the first floor, make a right, you’ll
see a yellow bus, get off at the
second Pan Am terminal, I
ran’.

I also tried to use strong, active verbs in ‘Fightback’ – ‘mauling’, ‘busting’, ‘grabbing’, ‘pulling’, ‘yanking’ (I remain in awe of the strength of Sylvia Plath’s verbs) – and there is some alliteration, with ‘busting the buttons of my flies, grabbing / my balls’, which I hoped would keep the language punchy. The violence of the attack is direct and so is the narrator’s response: ‘bit into his white skin real hard’. As with Olds’s rape survivor poem ‘The Girl’ (The Gold Cell), which ends with the image of ‘fists’, the narrator in ‘Fightback’ has some agency in the final line, ‘I’ve set out to prove just how wrong he was’. This line could have been written in my own voice. Indeed, it does sound like my voice. So there is a confusion, for me at least, over who the ‘I’ in this poem is. Paul Muldoon, in The End of the Poem, discusses ‘the extent to which the personality of any single poet may be thought of as being coterminous with his or her poems’. I believe everyone has a range of personas. Still, this deliberate disguising of my experience is probably not something I would choose to repeat, although it allowed me to write out of trauma.

‘The Bicycle’ is the second of the poems on the attempted rape:

The Bicycle

I was OK nothing had happened
nothing bad had happened
I couldn’t get up from the bench
couldn’t do up my dungarees
It was cold it was night
The man had gone and that was good
I was OK I could sit up
peel myself from the bench’s slats
which had pressed deep inside
It could have been worse
I was shaking it was night
The bicycle was too heavy
My dungarees kept slipping
buttons were missing
I had to get home
It was so hard to walk
My head hurt kept punching inside
my teeth couldn’t stop talking
It could have been worse
My jaw hurt and my breasts were raw
I couldn’t pick up the bicycle its spinning wheel
couldn’t walk with the bicycle
I had to get home to wash
sleep throw these clothes away
I was shaking I was cold
My dungarees wouldn’t do up
I would be alright it was just
this bicycle I needed

(First published in Magma 55, 2013)

Like ‘Fightback’, ‘The Bicycle’ uses simple, direct language. However, the latter also uses an extended metaphor – ‘bicycle’ – as code for the attempted rape, as if the narrator loads all her anguish onto the broken bicycle and how to wheel it home. Further, the rapist is not given a voice. He

is only referred to briefly as ‘The man’. The poem uses repetition, including ‘I was OK’ – troubling because, when she has to say it twice, we infer that she is not OK. I wanted to show how a person constantly goes over a traumatic event in their search for meaning, as in ‘It could have
been worse’. The form is different to ‘Feedback’: the only space for the reader to breathe is in mid-line gaps, where punctuation might have been placed. This strange spacing produces a kind of hyperventilation to mirror the narrator’s sense of panic. The spaces are irregular, in the way that breath can be irregular when a person is in shock, and the spaces have a disorienting effect. The spaces might also be ways of showing the blanks in the narrator’s memory – whether these images and experiences have been blocked or forgotten. The poem takes a considerable risk with the ending ‘I needed’. Would readers (or editors) think that a line was missing? I hoped this jarring ending would represent all of the things the narrator needed after the attack. It might also signify that whatever the narrator does she cannot erase what has happened.

‘Crocodile’ has a different energy. Like the violence in some of Peter Redgrove’s poetry, it is quite playful. The poem riffs on the children’s song ‘Never Smile at a Crocodile’ yet the adult narrator takes that smile, which she was taught as a child was dangerous, and uses it to her own ends. The attack does not happen until the final stanza. Prior to this, the narrator is in control. She chooses a sexual relationship with the crocodile-lover: ‘He brought out the prehistoric in me’ and ‘I dived’. In the third stanza, sex –the sex of her choosing – is an enjoyable struggle, with ‘tussled’ and ‘thrashed’. Elsewhere, there are playful allusions to sex and lust with ‘pumped’ and references to the crocodile’s tongue ‘having few good uses’. Further, the marks left on her skin (as opposed to the marks she makes by biting the attacker) result from her chosen action – lying on ‘a limestone lilo’ while having sex with the crocodile-lover. This sexual liaison is utterly different from the incident portrayed in the final stanza ‘when a man tried to drag me under’. I wanted the violence to be transformed when the narrator ‘levered my small jaws open to their furthest extent’, and ‘splashed them down on the human’s arm’. The narrator bites back. In a reversal of roles, she also claims some ownership over her attacker.

In contrast to the claustrophobic form of ‘The Bicycle’, there is an abundance of white space around the line, in which the reader can move, or even swim. Stylistically, the greatest difference from the other poems is the heightened use of imagery. This poem draws on Redgrove’s hot and cold imagery in poems such as ‘Abattoir Bride’ (Assembling a Ghost) and Petit’s animal imagery, (especially in The Zoo Father). I found a sense of play in alliteration, with ‘limestone lilo’, and ‘lover’ and ‘levered’, and hard ‘k’ sounds with ‘attacker’, ‘carries’ and ‘mark’. The hard ‘a’ sounds of ‘attacker’, ‘carries’, and ‘splashed’ emphasize a hardening in the narrator’s tone as well as her actions. Robin Robertson’s musicality in ‘At Roane Head’, (The Wrecking Light) is also an inspiration.

I did not set out to write these poems as therapy. Had I done so I would have been disappointed at the outcome. So why write poems like these? Perhaps W. D. Snodgrass’s words from In Radical Pursuit come closest to my reasons:

‘[O]ur only hope as artists is to continually ask ourselves, “Am I writing what I really think? Not what is acceptable; not what my favourite intellectual would think in this situation; not what I wish I felt. Only what I cannot help thinking.”’