Dear Chris,
I don’t believe a 7-year-old boy or 70-year-old man, or many people in between either, could have written something about rape as convincing or insightful as “My Vagina Was My Village.” The point of that monologue is not some blow-by-blow action with a broomstick. It’s that the military gang rape destroys the young Bosnian girl’s budding sense of sexual and romantic delight. It destroys her true self, and she knows this and has to live with it the way it’s just a fact that the war has destroyed her village and her society. Furthermore, the destruction of her sexual pride and self-hood was the point of the rape. It was only yesterday that military rape was understood in this way, as an act of war–as opposed to (if one’s own army) soldiers acting up, obtaining biologically necessary sexual relief, or being a few bad apples on the patriotic tree, or (if the enemy’s army) being subhuman beasts.
The usual view of rape victims is that it’s their fault, and even if it wasn’t their fault, they are now permanently tainted, sexualized, damaged goods. That is why rape is seen as shameful in a way that other violent crimes are not. (Bosnian and Albanian rape victims were often rejected by their husbands or boyfriends and ostracized by their families–a phenomenon not unknown here in the United States.) “My Vagina Was My Village” breaks with that whole way of thinking about rape: What is destroyed in the speaker is not innocence or virginity or modesty or reputation–i.e., sexual reserve, which constitutes her sexual value to others–but sexual feeling and expression, her sexual value to herself. That is her tragedy. This is not the usual perspective on rape at all!
You mention Larkin’s “Deceptions,” Chris, a poem I also admire. But that poem, interestingly enough, does not depict a rape. The poem shows us an impoverished young girl who has been drugged and deflowered and is being kept prisoner by her attacker. She doesn’t remember the actual experience. Her anguish is brilliantly described–“your mind lay open like a drawer of knives”–but without the epigraph (the girl’s own words, as quoted in Mayhew’s “London Labour and the London Poor”) it would be hard to figure out what had actually happened. The poem’s real point is about the rapist, who, says Larkin, is ultimately more “deceived” than the girl he lured to her ruin because his “desire” has only led him to “burst into fulfillment’s desolate attic.” The girl cannot be expected to care that she is “less deceived” than her tormentor, Larkin writes, but it is so. The poet supplies to the rapist the human understanding the victim cannot be expected to. You could even say that the real, if buried, subject of the poem is the poet himself, one of whose persistent themes is the futility of attempts, especially sexual attempts, at human connection and self-transcendence.
As I said, I admire this poem (although less than before I started analyzing it!) and all of Larkin’s work, but I don’t think it’s the last, or only, or even truest word on the subject.
I have to write my column, so I’ll leave you to your labors, but I can’t sign off without saying that the scene that so thrills Erik and Chris–Glenn Close leading 18,000 women in a war chant of “cunt! cunt! cunt!”–did not actually occur. Some women, laughing and grinning, called out the c-word in unison, but it never took off. Most audience members just giggled. I just sat there, feeling rather out of it, as I so often do. Next year, maybe Jodi and Marjorie and I will go together and throw those free Tampax samples at the stage in Maenad-like abandon.
Katha
