Public Awareness
OPDV Bulletin:
Derrick Jensen - Lives
When I was a child, my father beat everyone in my family but me. Because I was the youngest, he instead chose that I should watch, and listen. I remember scenes - vaguely, as from a dream or a movie long ago - of arms flailing, or my father chasing my brother Rik around and around the house. I remember my mother pulling my father into their bedroom to absorb blows meant for her children; the rest of us sat frozen in the kitchen, listening to stifled groans through too-thin walls. I remember lying motionless late at night, hearing my father come to other bedrooms, and I remember waiting watchful till dawn, wondering when it would be my door that opened, and not another.
The worst thing my father did was not to hit us, but to deny he ever did it; not only were bones broken, but broken also was the bedrock connection between memory and experience, between psyche and reality. His denial makes sense, not only because the admission of violence would have harmed his public image as a socially-respected, wealthy, deeply religious attorney, but more simply because anyone who would break his child's arm would in all likelihood not be able to speak of it honestly.
Nor could the rest of us speak or even adequately think of it. We were too busy anticipating our father's movements. We learned to slip unnoticed from rooms, or make ourselves small and immobile, and when all else failed, to disappear while leaving a shell behind, which shielded the psyche from blows and allowed the body to protect itself without being encumbered by the terror, outrage, sorrow, and pain inherent to this violence.
We became a family of amnesiacs. There's no place in the mind to sufficiently contain these experiences, and as there was effectively no way out, it would at the time have served no purpose for us to consciously remember the atrocities. So daily we forgot, and forgot again. After each beating came brief contrition, manifested by him asking, with deep emotion, "Why did you make me do it?" And then? Nothing, save the inconvenient physical evidence: the broken door, the urine-soaked underwear, the wooden room divider my brother repeatedly tore from the wall trying to pick up speed around the corner. Once these were fixed, there was nothing to remember. So we forgot, and the pattern continued.
Not only battered children forget. We read in the newspaper statistics revealing that violence by intimate partners is this country's leading cause of injury to middle-aged women (every nine seconds, a woman is beaten by her partner), and that 350,000 American children are killed or injured by their parents or guardians every year - and then we turn the page.
We don't stop the horrors because we don't talk about them. We don't talk about them because we don't think about them. We don't think about them because they're too horrific to comprehend. As trauma expert Judith Herman so accurately puts it, "The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable."
What else do we forget? Do we think about nuclear devastation, or the wisdom of producing tons of plutonium, lethal in microscopic doses for a mere 250,000 years? Does global warming invade our dreams?
No sane person explores pain for pain's sake. But mythologies of all times and all peoples reveal that those who enter the abyss and survive (not only physically but psychically) can bring back lessons for the rest of us. I don't know what boons I have brought with me from my own abyss. I do know I carry a palpable knowledge of the destructiveness of which many people are capable. I have no need to merely imagine the unimaginable. And I will no longer forget. I have learned that whether I choose to feel or not, pain exists. And whether we choose to acknowledge or not, atrocities continue. I have grown to understand that even in the face of the unspeakable I can and must speak and act.
I wish I were unreservedly hopeful. But for now, nuclear production continues, global warming proceeds apace, and six children are beaten every ten minutes. It is also true on a more intimate level that no one returns from the abyss unscarred. In small and large ways the horrors continue, as they do for all veterans of trauma. For years I could wash dishes when I was alone, but not when anyone watched (my father beat my sisters when the dishes were not clean enough), and only recently, in my thirties, have I learned that not everyone awakens often in the night and holds their breath to listen for the sound of the door creaking open, as eventually mine did, and did again.
Reprinted with permission of the author. Derrick Jensen is the author of "A Language Older Than Words" (Context Books, 2000) and "Listening to the Land" (Sierra, 1995; Critics Choice Best Nature Book of 1995). He writes for the Bloomsbury Review, The New York Times Magazine, and The Sun.
