WHAT HAPPENS BETWEEN AN INDIVIDUAL AND AN INDIVIDUAL can be labeled “not that bad.” It can be called a “crime of passion.” It can be called a misunderstanding, a Freudian slip, a one-time deal, just between you and me, an act meaningless among the vast, insensible crises of genocide. Any measure of comparison feels grotesque when presented as a simile: that rape is “like” colonization—although the metaphor of “rape” is often used to describe the conquest of land. Flip it around and think of rape as colonization: not just a metonym, but a precise synecdoche, part for whole, an action by which
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