What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape

by Sohaila Abdulali

It’s easier to feel ashamed than to accept that someone violated us in the most viciously intimate way and we couldn’t do anything about it.

On top of it all, we choose to blame each other—maybe out of misogyny, maybe simply out of fear—forgetting, as we do so, that there is someone else in the picture who also has a choice: a man, who can choose between decency and dominance.

I feel the need to remind you that, while this is a book about talking about rape, it’s important not to get so comfortable and conversational that we forget something: rape is staggeringly horrible. Most of us survive, and, if we’re lucky, get to appreciate the sounds of birds hurling crockery at each other in the trees of a summer morning. But, no matter how much we talk about it, it is in fact staggeringly, almost incomprehensibly awful. Like war, childbirth and other traumas, it’s almost impossible to explain if you haven’t been through it.

When you’re down there, spread apart, with someone inside you, rape is not a metaphor. It is most definitely physical. It’s blood and gore and tipped with poison, and it hurts.

That is what you must feel, and remember, while we continue our conversation about rape: that punch in the gut. The blood and gore, the horror, the horror.

Human beings are complex, and one person may bounce back quickly from a crime that breaks another’s spirit.

It’s impossible to tease out all the variables—our innate personalities, the things that happen to us, and the people we become are all so bound up with each other.