Your Story, My Story

by Connie Palmen

Everything that’s denied and repressed, every conflict that’s swept under the carpet and disavowed, in a culture or in an individual’s existence, seeks a way out and ultimately—violent, destructive, diabolically disguised—turns against life.

To deny violence is to summon it. To deny evil is to summon it. In all my stories and poems, the denial of the evil lurking within us is the source of all misery, and insight and knowledge then become the salvation. Evil can be used to create something good through understanding, ordering, and ritualization. That’s what literature and religion are for.

It was the hostile gaze of others that made me loyal to her without hesitation. I regularly felt like a man protecting a fox from his own barking hounds while the fox bit him.