> know her name
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: *Know My Name*.
TW: sexual assault, rape
Hello friend,
I’ve been reading Chanel Miller’s memoir, Know My Name, for the past few weeks, although to be honest, I haven’t picked it up since last Wednesday.
Last Wednesday, I finally read the chapter about the rape trial. I read it under the awning of a café, anxious as hell, crying alone under the ceiling fans. Know My Name should be required reading for everyone, but I started reading it at an especially fraught time for me.
In many ways, the book feels too close to home. She is Chinese American, twenty-two then twenty-three, my age. Overachieving high school. Studied literature. Disaster and death felt distant, and then close. In other respects my life is nothing like hers, but in these facts is the impulse or perhaps the necessity of seeing my life in hers. And maybe it’s that simple, the seeing of how she is like me, that makes me cry nearly every time I pick up the book. It’s in the title, for crying out loud. Knowing Chanel Miller’s name, knowing who she is, is an act against the erasure, the gaslighting, of sexual assault and rape survivors. It’s what makes it real.
I returned to Patricia Lockwood’s poem, “Rape Joke.” The first time I read it, it felt important and funny and angry, but also distant. It was important and changed things but it was not about me (I know, I’m sorry). Reading it now, alongside Know My Name, is different. That could have been me. That is probably people I know.
And maybe sexual assault tends to write itself out of existence because there’s the doubt afterward, the gaslighting. In the poem, Lockwood writes:
The rape joke is that you asked why he did it. The rape joke is he said he didn’t know, like what else would a rape joke say? The rape joke said YOU were the one who was drunk, and the rape joke said you remembered it wrong, which made you laugh out loud for one long split-open second. The wine coolers weren’t Bartles & Jaymes, but it would be funnier for the rape joke if they were. It was some pussy flavor, like Passionate Mango or Destroyed Strawberry, which you drank down without question and trustingly in the heart of Cincinnati Ohio.
There’s a Still Processing podcast episode on the movie Promising Young Woman that I’m thinking about. The title comes from gaslighting survivors, from the idea that “You shouldn’t ruin a promising young man’s life just because he made some bad decisions.” Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris agree that the premise of the film is important, but also point out its privilege and White-centeredness. This, too, is probably why reading Know My Name is important to me, moreso than watching Promising Young Woman.
At what point does “That hasn’t happened to me and probably won’t” become “That has happened to so many women and could definitely happen to me”? When does a distant possibility become terrifyingly real? Why don’t I talk to my friends about this stuff?
Although not all sexual assault victims are women, they are mostly women, and I’m thinking about that, too, and what female friendships means within that context. In bell hooks’ Communion, she writes about the female search for love. From the book:
Femaleness in patriarchal culture marks us from the very beginning as unworthy or not as worthy, and it should come as no surprise that we learn to worry most as girls, as women, about whether we are worthy of love.
Worrying about whether we are worthy of love. Learning to accept the erosion of one’s own self-worth. I worry about this, about future workplace dynamics and meeting people and making friends, about whether I’ll undervalue myself because where does my internalized sexism end? I’m questioning whether I undervalue my female friendships and how to treasure them more.
Cheers,
Tiffany
+ Soupbone Collective zine four has been out in the world for just over a week (thank you Thalia and Clark!). It’s about spirituality. My roomie Zeki and I wrote a poem about establishing routine in a space where we’re outsiders, which you can check out here.