Are Politics Personal?

A student in the creative writing class I’m in wrote a short story from the perspective of a young man who sexually assaults his classmate.  It is a well-written account of the build-up to the rape.  The reader sees the narrator, Ben, try to weave unreliable logic together in order to justify his actions.  He reminds himself that he cares about his classmate, that they are in love.  In reality the “couple” had only shared a few sentences before the night began.  At the end of the workshop, another classmate commented that she really liked the original point of view it was written in.  The writer responded that she had written a first draft of the piece from the victim’s point of view, but that she thought that had been done before, so she rewrote it from the attacker’s point of view.  The teacher added, almost leaping across the table how happy she was for making that change.

“Thank you!” She exclaimed.  “I have found that the female’s point of view is so over-written.  I commend you for taking on a different perspective.”  There were a series of other comments from students agreeing with what my teacher said.

I sat there thinking to myself, what the hell type of books have these people been reading that they’re tired of reading the perspective of sexual assault victims?  In my four years as a high school student and half-year as a college student, I have read one novel solely dedicated to the perspective of a pedophile, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, and one novel that devotes two chapters, if that, to the narrative of two women who are sexually assaulted, Meridian by Alice Walker.  “Am I missing something?” I thought.

Even in the news, I am more used to seeing stories from the attacker’s perspective, than the victim’s.  From any number of NFL players refusing to acknowledge their domestic violence, to artists taking no responsibility for sexual assault “scandals”.

I asked my family about this in the car and they came to an agreement that in their experiences they had not noticed the same thing my classmates did about the overwriting of sexual assault narratives by the victim.  My brother said he bet if I had pressed my peers about what specific pieces of literature they were talking about, they would have a hard time coming up with an overwhelming list.

I sat back wondering what would happen if I had called out my classmates about their opinions.  During a class before this, the discussion touched on the issue of bullying.  One classmate made what I thought was a very powerful comment about the issue of victim-blaming in situations where violence is committed on vulnerable people.  I approached this student afterwards telling her that I thought the point she made was very important.  She said she wished our teacher would engage those types of discussions more often, the ones that make us uncomfortable, because those are the important and the fruitful ones.

“I think we signed up for the wrong class,” I responded jokingly, “Maybe we need to separate the political from the poetic, it is just an introduction to creative writing class.”

“But they’re the same thing!” She exclaimed.  “Politics are personal.  We’re in this class because we want to write about the things in life that affect people deeply, we want to explore and argue about it.  There’s a girl sitting in that class who was picked on in middle school and felt that politically tinted comment emotionally,” she argued, her passion pushing me back rather than engaging me.  “You can’t separate politics from personal experience,” she said.

Over a month removed from this conversation and I feel my classmates words sit in my gut as I read about the nurse resisting the 21-day quarantine in New Jersey, the protests in Ferguson, or try to stay up to date on the many things going on abroad.  It’s easy to think about these stories as just words filling up white on a page, a way to claim I’m an informed citizen, but they are stories that affect lives as real as my own.

The choice many of my peers in my creative writing class along with my teacher’s decision to praise the writer’s choice to write from a point of view that takes all of the power, is a dangerous political choice.  It sends a message that discredits, or makes smaller an already vulnerable point of view.  It quiets an already hushed voice that is an important voice to give credence to.  Politics are personal.  That’s why movements begin.  Enough people are touched personally, are outraged and inspired to make change.  Because enough people aren’t yet tired of hearing survivor’s stories. Personal is political.

 

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