Honour

Today I forced myself to come out of my house for a few hours, and wandered around outdoors where it is becoming sunnier every day (but it’s still a bit chilly). My father’s been mucking around in the plumbing in the house, and as a result my kitchen sinks haven’t worked all day, and more and more water’s coming in from the drains as we speak. Naturally, he’s yelling about it to me, as if I were the one who took tools to the pipes on my own and made sure the disasters would result. This anger that comes out of us so easily–it’s been shattering me for a lifetime. Deep breath, everyone. I’m in turmoil about what follows.

I stumbled into a conversation the other day about the nature of rape and incest, and how its forms go unacknowledged in the world around us because they’re so often such a deeply embedded aspect of family life. Now, in my mind, I always knew this meant that patriarchal societies like our own turn on the idea of some man owning people as if they were property, and passing on that property to sons or selling their property (daughters and wives, whores in the “stable”, all the same thing in this economic set up) as chattel. And I always knew, on an intellectual level, that that means “ownership” of the women in the family as a means to produce more “property”–children. And I knew, as well, that “ownership” also means they can assign a value on a person’s worth–hence the big deal about virginity and “honour” and all the nonsense that so many men still believe in with all their hearts and minds, as individuals–and so many cultures still enforce as a tenet.

And then I remembered that this is true in our family, where my father’s preoccupation with me and my “value” often ended in violent battles between us. Where, many times, he intervened between me and a man and our own relationship in order to do damage to the relationship by opening up the noxious point again and again. How he made it clear to me, in words and fisticuffs and belt marks, that I didn’t even possess my own sexuality or body, that it was his to control. And that he would destroy any relationship I ever made with anyone else as long as he could, because of that fact.

Well, I guess it’s not as if he “raped” me, or anything–no, not technically. But there it is–a direct line between incest, seen as a father’s right; and the destruction of an individual person’s right to all that is their own by birth. It explains the outright disrespect he’s shown me for as long as I can remember–the contempt for anything related to me, as long as he could trace it back to me. It all stems from this idea of me as property, a real extension of himself, both as a symbol of him and as his marketable commodity.

I reacted to this thought as if I were reacting to a shock–because that’s what it was. I remember when I was 15 and interested in a boy who used to come around here–just interested in that way that kids are, wanting to spend time around me as much as I wanted to spend time around him, maybe to just experiment, with first kisses and a little bit of a crush on each other. I did a lot of writing back then and like most kids at that age who write a lot I kept a journal, which I wasn’t aware was being monitored for weeks by my father. Eventually I wrote about my little crush, how we’d talked about just being alone for the first time, instead of in a big group with other kids around, your typical teenaged stuff; and my father read up until that point before exploding in fury at what I’d written. Of course, I had no idea he’d been peeking in. In my mind, my privacy was my own; and what the hell was so wrong about having a crush on a kid your own age? Eventually the moment where the boy and I could just talk to each other without others joining in arrived. But I do remember we were not at all alone–other people we knew were all in attendance, just doing something else besides talking to us.

My father chose that moment as if he’d lain in wait for it to arrive. He stormed out among us, and made me feel like I was completely disgusting; he beat me in front of that boy and other people, and called me every single name he could think of, accusing me of acts I didn’t even know about at that point in my life. And that boy was not spared. My father insulted him and his family by accusing them of carrying out a plot to extort money from him (you know, they were all intent on making me pregnant, and therefore I would be forced into marrying their son, and my father would be forced into paying them lots of money until their son deigned to marry me). It’s so medieval and so unbelievably sick that my father would be so deluded (really, if I’d actually had sex with the boy and got pregnant, I’d have had an abortion without batting an eye, even then; and even then I would have been sure to have some form of birth control on hand for the event if that is what would have happened–but I had no intention of having sex with a kid I just wanted to talk to. I was 15, not 10).

My father chose to react to this child and his family as if he believed I were absolutely repulsive, that I was so awful and disgusting that someone would have to extort money from him just so that their son would accept the idea of being with me. Actually, my father chose to react to what I’d written. He secretly read what I’d written for weeks, waiting for something to act on, believing that I’d somehow reveal myself in my own misguided plans to devalue him with my actions. Everything I’d written, in his mind, was all about him and all about me as something that belongs to him, a threat to him because of my existence.

That violent event was devastating. I’d forgotten about it almost completely–the details like the boy’s name, the night it happened, but not in other ways. I’ve always “remembered” it because it’s at the heart of a depression that still lingers, maybe at the heart of my illness as well. And I was 15 at the time, the time something similar happens to most girls, and changes their lives irreparably afterwards.

Something similar happened again 12 years later, I was seeing a man I wanted to be with sexually more than anything–someone good natured, from a good family, someone who seemed to want to be with me as much as I wanted to be with him. But then things changed between us after a night when my father decided to become inflamed over our (very discreet, and also completely acceptable and to be expected) sexual interaction with each other. It’s not surprising, as I was 27 at the time and my sexual activity was my own concern. But once again he pulled the “I own your ass” business and intervened–and this time, with the man. Again things came to blows between me and my father, and once again the relationship was ruined. I never connected the two incidents, because I’d almost forgotten the first one that took place and all the pain it caused. Even now I feel like I’m the self-centered one, who doesn’t see how wrong I am in all of this, and how much damage I’ve done with my actions. That’s quite a twisted logic, to be blaming myself in that situation and not seeing exactly what the conflict was and why it was staged at all. My father believes I am his property, especially sexually. And he believes that to this day and comments on that to my husband. He doesn’t understand that that’s not only wrong, it’s transgressive, a kind of rape that bypasses the physical violation and plows straight into the emotional and psychological violence directly. Then again, I “get” the idea intellectually and yet I still feel like he’s right to think that way, as incorrect and transgressive as the idea is. It’s like I’ve internalized his hatred for me, even though I know he must be wrong, and always has been. All this time all I’ve been struggling with is that imposed hatred and that violation. How do I make myself right again? How can it be possible? Every relationship after that first one that was destroyed…because of me and the way I felt in them, the way I felt about myself. I always felt like there was something atrociously wrong with me, I wasn’t deserving of anyone’s love or attention or care–I was never sure of their intentions, and always questioned them. I was convinced I’d be dumped sooner or later, and in almost every relationship, I was: even when I would choose to leave the man.

It’s there under the entire relationship with RS–even in the fact that he was so much older than me, and quite willing to be like a “father” to me–and maybe there is something to that in my selecting him as I did. It’s behind the lack of connection between me and M.–the lack of sexual life we actually have together, since my father insists on intervening there even if only in word. I don’t feel worthy, I don’t feel like I deserve that vital part of the relationship, or even of my life. I feel like my sexuality is a destroyed thing.

It’s like that film, Prizzi’s Honour–I get it now, in a way I never could before (ironically, as almost the same thing that happened to the Angelica Huston character at the hands of her father happened to me). Fittingly, Angelica Huston as the wounded Prizzi exacts the only kind of revenge that counts: she kills her father via torture, and then re-establishes the relationship her father’s incestuous beliefs destroyed. It’s as if she wins “the argument” with her father over her worth, in a way I never could: she forces him to see he was wrong by using his tactics, a kind of war of surveillance, calculation, and violent action, and she reverses every other development that took place since her violation happened, taking a bit of the revenge out on her lover, who “bought in” to the concept of her “dishonour” by moving on to another lover altogether.

And this brings us down to the crux: the point at which all things come together, the point at which all things started to fall apart, for me: that 15 year old girl who’s still out there, wondering why the hell she’s been so beat up about nothing, and so hurt that everything else in life suffered after that. Dr. John got close to it, but didn’t name it: my accidental conversation with some other girls who’ve survived rape and incest made me see this point. They told me very clearly: in all cases of rape, the woman will always be told she’s the one who was in the wrong, the one who brought it on herself, often the one who chose to be raped in order to inflict shame on everyone else she is related to.

Huh.