Several writers break the taboo on sexual violence and tell them in fiction or testimony books
Violations cause terrible trauma to their victims that are difficult to overcome. One of the mind’s defense mechanisms is to erase aggression. Another formula for evoking horror is to confront it with words. Tell it. This is what Tatiana Salem Levy, Belén López Peiró, veteran Joyce Carol Oates, Lidia Caro or Mónica Rouanet do. His books, which break a literary taboo, are now collapsing in bookstores. They speak of women clinging to words to escape the loop of horror and panic that prevents many raped women from restoring normal lives.
In ‘Vista Chinesa’ (Books of the Asteroid), Brazilian Tatiana Salem Levy (Lisbon, 1979) recounts the true rape in 2014 of a good friend, Júlia. She is a young architect who is robbed at gunpoint by a man while running in Tijuca Park, on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. «My body, my work, my courtship, my doubts, my questions, my life was over. It is over. It was all she could say,” writes Júlia, who years later will tell all that happened in a letter to her son.
Salem Levy wrote this book to confront a family taboo. Her mother was raped when she was 4 years old. It was always hidden from him, disguised as a carjacking. “I might never have known. Most raped mothers don’t dare tell their children, no matter how old they are,” says the author.
Belén López Peiró (Buenos Aires, 1992) was 22 years old when she sued her police uncle for the abuse she had endured as a teenager. At the age of 26, he published ‘Why you come back every summer’ (The Outskirts), a raw and shocking story that recreates those terrible summers. “The room is still dark, but there is more night in my chest. Only when he is inside me does it hurt, the skin tears at the force of his fingers. But when he walks away and leaves me like a used body, like a shell stretched and pierced, the pain is worse. Because he’s leaving, but I know he’s coming back,” he writes. It was a catharsis that would continue with “Where I don’t walk” (Lumen).
He here confronts the humiliating trial that is still pending and eight years after his indictment without conviction and discusses the meaning of damages. “What should it be? To forget? Release? Leave behind? Can a body be repaired as a broken cup is repaired?
The American Joyce Carol Oates (Lockport, 1938) approaches the aftermath of a savage aggression in ‘Rape. A love story’ (Password). Teena Maguire is brutally raped and beaten by a gang of drugged boys while crossing a park in Niagara Falls, New York, with her 12-year-old daughter Bethie. The baby runs away and hides but listens to everything that happens in the cabin of horror.
The why hammers the mind of the victim, who will feel humiliated in a judicial ordeal. The aggressors’ lawyers question her version and launch a smear campaign that permeates the population and the media, suggesting that Teena was never sexually abused. “Half of the rapes go unreported and the victims are treated horribly twice, from the rapists and from the corrupt justice system,” Oates denounced.
‘Los años que no’ (Barrett), is the first novel by Lidia Caro (Valencia, 1990) that also makes it clear that hell doesn’t end when the rape ends. From autofiction, it tells the trials and tribulations of a young woman who is raped in the doorway of her home in the center of Madrid and who will flee to the United States to seek refuge in a different reality and language. “It was the years when no, I wasn’t a person. He had an alien of sadness and loneliness, but he stopped it with trips and adrenaline. The pain, covered in layers of iridescent mother-of-pearl,” writes Caro.
In ‘Nothing Important’ (Roca Editorial) Mónica Rouanet (Alicante, 1970) deals with rape from the ‘thriller’. Young Minerva survives a brutal attack that sends her into a coma in 1990s Madrid. But there are those who claim that he was looking for it. When he wakes up, he doesn’t remember anything. Nor will her aggressor, who will mingle with her closest friends and be her shadow for years, waiting for the moment to complete her “self-order.”
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
