A rape story
Annie Zaidi
It's not science fiction and it's not
the nation's growth story. It's the rape story we are all living
inside of.
In this rape story, your
female/male/trans body is owned broadly by the state but specifically
and practically by your father, and next to him, your elder brothers,
and next to them, your uncles and your younger brothers. They decide
who to hand over your body to. This new person now has rights to
access your body, its seed and its fruit.
Sometimes money exchanges hands in this
story. The new owner of a female body takes money in addition to
control over your body because he will now have to feed, maintain,
clothe your body. Because its old owners have paid heavily and are
unlikely to get back what they paid, they no longer want to take
responsibility for your body should you return, broken and fearful.
In this rape story, there are rapists
but some of them are designated defenders of public law and order.
And there are victims but it is imperative that they not be called
rape victims, else the rape would have to stop. So the victims are
called public enemies. This is vital in order to ensure the stripping
off of their clothes, the kicks to their groins, the stones and
sticks thrust into their bodies, whip lashes on their haunches and
legs, electric shocks to their private parts, their damaged nerve
endings, their never-mending fractures, and other inventive
humiliations such as the forced ingestion of faecal matter and urine,
and the photographing and filming of all this so that the humiliation
is made eternal and the prospect of future dignity near-impossible.
In this rape story, rapists can retire
and live comfortably on public money, some of which also comes from
the victims themselves, their families and communities.
In this rape story, a court of law can
decide whether or not two bodies who have met are locked into a rape
like scenario, even if the two bodies themselves have screamed
themselves hoarse that this is not rape but love.
In this rape story, a body ceases to be
a child-like body if its owners have bartered it away too soon to
whoever would take it.
In this rape story, the name of
romantic/sexual love is overwritten with rape, and in the name of
familial love, rape is offered on a platter decorated with symbols of
divinity and all the holy blessings mother earth bestows such as
grain, sugar, turmeric.
In this rape story, a court of law –
and the state with all its given power and resources – cannot give
a safe refuge to a body fleeing rape. Such bodies are always returned
to their owners with the tacit knowledge that they will be bartered
or destroyed.
In such stories, it is also essential
that ideas be propagated about body worth in such a manner that the
body always has the least control over what is done to it. Ideas such
as how the value of the body decreases with use, rather than
increases. Ideas such as how the body is fickle and greedy and
deserves to be punished further if it has been hurt in the past.
There is no word for the pain of
smiling for photographs after having survived violence and pain in
some room of the house. In this story, the fact of having stood
beside your rapist and having smiled into the camera cancels out
rape.
Force is the pinnacle of aspiration in
such stories. To reject the wishes and desires of one body, or a
state of bodies, or the greater majority of bodies in a nation, is
seen as glorious. To impose upon another's body the wishes of a
handful of bodies that have acquired money enough buy off the bodies
of other service providers, is seen as glorious and morally correct.
In this story, rapists occupy positions
– they manage businesses, sell bouquets, guard apartment complexes,
melt steel, run city councils and state departments. It is assumed
that businesses would not run, homes would not be guarded, steel
would not melt and states would be ungovernable were rapists not
permitted to do what they do. It is assumed that victims are
dispensible for they run nothing and own very little. They are needed
to make new humans, but that purpose can also be achieved via rape
and thus, this story continues.
All these stories are told and re-told,
and enacted and reviewed every day, everywhere. These stories
sometimes nauseate their listeners, and often their tellers. But
these stories are never nullified. Thus, a rape culture is
constructed that we all live inside of.
