What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape
Sohaila Abdulali
Penguin
229 pages; Rs 499
On the night of December 16, 2012, two of my friends — a man and a woman — had gone to watch Life of Pi at a movie theatre in South Delhi. Failing to make it in time for the last Metro, they decided to take an autorickshaw and my male friend had to accompany the woman right to her doorstep. There is nothing unusual with this account, except when they woke up the next day to a chilling account of a young woman’s gang-rape and brutal assault. She was watching the same film in the same theatre, possibly even the same show. And yet, her night ended so violently different from my friends’.
Most people in Delhi would remember where they were when they heard the news of the 2012 gang-rape case. Widespread protests followed, the Justice Verma Committee was set up and the government announced the Nirbhaya Fund, a non-lapsable, Rs 10-billion corpus dedicated to women’s safety.
For Sohaila Abdulali, travelling on a train from Boston to New York, a young woman’s rape had an entirely different impact. An article Ms Abdulali wrote for Manushi 30 years ago had become viral on social media. This piece detailed her ordeal as a 17-year-old gang-rape survivor in 1980. In three decades, Ms Abdulali had learnt to academically engage with and detach herself from her own trauma, but it all came crashing down in 2012. Her phone rang incessantly and her inbox was choked with emails from friends, family, rape survivors and the ubiquitous trolls.
Ms Abdulali’s book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape, is a product of her nuanced engagement with the subject of rape. It would be naïve to assume that she is qualified to write a book on sexual assault solely because of her own experience with it. If that were the case, countless women in India would be churning out books by the hour. While her own experience is a constant reference point in this book, her ability to examine rape as though it were a tangible, three-dimensional object comes from her theses on the subject, protesting for change, raising funds and working with survivors at the rape crisis centre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
What We Talk About… is a book like no other for various reasons. For one, as Ms Abdulali points out in the Introduction, this book is not a compilation of essays, does not fit into the sociology or psychology genres, cannot qualify as research nor is it a memoir. As she exultantly declares, “This is just what I want, because in this space lies my freedom.” The book, she adds, explores both what we say about rape and what we don’t. Second, it raises questions about rape survivors, rapists, about empathy and loss of power and it defiantly answers none. “In this book, I will contradict myself. Rape is always a catastrophe. Rape is not always a catastrophe. Rape is like any other crime. Rape is not like any other crime. It’s all true.” But despite its myriad contradictions and needling questions, Ms Abdulali’s prose is in no way confused or confusing.
She uses pithy phrases to put forth piercing arguments, offering a degree of refreshing perspective that at once emotionally charged and objective. For instance, in a chapter titled “The official version”, Ms Abdulali writes about the time when she was called for jury duty in the US for a rape case. As is the norm, the judge asked if anyone had been or knew someone who was sexually assaulted. Ms Abdulali was one of the several people who raised their hands. She was called into the room for a brief interrogation and was soon adjudged unfit to be an unbiased member of the jury. “If you’ve been raped, then you can’t have an opinion about it because you’re too biased, too emotional, too close to it. Yes, I know. Crazy. But true,” she writes. She goes on to talk about the language in which rape is defined, the way in which a criminal or a survivor is addressed and how the official version is important no matter the statue of limitations on the crime. In her own case, the official version states that nothing happened on the night she was raped.
Ms Abdulali is joyously irreverent and does not shy away from using colloquial phrases such as “the system universally sucks” or “d*** conquers all”. For an (the) Indian readership particularly, calling a spade a spade is the need of the hour. There is enough anecdotal evidence from the reaction around #metoo that suggests that we are still a country not equipped to comprehensively talk about and deal with the issue of gender-based violence. What We Talk About… not only sets the record straight, but it also explores the yet unthinkable idea that a survivor’s life isn’t ruined after he or she is raped, that his or her identity lies beyond the victim checkbox. Remarkable is too feeble a word to describe Ms Abdulali’s courage, surreal is a misplaced word to define something that is so firmly rooted in the reality of our times and delightful seems rather inappropriate an adjective for a book about unimaginable pain. And yet, all three capture the essence of Ms Abdulali’s book that resolutely escapes all efforts to be pegged.