Today, I am so glad I am a girl because yesterday my mother told me to write my story. No matter that I will write her in unflattering truths. ‘Write,” she told me, ‘and I hope that book sells so you can afford to raise your daughter with a heart just like yours’… I wish every mother whose daughter survived the burial of these unspoken things would give her permission to say what happened, to write down how she survived the terror of being that small girl in a world that so deeply favors men. I wish every cunt had the courage to bear public witness. I wish every woman had the pen, the clear view, and the support she needs to scream, ‘What happened to me was not my fault! What happened to me was not my fault! What happened to me was NOT MY FAULT.’
–Staceyann Chin
The piece with this quote can be found in this video starting right around 10 minutes. I wish I could quote the whole thing. You should definitely watch it.
I saw Staceyann Chin speak and read at Mount Holyoke College a few years ago and she ended with this piece. It was unbelievably moving and I felt so validated in that moment as a survivor who writes. When I found the notebooks from right after I was raped, I knew right away I wanted to write a conversation between me then and me throughout my healing journey. It’s a project I’ve been working on since I found them a few months ago and that is so exciting, healing, grounding, and powerful for me. I told my mom that I found them and her response was, “You should burn those.” She thinks I need to set down what happened, move past it. She doesn’t understand that the violence enacted against me changed the course of my life, deeply affected the person who I am. I feel so grateful for my ability to write about the effects of sexual violence, abuse, rape culture, my family structure, being in this queer body/wounded spirit every day of my life. Seeing Staceyann Chin speak in person, feeling her power in the room, was so grounding in this strength I feel as a writer.
jenny did it 