What's Going On?
Thinking of Marvin Gaye's great question and what's next for me
Next month, I will be embarking on my first writing residency. Out on a farm in Tennessee, I’ll have a week to write, read, and work on Book #2.
Book #1 was shrouded in mystery, and I kept it that way out of respect for my family and the story. With my next book, I’ve decided not to be so secretive. If you know me or have read some of my story, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Book #2 is about my 2015 rape and the trial that took place in 2016.
Being on the internet these days as a survivor is a hard thing. Epstein files, the musician D4VD’s alleged sexual abuse and murder of a 14-year-old Celeste Rivera. Everywhere I turn, violence against women and girls.
Book #2 focuses on the trial process, dealing with ADA’s, DA’s, lawyers, detectives, beat cops, all of it. It also lets you into my emotional world at the time. Which, you can imagine, was a bit of a wreck. I was 22. He was someone I considered a friend, was dating one of my friends, was a close family friend of my boss at the time.
This idea of friendship and how that bond was severed, the betrayal, is also central to the book. When I ask myself the question “what’s going on?” I know the answer is that society has never cared to protect the most vulnerable. We protect ourselves. In the book, there is a poem about women who kill their abusers and how women’s prisons are filled with such cases.
The word matriarchy has been floating around a lot lately in online spaces, as an alternative to our current system of patriarchy. Some argue that matriarchy would be more of the same, but with men and boys being oppressed and women being the primary violent abusers. Of course, there are women that are violent abusers, but I don’t think matriarchy is just a flip of patriarchy at all.
I think to believe this you must believe that what women primarily want is revenge and not freedom. That may be true for some, but lots more just want to be in loving relationships, to walk down the street and feel safe at night.
In Book #2, I talk about my desire for violent revenge in one of the poems, I also acknowledge that when I was going through it, all I wanted and did was enact violence on myself instead of my abuser.
For months after my rape, I had nightmares where I did kill him, but only after he attacked me again. It was always in self defense. Even in my own psyche, I couldn’t hurt him first.
I still need to buy my plane ticket, but I’m so excited to get started on reworking Book #2 and having the space and energy to devote entirely to it. Quite a few poems from it have already been published, which you can find on the writing page of my website.
Thanks for reading
xo
Dani Janae