Whose secrets do we keep?
Some scattered thoughts on silence and violence
This post is dedicated to everyone who needs to take care in reading it because of their experience of sexual violence and institutional silence.
Last week, I wrote about how by collecting stories of complaint, I collected secrets.
A complaint can end up in a file, treated as a secret document.
Secrets are not always declared secrets.
Secrets can be about consciousness, what we keep from ourselves.
You might shut the door of your consciousness to the violence you had to endure because if the violence got in, it would get everywhere.
Secrets can be about communication, what we keep from others.
You might shut the door so that other people don’t have to see the violence you endure, so what is everywhere for you, all over you, all over for you, is not there for anyone else.
A secret can be a story you have been stopped from telling, one you don’t even tell yourself. A secret can be what we carry around, like liquid in a container, what can spill, what we can spill.
I shared my post on Wednesday morning. Later that day, like many of you, I read the article about Cesar Chavez by Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes, based on extensive research including interviews with several women as well as sixty other people, and the reviewing of “hundreds of pages of union records, confidential emails, photographs and other material.”
We learn that Chavez, cofounder of the National Farm Workers Association and civil rights icon, groomed, sexually abused and raped many girls and women who were part of the labour movement.
Like many of you, I read civil rights activist Dolores Huerta’s words.
And was undone by them.
“I have never identified myself as a victim, but I now understand that I am a survivor—of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”
“The knowledge that he hurt young girls sickens me. My heart aches for everyone who suffered alone and in silence for years. There are no words strong enough to condemn those deplorable actions that he did. César’s actions do not reflect the values of our community and our movement.”
At the age of ninety five, Dolores Huerta said it.
That she had been raped by him. Had his children. Whom she kept secret.
Secrets can be kept to protect the movement. Such secrets, if they protected the movement, protected him, but not the girls, the women, who were also part of the movement.
The grief of this: how a political movement can be turned into a network of abuse.
If an abuser is a network, what happens when the abuser is a comrade?
Abuse ends up travelling through a movement that carries with it so many hopes for liberation.
Hope can be why you keep a secret, for whom you keep it. Hope can be what you fight not to lose when you can no longer keep a secret, by separating it from the movement (“does not reflect the values of our community and our movement”).
When I read Dolores’s words, I stopped. I stopped doing what I was doing. Writing what I was writing.
A secret can be how you keep grief in.
When spilled, a collective.
I felt the grief of so many secrets.
Squeezed out from the container.
Grief for all the silence. For all the violence.
Grief for everyone left alone. Made alone.
Silence about violence is violence.
I left my job because I could not stomach being silent about violence. I knew being silent was sufficient to become part of a network of abusers.
If I felt alone when leaving, in listened to other people’s secrets, I felt less alone. Was less alone.
Secrets gave me a handle. How I held on.
It can break, that handle.
And then it hits you.
You are flooded by grief and not just your own.
It came back to me, when I read your words.
The intensity of that time. The necessity of that work.
Your heart aching for all the others. Our hearts aching for you. And for all the others, too.
Grief for all the silence. For all the violence.
When I left my post there were secrets, I was supposed to keep. I didn’t keep them or not all of them. A resignation letter can be a secret spilt.
I didn’t say much. I didn’t put it all into words. Since then I have shared so many words. But still there is much that I have not shared. Not in so many words.
Just let a little bit out and more comes out.
That’s the hope.
That’s why secrets can require keeping everything so tight. Everybody so tight.
I was told to keep secrets not because it would damage the abusers, but because it would damage the institution. And not just any institution: a radical one. I was told to keep the abuses (and the enquiries into the abuses) secret because if I didn’t the “right wing media” would use it as a tool against the radical institution. I was told that if people knew what was going on at the institution, it would damage feminism because the institution would no longer be known for its feminism but as another place where sexualised abuses of power happened. Where they were allowed to happen. Let happen.
Does being known for feminism require keeping abuse secret?
If it does, doing feminism might require not being known for it.
I was told if I had any allegiance to a radical project, I wouldn’t say anything. When I shared information, I became not just a bad colleague but a bad comrade.
A bad comrade would let a complaint get in the way of the political project. I have since heard of many secrets kept not out of loyalty to an institution in an abstract sense, but to a political project.
I heard from Anna who was told not to complain about sexual harassment “because it would stop this innovative work happening.” I heard from Rohina who told herself not to complain about racism because it could “threaten a programme that is supposed to diversify the faculty.” They both complained anyway, despite what they were told or told themselves.
There’s a problem with a project if to keep it going requires accepting conditions of abuse. When you accept these conditions to keep a project going, it is not just that problem that’s obscured.
Abusers often entangle their projects with institutions whilst presenting themselves as against them. You might be told that you can’t complain about a radical centre housed by an institution because the institution would use the complaint to dismantle the centre. And, there might be truth to that threat, which makes it more useful to those who want to free themselves from complaints and their consequences.
It goes something like this: if you are with us, don’t complain about us because they are out to get us.
It is not that radical movements or projects or centres have more abusive men than those that make conserving the existing order the primary point or purpose. Of course not. It is not even that we have higher expectations of cis het men in radical movements – speak of the problem of men’s chauvinism on the left and most feminist activists will roll their eyes knowingly and get on with the job.
It is more that our political commitments to freedom from violence are used to enact violence.
That is so devastating, that our will for freedom can be used against us. That it works until it doesn’t, with too many lives, also hopes, crushed before it stops working, before enough secrets are spilled for the truth to come out.
And we don’t even have to be told to keep this or that secret. All around us, right from the beginning, we receive messages that tell us it is better to keep quiet, that making harm more visible would cause more harm, extending it beyond ourselves to a family or a community or an organisation or a movement.
The message is an instruction; keep harm to yourself as if it is small. Make yourself small, so they can be bigger.
So much is kept secret to preserve not just legacy, but reality.
That idea of what is going on.
Which is also the origin story of the feminist killjoy:
To expose a problem is to pose a problem.
Unless you bring it up, it does not exist or not really.
Or if exists, not here, not now.
Over there, back then, the violence
is brought in by those who are not us.
Abusers are treated as foreign, if here not from here, not part of our family, not one of our colleagues, our comrades. Or if an abuser is one of us, then he becomes an individual, an exception, an aberration, not expressing who we are.
To point to abuse as a system is evidence of not being attached to the system.
The expectation of attachment falls unequally.
Some become loose canons, improperly attached, firing off at anyone or anything. Others become free radicals, freed not only from attachments but restraints, doing whatever they so will or wish, turning equality into a “fuck you” policy.
Anyone who speaks of harm can be treated as a loose canon, intending to cause damage. After I left my radical institution - its radicalism depending on concealing all the ways in which it was not radical - I heard that harm being minimised despite all that had come out. How those who said no were treated as suffering from “hysteria” about the “abuse of women,” to quote from Noam Chomsky’s letter to Jeffrey Epstein. Yes, that old complaint about feminists.
The abuse was sometimes minimised by being transformed into the romance of rebellion, treated as transgression. Even by feminists. One time I was in another country and a radical decolonial feminist scholar casually referenced someone in a way that led me to realise she had remained part of the abuser’s network.
You can be part of an abuser’s network and float around radical spaces talking about abolition.
That broke my heart in too many places.
Another time I was contacted by a student after giving a virtual lecture. She apologized for having left early and explained she had done so because she “saw the name of her abuser in the chat’.”
Think about this: you have to leave a discussion about abuse because the person who abused you is in that discussion.
That’s how they abusers take over the spaces we created to survive the consequence of their conduct. When those who said no leave, they take our hopes with them. And if we point this out? We would be treated as punitive as well as policing, not doing transformative justice, being carceral feminists.
So much hostility follows a claim that abusers of power, those who use the power given to them by institutions to impose their will upon others, are not part of a project of liberation.
Should not be.
Or you, moralisers, with your goods and your shoulds!
The shunners, the meanies, the mobs.
Radical spaces become harder to inhabit, the more you know how they are not so.
We know, we go.
I will come back to this, why the charge of moralism matters.
Before that, think back.
When I stopped writing what I was writing, doing what I was doing, I thought of Audre Lorde.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I wrote a blog post, “Complaint and Survival,” inspired by Lorde (as most of my words are). From that post:
In an interview with Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde described how she was so “sickened with fury” about the acquittal of a white policeman who shot a black child that she wrote the extraordinary poem, “Power” (2017, 85).
In Lorde’s own words:
I was driving in the car and heard the news on the radio that the cop had been acquitted. I was really sickened with fury, and I decided to pull over and just jot some things down in my note book to enable me to cross town without an accident because I felt so sick and so enraged. And I wrote those lines down – I was just writing, and the poem came out without craft.
She stopped the car to get her feelings out.
She stopped the car and a poem came out.
She stopped the car because she knew that what she felt would come out, one way or another; an accident or a poem.
A poem is not an accident.
I have been thinking about that: how sometimes we have to stop what we are doing to feel the true impact of something, to let our bodies experience that impact, the fury of an escalating injustice, a structure as well as an event; a history, an unfinished history.
Sometimes to sustain your commitments you stop what you are doing.
In stopping, something comes out. We don’t always know what will come out when we stop to register the impact of something.
Audre Lorde teaches us how not to keep secrets not just by what we say but what we do, staying connected, live wires, being of more use to movements because we keep that no in circulation, even if sometimes we have to stop what we are doing. And so, in staying connected, going back, getting out, we circle through grief.