Talking about sexual assault is uncomfortable. It’s sensitive, disruptive and combative. But talking about sexual assault is vital, says poet Dominique Christina.
“You have to interrupt, and you have to agitate,” Christina says. “I’m interested in radical conversations that pull people into consciousness and call power out. You have to risk the discomfort because you know what the end game is, and you know how bad it can be if you don’t. All of it is inconvenient. Any fight is inconvenient. Any rebellion is inconvenient. Any revolution is inconvenient.”
As a kick-off to Sexual Assault Awareness Month in April, Moving to End Sexual Assault (MESA), is holding a poetry event with award-winning poet Pages Matam and female duo Sister Outsider, comprised of Christina and Denice Frohman, both world championship-winning poets.
MESA is a rape crisis center that serves Boulder County and Broomfield. It provides a 24-hour crisis and information hotline, programs that support sexual assault survivors and preventative programs to the community.
According to MESA’s website, one in four women and one in 17 men in Colorado will experience sexual assault in their lifetime. While the numbers are essential, the poetry event is an effort to put a face to the statistic.
“You have to talk to a person’s heart, the inside of their rib cage, so that they understand the weight of it, the mass of it, the critical nature of it and the urgency of it,” Christina says. “Poetry allows for storytelling. … [Statistics] sound far away. And that woman is not your mother or your sister or your next door neighbor or your favorite aunt. Poetry is about fleshing those bones … [and] forcing you to feel it from the inside. Forcing you to be uproarious. It’s not in the abstract anymore. It’s not far away. It’s close.”
Christina had her own experience with sexual assault as a child being molested by her stepfather, which she talks about in her poem “Star Gazer.” She says that along with doing the emotional work, poetry also helped her address the issue and push it outside of her body, enough to reach out to those in the audience.
“There’s something really important and restorative about speaking those things into a space,” she says. “Because, more often than not, there’s someone in that space that hears it and needs it.”
Pages Matam calls poetry the doorway to healing. In his poem “Piñatas,” he talks about working as a teacher and having students of various ages and genders approaching him with their incidents of sexual assault. It then triggered his own experience of being molested at 8 years old by a cousin. His students’ stories, he says, were the catalyst for dealing with his own issues.
“Some of these things, you think if you don’t talk about them or think about them they go away, but that’s not true…” he says. “It was good to be able to go through that moment and have that process and feel everything I needed to feel and truly begin tackling my healing.”
Sexual assault also affects the loved ones around the survivor. As her partner worked through former trauma, Denice Frohman says she learned how to be a support system.
“I’ve learned that sometimes it feels like it’s always in the room and that’s OK. … And that it doesn’t mean you’re going to slay all the person’s demons — they still may exist because you yourself are not the solution. You can be part of the solution. … All you can do is work every day to remind them that whatever defense mechanisms they need to survive, that they may not need it here with you.”
As a woman, Frohman says, she was able to offer empathy and compassion, because she understands what it feels like to be violated. Her first interaction with harassment was at a young age when someone commented on her developing body. She then proceeded to spend the whole summer in sweat pants and long-sleeved shirts because she didn’t want to be noticed. She says everyone comes at it from different experiences, but the source is the same.
“Most women do the things we do to avoid being raped,” she says. “I’ve been harassed and intimidated for being queer and visible. [Women] understand what it’s like to live under the threat of violence.”
That ongoing threat is something Christina says she doesn’t see improving any time soon. Especially with social media, she sees people posting pictures of unconscious girls at parties with hashtags — there’s no healthy level of shame, she says. The term “rape culture” didn’t exist when she was younger, and she says she wants people to realize that sexual assault can’t be ignored.
“[Rape culture] is when you normalize an event that should be abhorred by you, where it should send shock waves through your body and interrupt your day, but instead you can shrug it off and sip your coffee,” she says.
Those cultural standards have seeped into our societal structures, creating bigger systemic problems, Matam says. He sees cracks in the system where people fall through, such as survivors not being believed by police or being turned away from hospitals.
“There are so many layers and complexities to this,” he says. “There’s not just one answer because there’s so many issues that stem from the personal to the public to the judicial and all the other bigger institutions and systems that are out there.”
This is not a new issue, but as numbers continue to skyrocket society is taking notice. Slowly, the conversations are shifting, and the problem is beginning to shed its misguided reputation of being “a women’s issue.”
“There are three types of violence — actions, words and silence,” Matam says. “If we continue to remain silent it’s an act of violence in itself, and it’s not something we can keep standing for. It’s not just a women’s issue, it’s an everyone issue. We all have to take our part in this and do the work.”
The awareness also needs to expand to include more marginalized groups, he says. The numbers of sexual assault increase for people of color, and they continue to worsen for lesbian, gay, bisexual and especially transgender communities. Matam says he wants to see safe spaces for these survivors because it’s the people who are ignored the most who need the most care.
For Frohman, she wants the dialogue to transition away from victim blaming to stopping the act itself. While sexual assault prevention is an important conversation to have, she says it’s a dangerous game to ask what the victim was wearing or how hard he or she actually struggled.
“The primary conversation and the one we need to keep pushing it back to is why did it happen, and maybe secondarily is how do we react to it,” Frohman says.
As she says, it’s an issue that affects everyone, yet mostly women are the only focus. Christina says therein lies the problem.
“You can’t interrupt power by having powwows with the people who understand it,” she says. “You have to interrupt it by getting in front of the people who don’t understand.”
Various studies say over 90 percent of sexual offenders are men, says Camilo Casas, coordinator of the Men Standing Up program at MESA. Casas, Frohman, Christina and Matam all wish to see more emphasis on bringing men into the discussion. MESA’s doing footwork in the community to engage with boys, especially in middle and high school, to promote healthy masculinity, Casas says.
Through his work, Matam has also reached out to several men and boys. He says when boys lack strong male figures or other guidance, boys learn how to treat women through other harmful avenues. Matam says he himself learned about sex from watching porn.
Once when talking to men at a detention center, Matam asked why the detainees catcall women, and the response? Because they can. Because no one will stop them. Matam says patriarchy teaches men that they know better — men are on the top and everyone else is at the bottom. “We need to start revamping the way we talk to people, most definitely men, and teaching them not to rape and undoing patriarchy and undoing sexism,” Matam says.
The MESA poetry event can be a step toward starting the discussion about sexual assault. Matam says he hopes that by the end of the performance everyone leaves with more love than they came in with.
“That’s what we need,” he says. “We need more people loving themselves so they can love other people and support other people. My sincere hope is to create a safe space full of love for everyone.”
ON THE BILL:
MESA: Be Moved: Poetry for Sexual Assault Awareness. 6p.m. Thursdaty, April 2, The Dairy, 2590 Walnut St., 303-440-7826. Tickets &10-20 at www.thedairy.org.
