Charlotte Pierce-Baker, "Memoir and Academics"
(page 2 of 4)

With resistance, I slowly accepted the fact that I actually was writing a book about black rape - a very personal book - with a wide audience, not an historical, statistic-laden treatise on rape and sexual assault. Once I spoke the words aloud and believed them: "I am writing this book for the ordinary woman - the "woman on the bus" - I knew that Surviving the Silence, which began as an ethnography, had to rid itself of words such as "methodology"; "thick description"; "raison d'être"; and "philosophical muse" (although I was particularly fond of that one) - and other equally obtuse lexical items. I was, in fact, with the other women of the book, speaking wisdom from terror - and I wanted the words to be accessible. With the addition of this new, expanded - and unexpected - audience, the manuscript became viable.

I am taught in my work (in part) by the theory promoted by two Latina writers, Cherie Moraga and the late Gloria Anzuldúa who speak and write of what they term a "theory of the flesh." And yes, at this point my writing and speaking do sound a bit essentialist. But then I am not sure how one discusses black bodies, trauma, and "the personal" while remaining non-essentialist. The intersection of our lives and our work represents whole grids of the urban, indeed, the cosmopolitan, les mestizas and the international; they are major crossings, not just simple intersections of streets and corners and byways. We are talking here of whole grids of race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, disability. As time progresses, and with the feedback of other readers and researchers, I continue to learn how "life" intersects my research, my writing, my teaching.

By way of a personal example: With the recent loss - the death of my oldest childhood connection, my best friend - and the death of my mother, a year and some months later - I now must say slightly different things about Surviving the Silence - a book I wrote just seven years ago going on a quarter of a century. To whom, for instance, do I now tell the story - of the unspeakable, of that which is usually whispered in corners, behind curtains, in the shadows? Neither my friend nor my mother were survivors of rape, but they might as well have been. They understood the complex and manifold crossings of the seemingly disparate parts of my life. They were witness to my strangeness after the rapes - and to my struggles to "just get through the day." They were, for me, the essence of community. And in (at) their "endings," I was present. We were each other's bodies. My hurt was archived in theirs. And so - these are the offices of black women in the Americas. These are the offices of women in the Americas. When those long-time confidantes are no longer there, to whom does one tell the stories? The stories that American Indian writer Leslie Marmon Silko says we must hold onto lest we have nothing?

Once Surviving the Silence was completed and given over to "dear reader," I took a long, deep, cleansing breath, and I thought, "Now I can return to the real world of teaching and writing about 'ordinary academic' issues and topics." Little did I know that the publication of the book would be only the beginning of my engagement with topics of trauma/loss/violence and black women's lives. I thought with the finishing of Surviving the Silence I had put an end to the voices, the urgings to uncover yet more information, more stories. But as it turns out, Surviving the Silence only marked a "caesura" - a pause. There was more to be done. My book was merely a comma. My work has now taken on other angles and - slowly - the paragraphs beyond "rape and black women" have begun to fill in.