One July afternoon in 2020, I called Dr. Judith Herman to discuss the new book she was working on, which I was representing as her literary agent. Truth and Repair was the sequel to her landmark Trauma and Recovery—I didn’t represent her in 1992, I was seven—and it sought to answer a question that picked up where the earlier book left off: What does justice look like for survivors of sexual violence?
As our conversation wound down, Judy mentioned an email she’d recently received from a woman named Sarah Super. Super and her nonprofit, Break the Silence, were creating a memorial to survivors in one of Minneapolis’s parks. Since Trauma and Recovery had been such an inspiration to her, Super wanted to know if she could engrave a line from it in stone.
“Which quote?” I asked.
“The one about how all the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing,” Judy said. “While the victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.”
Right then, I decided I’d go to Minneapolis.
Survivors are always remembering and forgetting, not remembering then never forgetting. It’s one of the dialectics of trauma, this endless recurrence. Whirlwinds of intrusive thoughts and flashbacks, then deserts of dissociation. The mind is a warzone, where battles are neither won nor lost, only fought again and again. I try to forget what happened to me; I succeed. After a length of time, the remembering stages a counteroffensive, with extreme prejudice.
The Memorial to Survivors of Sexual Violence—referred to as “the nation’s first permanent memorial to survivors” in the few news stories I could find online—was set to open that October. I wondered if Super was inspired by #MeToo. The autumn of 2017 was the only frame of reference I had for living through the summer of 2020, when people’s buried and not-so-buried traumas broke the surface, erupting in a collective catharsis and a righteous call for reckoning. I wanted to see if the creation of a new cultural memory was possible.
I also wanted to go to Minneapolis because I needed to do something. Yet again, I wasn’t doing well. When I closed my eyes at night, I lost control of what I saw, as if I were strapped into the machine from A Clockwork Orange. It might only take me forty or fifty minutes to fall asleep, but every vertiginous minute felt like an hour.
Not that I had much to look forward to on the other side. It wasn’t just the dreams, in which the people who molested or raped me made more and more cameos. It was how I remained frozen when I woke in fright the next day. Twitchy yet lethargic, my whole body was keyed up to just lay there—and take it. My thoughts of suicide had returned.
I was “doing the work,” but it could be grueling. I went to therapy every week, and I’d recently joined a group for male survivors, run by a second therapist. While helpful, no doubt, neither could be considered taking a break from dwelling on my past. Also, I wasn’t even really “going to” these therapies. They were on Zoom.
Perhaps that’s why the idea of flying to Minneapolis was so appealing to me that day on the phone with Judy—a chance to travel for the first time during the pandemic, flee my mental battlefield, go AWOL. Still, making decisions wasn’t easy for me in that time of twisted days and nights. It was two weeks before I got around to emailing Sarah Super.
Memorials, if they’re any good, address you. They say: We remember and Don’t forget. The first statement is a testimony from whatever minority of people the memorial serves, the second an injunction to the majority to bear witness. I’d never been in the minority before, and I was ambivalent about it. Was this always the case with memorials, or was the Survivors Memorial special in its public dedication to something so personal, so marked by shame? The dual messages felt scrambled by that dialectic of trauma—the pain of remembering, the need to move on; the need to have it remembered, the pain of others forgetting. And what about the name? Memorials typically commemorate the dead for something they did heroically or that tragically befell them. This one played with time. Dedicated to the memory of all survivors—by definition alive—in the past, present, and future.
When I heard back from Super, I asked if there was anyone else she thought I should talk to. She directed me to Nicole Fox and Alexa Sardina, two assistant professors in the Division of Criminal Justice at California State University, who were writing an academic paper about the Memorial for The Journal of Interpersonal Violence. They had interviewed more than twenty-five people involved in its construction, including landscapers, lawyers, and the artist Lori Greene, whose mosaic artwork was featured.
When Fox, Sardina, and I met over Zoom in August, Fox confirmed that the Memorial was the first of its kind. “In terms of a monument or memorial, solely for this,” Fox said, “that doesn’t specify a specific episode of violence, or a specific type of gender-based violence, or a specific group of victims—this is it, from what I know.” There was a statue in San Francisco dedicated to the two hundred thousand girls and women of Asian ethnicities who were sexually enslaved by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II, and there was the memorial garden at Stanford University where Chanel Miller was sexually assaulted by Brock Turner in 2015. Not much else.
It didn’t surprise me that there weren’t more rape memorials or sexual assault monuments dotting our country’s parks and statehouse lawns, standing next to perfunctory cannons or statues of Abraham Lincoln. Sexual assault and rape are the kinds of thing the body politic would rather forget. Fox told me that some Holocaust and genocide memorials had started to encompass gendered violence, but they’d been slow to do so. In “The Unremembered,” a 1994 essay for Ms. Magazine about the recently opened Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC, Andrea Dworkin wondered, “Where, how, in what numbers, were women raped?” She got no answers: the museum at the time did not deal specifically with women, or the question of rape. Writing about the memorial that opened in 2003 at Srebrenica, where one of the most horrific episodes of the Bosnian genocide took place, the scholar Janet Jacobs observed that the “approximately 50,000 (mostly Muslim) victims of mass rape” were not explicitly memorialized. “Because the memory of the raped body is marked by personal, familial, and national degradation,” Jacobs wrote, “memorializing this suffering and honoring those who survived the violence are antithetical to the project of nation building and ethnic pride.”
Still, I was surprised that the Survivors Memorial was the first. “We know that for survivor healing to take place, there needs to be a reintegration into the community,” Sardina said. “And public acknowledgment of their experience is a really important component of that.” There are a lot of people the Memorial could serve. Every 68 seconds in this country, there’s a sexual assault. Conservatively, at least 20 percent of women and 4 percent of men have been the victims of rape or attempted rape. Over 50 percent of trans people are sexually abused or assaulted in their lifetimes. One in four girls and one in six boys are sexually abused before the age of 18. Eighty percent of the time they’re abused by people they know well (older children, parents and stepparents, coaches and priests). These are high civilian casualty rates for being born. When I disclosed to Fox and Sardina that I was a survivor of sexual violence, they both said they were, too.
It takes a particular kind of person to create the first memorial to all survivors of sexual violence in the history of the world. Most survivors seek to resolve their horrific experiences “within the confines of their personal lives,” Judith Herman wrote in Trauma and Recovery. “But a significant minority, as a result of the trauma, feel called upon to engage in a wider world.” Sarah Super is one of these. “While there is no way to compensate for an atrocity,” Herman continued, trauma can be “redeemed only when it becomes the source of a survivor mission.” Super describes herself as a “perfect victim”—white, middle-class, well-educated—such that her rapist was arrested swiftly, and a conviction secured. But it was her background in social justice and trauma studies that helped prepare her to transform the crime’s meaning. The Memorial became Super’s survivor mission.
The first time Super and I spoke, also over Zoom, she told me about her life before the Memorial became the center of it. (It took over five years of planning, fundraising, and organizing to complete.) After graduating from the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities in 2007 with a major in sociology and American studies and a minor in social justice, then working for a year as a racial-justice program specialist at the local YWCA, Super returned to school to study the connection between human rights abuses and mind-body healing. She soon became interested in the research coming out of the Trauma Center in Brookline, MA, run by Bessel van der Kolk, who at the time was writing what would become his massive bestseller, The Body Keeps the Score. In 2013, Super was awarded a fellowship to go to the Trauma Center, where she helped design a trauma-sensitive yoga curriculum. She became the first certified trauma-sensitive yoga instructor in Minnesota.
On February 18, 2015, the day Super was scheduled to return from a short vacation, her ex-boyfriend, Alec Neal, broke into her apartment and hid in her closet. When she got home that evening, she called a friend, expressing concern over a “creepy” note she’d recently received from Neal, then fell asleep. She woke at 11:30 PM to Neal sitting on her bed. He raped her at knifepoint. As Super tried to escape, Neal cut her hand with the knife, but she still managed to get to a neighbor’s apartment. Police later apprehended Neal after a 13-mile car chase. He was charged with first-degree criminal sexual conduct (commonly called rape), kidnapping, and first-degree burglary. He cut a deal: by pleading guilty to the count of criminal sexual conduct, he got the other two charges dismissed. On July 28, Alec Neal was sentenced to twelve years in prison and a lifetime on the sex-offender registry. (He was released in 2023.)
At his sentencing, Super noted in her victim impact statement, which she shared with me, that long after the sexual assault, an “immense sense of powerlessness, captivity, distrust, and betrayal lingers.” That feeling, she wrote, is “compounded in our culture as survivors watch their own communities turn their heads, cast judgment on the situation and healing process, pass any sense of accountability and ownership, and deny the crisis and prevalence of violence against women here in our community.” Super also pointed out that her perpetrator had been “able to flee the police at 120 miles per hour and be taken into custody without harm” at a time “when young, black men are killed by police for nothing but wearing a hooded sweatshirt.”
The day after the assault—after talking to the police, going to the hospital, waiting for the forensic exam—Super remembers coming home, standing in front of her mirror, and saying to herself, “I look exactly the same as I did 24 hours ago, and I am so different. I don’t know who I’m going to talk to about this tomorrow morning. I don’t know who I could call and feel like they could understand.” Nobody, it seemed, knew how to speak with her about what had happened. There were people she knew well who didn’t acknowledge it at all and others who, she felt, held the attitude that what she needed to heal was just “a really good therapist and a lot of self-care.” That wasn’t enough—it didn’t recognize the social and political dimensions of sexual violence. In the weeks following her rape, Super reflected: “There’s no place for my story. There’s no place to do anything. There’s no place that just validates it.”
Super chose to go public in April 2015, only six weeks after the assault, outing herself as Neal’s victim to the Star Tribune, sharing her experiences in a profile to let others know they weren’t alone. After the article ran, emails flooded her inbox, men and women telling Super of their own or others’ experiences. Super started a group, Break the Silence, to bring together survivors and give them the opportunity to voice what had been deemed unspeakable. Hundreds of people attended the group’s first speak-out in August. Thirteen survivors shared their stories. One of them, Sue Marshall, had been enduring persistent panic attacks and flashbacks since a gang rape she suffered as a teenager. Until that night, she’d kept it secret for over thirty years.
The Star Tribune story caught the attention of Super’s old high school choir teacher, and, sometime after they reconnected, Super asked if she’d be willing to direct an ensemble modeled on the gay men’s choruses of the 1980s. The teacher agreed, and Survivor Voices was born. Meanwhile, Break the Silence continued to put on protests, community truth-telling events, and other awareness-raising projects. “Survivors of the Twin Cities: You are not alone” was a portrait-photography exhibition on Facebook that featured more than seventy male and female survivors and their testimonies. Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges, who publicly disclosed her own sexual abuse for the first time in the “Survivors” portrait series, went on to name August 17 “Break the Silence Day” in the city in 2016. (Two years later, Governor Mark Dayton proclaimed October 15 “Break the Silence Day” for the entire state of Minnesota.) In late 2017, Super began working with another survivor, Asma Mohammed, to lobby the state legislature to end the six-year statute of limitations on reporting sexual violence. The statute was lifted with unanimous support on September 15, 2021.
When I asked Super where the idea for a memorial came from, she replied, “Well, it’s actually Dr. Herman’s idea.” Back in 2015, when she was still grappling with how to teach those close to her about rape and trauma, Super returned to the books she’d read in graduate school.
Trauma and Recovery virtually founded the modern field of trauma studies. While Judy would be quick to acknowledge her mentor, Robert Jay Lifton, particularly his work on the survivors of Hiroshima, Trauma and Recovery was the first book to examine trauma as a social phenomenon that included child sexual abuse and domestic violence, not only PTSD from armed conflicts. The first of its core arguments was that trauma is trauma. The mind and body react similarly if you’re raped on a battlefield or in a dorm room, if you live with a tyrant at the head of your state or your dinner table. There are degrees, yes, there are differences, of course, but it is a continuous spectrum. Second, recovery from sexual violence occurs in stages. A person begins by finding safety and stabilization; moves on to remembrance, mourning, and metabolizing the trauma; and finally reconnects with life in the present. Third, the means to advance the study of psychological trauma—and any concerted attempt to stop its causes—only materialize when a social or political movement demands it.
The first sustained inquiry into the effects of trauma was after soldiers in World War I returned from the trenches, their “shellshock” impossible to ignore. Later, when combatants came home from Vietnam with flashbacks, panic attacks, depression, and substance-use disorder, veterans’ groups—and antiwar activists—pressured the US government to allocate resources to treat them. The concept of PTSD gained widespread acceptance, and it was included in the DSM-III in 1980. Around the same time that the US began its withdrawal from Vietnam, the battered women’s movement forced a reckoning with the reality of abuse in the home and its psychological effects. It was in the 1980s that Herman and Bessel van der Kolk first met in Boston—she working with abused women, he with veterans—and they pledged to support each other in their shared pursuit of the truth about trauma.
While rereading Trauma and Recovery, Super lingered over a passage: “The most common trauma of women remains confined to the sphere of private life, without formal recognition or restitution from the community. There is no public monument for rape survivors.” Super decided to make one.
I first came acrossTrauma and Recovery in September 2017. That fall, about six weeks ahead of the Harvey Weinstein story breaking, I had my own reckoning. Somewhere between an epiphany and an exorcism. An aging levee burst in my brain, flooding me with flashbacks and full-body memories of having been raped and sexually abused as a boy. The timing was bizarre, disorienting. As I was still in the earliest, loneliest phase of my revelations, all around me the collective unburdening of #MeToo began.
I found a good therapist with the relevant experience and began to track the hurricane of fragments inside me. Terror and guilt, fear and self-loathing, clenched fists and gagging. My new past was at once undeniable and completely unfathomable. When that first wave of memory crashed over me, I felt a bone-deep certainty; yet in the weeks and months afterward, I was dogged by doubt. How could I have forgotten these things?
“There have in fact been hundreds of scientific publications spanning well over a century documenting how the memory of trauma can be repressed, only to surface years or decades later,” van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score. The relevant footnote, before listing citations, begins: “Every single study of childhood sexual abuse, whether prospective or retrospective, whether studying clinical samples or general population samples, finds that a certain percentage of sexually abused individuals forget, and later remember, their abuse.” The forceful language here might be a residue of the so-called “memory wars” of the late 1980s and 1990s, in which therapists and their patients who had uncovered memories of abuse were pitted against implicated family members. Psychologists took sides; the nature of memory was disputed. An organization called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF)—a nonprofit founded by Pamela and Peter Freyd after their daughter Jennifer accused her father of sexually abusing her when she was a child—was particularly successful in undermining the concept of recovered memories.
There’s now widespread agreement that traumatic experiences, especially if they’re prolonged or occur early in life, interrupt many normal brain functions—such as the encoding, storing, and recalling of memories. In fact, the link between trauma and dissociation is so strong that the DSM-V added a dissociative subtype to the PTSD diagnosis in 2013. One classic study from the mid-1990s is illustrative. Sociologist Linda M. Williams found that of 129 women whose childhood sexual abuse had been documented seventeen years before, 38 percent did not recall the abuse when asked about it. Of those who reported remembering it, 16 percent still said that, at times over the intervening years, they’d forgotten. Elizabeth Loftus herself, famed memory skeptic and one-time board member of the FMSF (as well as a witness for Harvey Weinstein’s defense), once co-authored a paper that found something similar—19 percent of her study’s cohort had forgotten their abuse. For her part, Jennifer Freyd went on to become a psychologist best known for her formulations of betrayal trauma, institutional betrayal trauma, and the perpetrator strategy of DARVO (deny, attack, reverse-victim-and-offender).
Even after I got independent confirmation that other people had been sexually abused by two of my perpetrators, I still doubted myself. It’s impossible not to. Another dialectic of trauma involves certainty and disbelief. The memory is visceral, sometimes more real than what’s before your eyes, but it recedes from your consciousness like the sea from the sand. Where did it go, and was it ever really there?
There’s added bewilderment for a man. To be afflicted by what is often perceived as a women’s problem is to dwell in a special state of denial. That’s why eventually, in early 2020, I started going to group, where every Tuesday at 7:30 I joined seven other men and a therapist for an hour and a half. I’d never heard men talk like this, except at acute moments of distress or inebriation.
That fall of 2017, one of my clients, Sarah Esther Maslin, was drafting a book proposal about the El Mozote massacre and its aftermath. During the Salvadoran civil war in 1981, a right-wing battalion of US-trained soldiers murdered more than 800 townspeople. The epigraph to the proposal was: “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried.” It was a line from Trauma and Recovery. When I bought a copy of the book and read it, I understood what was happening to me.
It took me a while, but in May 2020 I sent Judith Herman an email, asking if she was represented and if she’d thought about writing another book. She replied, “I’ve never worked with an agent before, so I don’t know what that entails, but I’d be happy to talk with you,” and attached a twenty-five-page paper that had grown out of an old project. “In the fifteen plus years since I first thought about it, nobody else has written about it (that I know of). I figure either that means that nobody is interested, or it means that I should write it.” That paper became Truth and Repair.
When I landed in Minnesota on October 8, two days before the Memorial was to open, the 2020 presidential election was looming. We were about to surpass 8 million confirmed Covid-19 cases and 220,000 Covid-related deaths. And although the biggest protests since the Civil Rights Movement had largely waned, the country was still reeling from the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin back in May. It was strange to be heading to the scene of the crime—my Airbnb was six miles from the Cup Foods—to visit a new memorial when the national conversation was so focused on old monuments. Some sixty Confederate statues, most of them erected during Jim Crow, had come down since the beginning of the summer. Usually relegated to the background—“There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument,” Robert Musil said—they’d become subjects of urgent municipal concern, perhaps because their removal was one of the fastest, most tangible ways for those in power to signal that steps were being taken to address systemic and historical wrongs. Monuments are stories, forming and maintaining cultural memory. Public remembrance, of course, is not an organic process: it is negotiated and contested. For everything that’s prioritized, something else isn’t.
Lori Greene tells stories through mosaics, and five of her original works are part of the Survivors Memorial, large panels fitted into three freestanding pillars. When she and I met at her studio/art-supply store the morning after my arrival in Minneapolis, we sat down on opposite ends of her long work bench, taking off our masks. I recognized something over her shoulder. It was a mosaic on a canvas: a close-up of a black-haired woman in the lower-left corner, a snowscape in the middle punctuated by tall trees casting shadows, and a radiant sun exploding in the upper right. I’d never seen it before. But I knew it from a story Greene had told me over Zoom some weeks earlier.
On the winter solstice, 1981, Greene, then a high school student in St. Paul, went camping with two friends in the woods. While there, she was kidnapped by a man with a rifle. He held her hostage for hours. He raped her. After blindfolding her, he promised to kill her if she turned around. She didn’t move. When she could no longer hear the man’s retreating footsteps punching through snow, Greene began to walk in the opposite direction. Then, she ran.
“I ran for miles, and I got to Lake Superior,” she said. “It was so beautiful. Overwhelmingly beautiful. And I knew, when I felt that—that if I could still see something beautiful after what had just happened to me—that I was going to be OK, that I could survive.”
Mosaic as a form appealed to Greene for two reasons. First, she felt like a mosaic. “When I was a kid,” she said, “it was a big deal, being a mix.” Greene is part African American, part Native American, and part white. She was also “very attracted to the brokenness metaphor.” When starting out, she smashed her ceramic tiles with a hammer (“I enjoyed that,” she said). Later, she refined the technique, cutting them into pieces. Her public art projects populate the Twin Cities: the Peace Park in St. Paul, the Midtown Global Market in Minneapolis, and in the Humphrey Terminal of the MSP airport.
In the winter of 2015, Greene was working on a project with incarcerated teens and volunteering in prisons a few days a week through an organization called Alternatives to Violence. “I think I went there to kind of forgive men,” she said. When she got an email from Sarah Super, she recognized the name; she’d read the story in the Star Tribune. Super asked if she would be interested in working on some kind of memorial. Greene’s immediate reaction was yes: “I’m also a sexual abuse survivor. I have felt like something like this needed to be done for a long time.”
Super and Greene agreed that mosaic was an apt medium to express how sexual violence fractures the survivor, while those fragments still add up to something beautiful and whole. Super conceived the idea for a circle of benches to create a space to talk, built on top of concrete with overlapping concentric circles made of small inlaid stones. The circles too were a metaphor. Trauma ripples outward. But so does breaking the silence.
Greene told me how hard it had been to figure out what the panels should be, what kind of story they would tell—she had to go “back to that place” to make the pieces truthful. She lived with inchoate ideas for five years. Then one day, the rest of the Memorial was basically done, and she needed to start assembling them.
“Can I ask you,” Greene said. “How are you doing?”
I had forgotten that this question was possible. I wasn’t expecting the reversal—I was touched. When I’d first spoken with Greene that September, I’d told her about my abuse.
“I’m doing OK,” I replied. “All this stuff happened to me in my childhood and I only recovered my memories four years ago now. I led a double life, it feels like. I had all the hallmarks of an abused person, I drank a lot, smoked weed, all that stuff, but I couldn’t put it together. Therapy has helped.”
Greene walked me out, past a colorful plywood portrait of George Floyd resting against the wall. She explained that during the protests that summer, she’d boarded up the studio and put it in front of the door. We stepped into the sun.
“There’s a piece on this building right here,” Greene added, pointing at a two-story structure across the street. It was the mosaic she had been working on with the boys in the juvenile justice system when Super first emailed her five years prior.
Set flush into the brick facade, the tiles formed an orb near the roof. Bright channels of red, orange, yellow, and green snaked down, incorporating a window, and swelled into a bright red bubble. Inside the bubble, a blue person stood reaching down to pull someone else up into it, the second figure multi-colored and half-formed, as if he or she were only starting to emerge but contained great possibility.
The next day I watched the dedication ceremony from the IKEA couch of my Airbnb. There was no in-person unveiling because of Covid precautions—although I had plans to meet Super and Greene at the site later—so Break the Silence made a film in advance. Among others, MeToo founder Tarana Burke and V (formerly Eve Ensler) had recorded videos talking about the Memorial’s significance and necessity. Super delivered a speech.
In the video, Super stood in front of Greene’s mosaics, the pillars nine or ten feet tall, capped with golden perforated metal. In the background, the sky was a crisp blue, and there were orange and red leaves on the row of trees hugging the Mississippi. As Super began to speak, a man in the deep distance jogged on a trail, unaware that something unusual was happening:
Dr. Judith Herman first named the lack of monuments for victims of sexual violence in her book Trauma and Recovery. She wrote, “It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. The victim on the contrary asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.” This memorial represents our willingness to share the burden of pain, to act, engage, and remember the reality of sexual violence that happened and continues to happen here. This memorial is a permanent, public symbol that says to victim-survivors: We believe you, we stand with you, you are not alone.
We were alone, though, all of us tuning into this ceremony in our living rooms, from our desks, and many of us would continue, most of the time, to feel isolated and lonely. I was lucky to be able to close my laptop, step outside into a sunny if cold day, turn right, and head to a place intended to make me feel otherwise, to meet the people who had built it.
Super stood on the white brushed concrete by the benches, her shoulder-length brown hair kicked up by the wind. I asked her what it was like to be here, finally. She gave me a where-do-I-begin smile and told me how hard it had been, for starters, to raise the $750,000 it cost to create. There were times when she wanted to give up—it had been too much, for too long—but she knew she couldn’t. “The only way out was through it,” she said.
We walked around, taking in the mosaic-panels. In the first, a genderless red figure lies coiled in the fetal position, vibrations coming off them into a dark winter night. The second contains two figures—the same person, red and purple, joined by another who is gently holding them—a swath of dawn on the horizon. In the third panel the figure has become a woman, helped to her feet by two others; behind them are signs of early spring. In the fourth, the figure walks alone in the woods in midsummer. Finally, in the fifth panel, she is surrounded by some forty people. The final step in the chronology of healing: the return to self and an acceptance by the community.
I looked again at the second panel, the red figure yelling out in pain while a serene, gray figure clasps them. “I don’t know if the person who’s holding the red person is a real person,” Greene had told me in her studio. “Or if it’s just their own healing happening within themselves.” The red figure’s arm is taken, at the elbow, by the gray figure—almost as if the red one were fighting it, not allowing themselves to be held. And yet they’re suffering so much, they can’t completely resist the embrace. There, again, a dialectic of trauma—the instinct to withdraw, the will to connect.
I sat on one of the benches meant to facilitate the kind of re-engagement with the world the mosaics depicted. But this was a memorial, after all, and my thoughts turned to death. Surviving sexual violence often entails a death, and I wanted to pay my respects.
Psychologist Leonard Shengold defined “soul murder,” in his 1989 book of the same name, as the “willful abuse and neglect of children by adults that are of sufficient intensity and frequency to be traumatic.” Judith Herman used it more broadly to describe what can happen to all victims of sexual violence. Shengold cites Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman, in which a female character says: “You have killed the love-life in me. Do you understand what that means? The Bible speaks of a mysterious sin for which there is no forgiveness. I have never understood what it could be; but now I understand. The great, unpardonable sin is to murder the love-life in a human soul.” Sexual violence is a special kind of betrayal that murders your trust in others and, also, in yourself. When it happens, you leave yourself—you dissociate—and while half of you plays dead, the other half watches. What it feels like later is that you abandoned one part of yourself to die so that the other might live. That blows up the bridge from your island to the continent, disinvolving you in mankind.
“Oh my gosh,” one of Super’s old colleagues said, approaching us, her hands outstretched. “I was crying when I walked up. Beautiful. What a beautiful moment. Thank you for everything that you created.”
By the time Greene joined us, the sun was high. We watched as couples, families with small children, and solitary walkers stopped by the Memorial. All had the look of Saturday amblers happening upon something new. As one developer who worked on the project had told Sardina and Fox, “I hope it starts to change our culture—again, in a culture that normalizes sexual violence—to take your, like, 6-year-old son to a park where there is a memorial to survivors of sexual violence, and having to tell your 6-year-old son what that is, and why it’s important. Maybe that 6-year-old son will grow up in a world that doesn’t normalize sexual violence.”
Most of the time there were two or three people, a steady trickle, who studied the pillars or looked at the benches, glancing down at the bricks bearing the names of donors like Gloria Steinem, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, and the child-sexual-abuse attorneys Jeff Anderson & Associates. But a curious thing happened. Whenever a fourth or fifth person joined, a magnetic mass, suddenly more couples and families swarmed in, until there were ten or twelve or fifteen. Some spoke to one another. And then, as quickly as the group swelled, it dropped back to one or two.
Super and Greene relished the experience of seeing people interact with their creation for the first time. I wondered how my presence was coloring their quiet pride—heightening it in some ways, muting it in others. I’d flown from New York City during a pandemic to bear witness and, as I’d disclosed, to write about my experiences. Aside from a local NPR reporter who briefly interviewed them, no one else was covering the opening. I was a survivor. I was also a man.
I wasn’t surprised, though I did notice, that when V spoke at the dedication ceremony, she only referred to women. Super for her part was careful to call everyone survivors, and Tarana Burke always stresses that sexual violence affects all genders. (When I later asked Burke at an online text-based Q&A about abused men and MeToo, she replied: “This is not a women’s movement. This is a SURVIVORS movement. We need to do better at sending that message. Men should be seen first as survivors not harm doers.”) I was struck, too, that Greene had chosen to render the figure in the first two panels as genderless before, in the third, they become a woman—who, Greene told me, was her, since she could only tell her own story.
We sat on the benches. It was the first time the Memorial was being used: all three of us had been raped by violent men, had lived in fragments. They were threatened with weapons; I, a child, was ordered by my coach to clench a chain-link fence in the shade of a baseball dugout while he went to work on me. I had been sexually abused, years before that, by two people in my extended family, independent of each other. We were a man and two women, mixed and white, Gen X and millennial. The Memorial was built for us.
At that moment, we had talked enough. We sat there and didn’t say a word.
I met Super for coffee the morning of my departure. We spoke about her life’s narrative arc, its “strange, crazy throughline.” I wanted to understand what it was like to endure what she endured forearmed with the tools of trauma studies. Had they protected her somehow?
“During the experience of being raped,” she said, “I had a moment that the thought flashed through my mind of, This is a traumatic experience. I don’t want to be stuck in this moment. And just the one moment I can think of, having that sense of awareness and noticing the texture of the sofa beneath my hands, just noticing the texture of the fabric, was a present-moment experience that wasn’t terror. It wasn’t the experience of pain. All of that was still happening, but there was one moment where I just remember that sense of like . . . It was awareness. A present experience.”
As someone who had dissociated to the extent of near-total repression, I marveled at the power of this embodied experience. My inability to comprehend anything that was happening to me had left me haunted: trauma roamed like a hungry ghost throughout my body. The clenched hands and shallow breath, tics and twitches, which, if I gave in to them—and I had to in order for them to go away, at least temporarily—triggered writhing flashbacks.
Super suffered her own physical ills in the wake of her attack—migraines, irregular heartbeat, varicose veins from poor circulation—but her ability to remain present and aware in that moment, her refusal to get stuck there forever, helped her maintain her sense of self. She’d had an unusually extensive education in trauma. The Survivors Memorial was designed to pass along some of that teaching—the 6-year-old boy who asks his father, “What’s that?”
As we got ready to say goodbye, Super looked at me. “You called it a pilgrimage yesterday,” she said. “That really touched me, because there’s going to be people who come here because of this. You’re the first.”
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