Note to Self: Audre Lorde, Chanel Miller, and My Second Tattoo
For years I had been wanting a second tattoo. Since getting my first tattoo almost five years ago, I had been looking for just the right occasion to mark as momentous (and also waiting until I had enough money in my bank account to justify it). In the last five years, many things have happened in my life: I met the woman of my dreams and got engaged, became a (step)mom to two more children, bought a house in NYC, returned to graduate school, survived a global pandemic. And, most recently, finished the first chapter of a dissertation that I have been trying to write for many years. Finally finishing my chapter on Audre Lorde felt beyond momentous. And it felt appropriate that my next tattoo would somehow be connected to that, and to Lorde’s writing. But I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted. And I hadn’t yet decided on a particular line of text.
I was giving myself some time to relax and read non-dissertation related books. I picked up Chanel Miller’s Know My Name and I could
not
put
it
down.
It is not light reading, to be sure, but it is engrossing and beautifully written, and I am so glad I read it.
Miller was known in the media as “Emily Doe” during the trial of Brock Turner, who was portrayed by the media as the all-American college kid — the Stanford swimmer caught in the act of raping Emily Doe at a frat party in 2015. Turner was found guilty and upon the occasion of his sentencing, Emily Doe (whose real name none of us yet knew) read aloud in court, her victim impact statement in the form of a letter she had written to her rapist. The piece was so clear-sighted and powerful. A reporter at Buzzfeed got a hold of it and published it. It went viral and was eventually translated into multiple languages and circulated around the globe, prompting then vice president, Joe Biden, to write an open-letter to Emily Doe, offering support, encouragement, and praise for her bravery.
The impact, however, had little effect on the judge who handed down an absurdly light sentence — six months — of which Turner served only three before being released on good behavior. As Judge Aaron Persky read his sentencing decision, he noted his concern for Turner, worrying that a longer sentence would, “have a severe impact on him.” When this hit the media, you could feel the collective rage of every woman paying attention. That rage was channeled into action and Persky lost his judicial seat in a 2018 recall election.
Emily Doe also channeled her rage. And her grief and her fear. In 2019 Chanel Miller published, Know My Name, forsaking her anonymity in order to share her whole story with the world.
With this book, Miller gives voice to the experiences of so many rape survivors who have been silenced. As I was finishing the book, I kept coming back in my mind to the words of Audre Lorde and thinking about how she wrote in 1977 that through poetry “we give name to those ideas which are nameless and formless.”
Lorde refers to “poetry” here, not as a particular genre or style of writing, but as any form of self-expression that scrutinizes our own experience in order to share them with others. This, she says is “poetry as illumination.” And “as we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny, and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.”
This is precisely what Chanel Miller accomplished when she wrote her story and shared it with the world, both through her victim impact statement and through her beautiful book. Her willingness to scrutinize her life, her experience, and to bear the intimacy of that scrutiny, not only allowed her to flourish, but has allowed so many other survivors of assault to begin to break the silences that have had control over their own lives.
After I finished Know My Name, I posted about it on social media. A few weeks later someone in my life who I am very close to, called to tell me she had just finished reading it, and that it had cracked something open for her — the understanding that she still needed to deal with her own unprocessed trauma of sexual assault.
Each survivor will break their silences in their own way. For some it may come in the form of writing a book. For others it may be prompted by reading someone else’s story and then finally talking about their trauma with their loved ones or a trusted teacher or a therapist. Either way, this is what Lorde meant when she wrote, “For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” Know My Name is not a book of poems. But it is very much Chanel Miller’s poetry. And it has never been clearer to me than it is now, that poetry is not a luxury, not for those who need to write it, nor for those who need to read it.
So my tattoo is in honor of Audre Lorde and also Chanel Miller. It is in honor of myself and every woman I’ve ever met who has struggled and found the courage to break the silences that have kept us in chains. It is a reminder — a note to myself — to remember each time I’m tempted to dismiss my own desire to write or when I hear others disparage the work of certain authors, or even devalue the work that I do with my students in the writing classroom. Poetry is not a luxury. It is vital, life-changing, sometimes life-saving work.