Survivor Stories: Roxane Gay

Photo credits: The Guardian

Roxane Gay, author of numerous best-selling books from Bad Feminist to Hunger to Difficult Women, has inspired others through her thoughtful social commentary, brave writing, and advocacy, whether it be through memoirs or essays, or fiction. Many of her works, especially Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, touch on themes of abuse, rooted in what she has seen occur around her and her own experiences.

When Roxane was twelve, she was on a bike ride through the woods with a boy she thought was her boyfriend. She recounted this story in an essay called “What We Hunger For,” describing a day that changed her life. There was an abandoned hunting cabin where the boy’s friends had gathered, and they were about a mile into the woods, and what happened next “was as bad as you might expect,” she wrote, stating, “I came home a completely different person.”

Naturally, the violence was extremely difficult to write about, she says, “because it’s definitely something I kept inside for quite a long time.”

In fact, Roxane did not confide in her family or friends, but her life since then has been divided into before and after, “which I hate, because I hate that it marks my life. It’s just like there's before – and I was normal and happy – and there’s after, and the after continues. The repercussions continue.”

After the event, Roxane put on weight quickly, which she stated was “an intense form of control,” as the boys in the woods had taken her body, and they broke it. I will never get that body back, and I hate that, because it was a good body. But they took it; they ruined it. And so, when I ate, I got to make my body into what I wanted it to be, which is a fortress.”

At boarding school, she wrote dramatic, repetitive stories, full of sexual violence, and a teacher named Rex McGuinn saw something promising and deeply troubling in them. Roxane finally found a huge relief when the teacher took her to the counselling center before eventually encouraging her as a writer.

“He taught me craft, and he also taught me discipline,” Roxane explained. “He told me to write every day. I was very impressionable, and so I write every day.”

Roxane acknowledged that the rape shaped her as a writer, saying, “I don’t think I would have a fraction of the fierceness in my writing if I hadn't had to endure that, and the aftermath.”

In her essays, she considers how sexual violence is treated as entertainment, central to countless TV detective dramas. She further discussed how rape is written about most of the time. In the essay “The Careless Language Of Sexual Violence,” she considers a New York Times article about the gang-rape of an 11-year-old girl by 18 men and boys in Cleveland, Texas, explaining that “Little word space was spent on the girl, the child,” with more of the focus being on how the men’s lives would be changed, the impact on the town, whether the boys would be able to return to school, where the girl’s mother was at the time of the attack.

“As a writer who is also a woman, I increasingly feel that writing is a political act whether I intend it to be or not,” Roxane stated. “I am troubled by how we have allowed such intellectual distance between violence and the representation of violence. We talk about rape, but we don't carefully talk about rape.”

Her work has taken vital strides in ensuring abuse is better and more justly represented in writing and media. Her experiences and thoughtful analysis of the preexisting works around her have developed a strong passion for uplifting voices and inspiring others, rather than twisting or oppressing the truth.

———

Jurisview Journal is a student-led blog that publishes biweekly articles about interesting criminal cases. Our aim is to shed light on cases that require justice or further exploration and provide input on controversial legal events. We also publish infographics to help victims or those who wish to educate themselves on legal issues. 

In this series, Survivor Stories, we explore and share the stories of survivors of violence and crime. Through this, we advocate for justice and more attention to victims such as the survivors we feature.