Say the Unspeakable

بول کہ لب آزاد ہیں تیرے

بول زباں اب تک تیری ہے

 تیرا ستواں جسم ہے تیرا

بول کہ جاں اب تک تیری ہے

دیکھ کہ آہن گر کی دکاں میں

تند ہیں شعلے سرخ ہے آہن

کھلنے لگے قفلوں کے دہانے

پھیال ہر اک زنجیر کا دامن

بول یہ تھوڑا وقت بہت ہے

جسم و زباں کی موت سے پہلے

بول کہ سچ زندہ ہے اب تک

بول جو کچھ کہنا ہے کہہ لے

Speak, for your lips are free,

Speak, for your tongue is still yours.

Your upright body is still yours,

Speak, for your life is still yours.

Look, in the blacksmith’s shop,

The flames are fierce, the iron is red-hot.

The mouths of the locks are beginning to open,

The hem of every chain is spreading wide.

Speak, this little time is enough,

Before the death of body and tongue.

Speak, for the truth is still alive.

Speak , say whatever you have to say.

— Bol (Speak), Faiz Ahmed Faiz

On my second day at Ashoka, as I was having chai at the mess, sitting across from me was a man, probably in his early 50s. Our eyes met and a conversation sparked. He was a mathematics professor visiting from University of Pennsylvania. His words glinted with a firm logic that was both sound and complete. “I hate the subject!” I blurted out, then added quickly, “I think it’s the language of the universe.” In our conversation, a gentle reassurance glided through my head. I found a place finally, I thought, where curiosity is a shared practice, not a borrowed privilege. The professor’s logic and my words coalesced into each other. It didn’t matter then if mathematical logic or fictitious philosophy were the language of the universe; rather, it seemed to me that belonging can exist across disciplinary boundaries and that all I ever would need to do to belong was to speak.

I am entering my final year now. Since then, both that intimacy of shared curiosity and the firmness of a sound language have journeyed through me in some vertigo inducing ways. The Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” is performed in its sublime elegance within the classes, my peers all too eager to add to class discussions; but not all Cartesian claims are always complete and sound. Sometimes, they are but a failed mirror, muddled with grandiose jargon that can give you a painful vertigo.

The most intense vertigo I felt was that of filing a CASH case and proving my hurt through a sound and complete language. Faiz says, “Bol ke lab aazad hai tere, bol zubaan ab tak teri hai”, but is it possible for your zubaan to belong to someone else? What if the price of legibility is my silence or a language that is incomplete? 

I had to belong to the category of victim under the legal register of Committee against Sexual Assault (CASH). The justice system is predicated on ideals of fairness. Legal rationality, what the CASH process follows, is a place where meaning is inferred from observable facts and injustice is dissected, slithered, made sense of.  But what remained to be observed in this new identity of a victim was mostly just a symptom, a battered tongue, and the ontological existence of violence laid far behind the veil of observable language. How could I speak and claim my belonging, then, with incoherent afterthoughts? The days before I formally filed a CASH case were filled with wordless illogic. I would sit and repeat the same story to myself, what happened, how it happened; sometimes in my inner speech and sometimes in the felt orchestra of my overwhelming emotions — but never in the coherent narrative of spoken word.  “Bol,” my friend would say, “just say it.” 

“Someone I trusted violated my consent.” It is a simple sentence but it is also an absurdly baffling sentence.

How can someone you trust violate your consent? The same vertigo returned, alas, with a manifold intensity. Was my profound hurt even legible, real? I exiled my hurt into the backwaters of unreal with a fitting logical feat — maybe I caused this?  Am I the reason this happened in the first place? How else can I explain it?  It wasn’t reasonable that in my country, an average of roughly 80 to 86 rapes are reported per day, yet we accept it as a mundane norm rather than a national emergency. This quotidian norm is not surprising to us, it is on the contrary, a very logical end of the reasoning that blames the victim.

 The vertigo didn’t subside. No matter how much I tried to expand my imagination, and get creative with the explanation of the violating act, I couldn’t devise things that could make my life sweeter and explicable. It was a logical fallacy and cognitive suicide to try to understand the language of my perpetrator when he said, “Maybe you didn’t file the CASH case because you liked it.” It was yet another cognitive suicide to communicate coherently with him.

In the days preceding my formal complaint, I had the impression that human language is arbitrary and some words matter more than others. Most of the words I said up until that point meant nothing. If someone would ask me how it was, I would say something like, “It was bad.” But this, too, was arbitrary. For me, the violation still lives in my throat, it still takes all the space in my chest. Unlike the first year me who wouldn’t question the safety of this place or the world at large, who would simply revel in the shared affordances of intellectual curiosity of this space, I existed now in a trapped dimension. The language of indifference that I inherited from my perpetrator and my surroundings was simply too flabby to capture this range of infinitesimal, honest, felt violation. 

Finally, I exiled myself from the harrows of self-blame and said the simple baffling statement. Someone I trusted violated my consent. Silence, speech, both took their turns in my thaumatrope, in a series of burning afternoons in my dorm room where I attempted to form a coherent statement. My accounts changed from a tense stutter, a shocked attempt to describe the indescribable to a natural act of speech. I denied the belonging of words shared by indifferent others. I wrote what was felt in my body and the vertigo began to smother out. The human body, especially the policed female body and tongue, is not a coherent amalgamation of logical and abstract ideals that the CASH process follows and the world questions. How would I speak and prove this baffling identity of a victim with a language that would make sense?  Is the ideal of justice really achieved in these theatres of logic where violation and the victims are measured, picked apart with insensitive and sometimes leading questions? I lose my humanity and become an inert specimen, to be morally reasoned about, to pass a verdict on. My experience is translated. Into a symptom. Into a category. Into an object of knowledge. This is the moment the curiosity for the victim disappears, and in its place emerges: the classification. So do we really witness the sexual assault survivors in their erratic integrity or just measure their violation?

When we use the cartesian logic of rigid legal inquiry to measure a victim’s violation we risk unseeing the very unobservable erratic injustice that precedes language and is felt in the body. Additionally, the reality of the violation doesn’t precede the CASH inquiry, it is made there; with agential cuts of how questions are asked, which memories are interrogated, which are left unseen. It is also made in the sociocultural everydayness, how serious or unserious we take sexual assault to be in India.“The agential cut enacts a resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological indeterminacy.” Karen Barad writes, which means the boundaries  of “the truth” within the sexual assault narrative we treat as natural are, in fact, produced through the measurement itself. 

How can a victim inhabit the dimension of justice when the world outside has already measured her character? How does a woman with a shocked tongue demand justice that contradicts your measurement? Will the battered tongue be visible to you as a tongue still? Can you, the legal judge, the bypasser, belong in a society where rape is a norm? If you belong in such a society where does the victim who feels injustice belong? Can she really belong by the act of speaking up?

The psychological distress, the vertigo, I felt cannot be separated from the cultural contradictions women  inhabit in modern India, with a silent expectation that never needs to be explicitly articulated because women know it in their policed bodies. I am thinking of how many times I have covered up in “better clothes” because the Delhi metro has a hidden dress code that I needed  to follow for my own safety. I have seen women around me being expected simultaneously to embody sexual purity and modern autonomy. The resulting conflict is an illogical state that should not exist in the first place and, now that it does, should be called what it is — illogical. Yet, indifference and abstract ideals of women’s purity perverses sexual assaults into a rational state for a woman to occupy in India: get over it, SA is commonplace in India! There’s just a flicker of ephemeral horror and surprise as a reaction, not an everlasting deep vertigo within the hearts and minds of bypassers when another news is broadcasted. Yet we ask questions, what must she have done to get assaulted?

Do not look for the answer in soothing abstractions or the theories we grab when life gets uncomfortable, Korada and Sen write, in an article. What does abstraction excuse in rooms with fine wine and perfect acoustics while something unspeakable exists outside the periphery? I thought about my own seminar rooms, my own intellectual conversations with students and professors here. The way we moved from hermeneutics to Barthes without ever acknowledging what was happening outside and inside the warm architecture of this university. I realised, I had been committing that act of cognitive suicide every time I entered a room where abstract ideas floated free of violated bodies. The Cartesian separation between the linguistic mind, and the prelinguistic body simply did not hold. 

So when the abstract logic and indifferent syntax of the world around me fails; when legal scripts of how I am delivered the promise of justice fails; I abandon these scripts. Belonging still exists across disciplinary boundaries but to belong now, I have to say the unspeakable.

بول یہ تھوڑا وقت بہت ہے

جسم و زباں کی موت سے پہلے

بول کہ سچ زندہ ہے اب تک

بول جو کچھ کہنا ہے کہہ لے

Speak, this little time is enough,

Before the death of body and tongue.

Speak, for the truth is still alive.

Speak , say whatever you have to say.

(Edited by Hiyaneijemmy Das, Avika Mantri and Anamta Husain.)