[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_58

Womanslaughter, Pat Parker, 1978

What was his crime? / He only killed his wife.

But a divorce, I say. / Not final, they say;

Her things were his / including her life.”

Convicted not of murder / but of “woman slaughter” because

“Men cannot kill their wives. / They passion them to death.”

This is “Womanslaughter,” the poem that Pat Parker wrote after her sister was killed by her husband.

Here, I don't want to talk about feminicide but about the normalization of violence.

I don't want to talk about myself but the people around me.

We live immersed in a web of invisible violence.

It is invisible because it is silenced. It is silenced because, many times, it is not recognized as violence. It is not recognized as violence because violence is systemic and, in some cases, institutionalized.

I propose an itinerary inside the spaces that mark people's daily lives: family, school, workplace, catering, and healthcare. The itinerary I propose is mine and passes through some family members, one of my university paths, one of my workplaces, one of the bars where I used to go with friends, and a hospital in the North of Italy. For each place, I will tell the story of a person who belonged to them.

Unfortunately, the names I propose are invented, but the stories are not.

The family: Alma.

Alma is a loved one who has lived with her partner for over a decade. Several times, in the middle of the night, she called me in tears, asking me if I could host her. Most of the time, she was confused and couldn't explain what had happened; what emerged was that she had argued with her partner, that he had come home drunk, and that he had a “terrible temper.”

Several years had to pass before she dared to tell me that he beat her. She tried to justify her silence: “It's not true that he hit me.” She corrected herself, “he only punched me in the head.”

As if it were violence just when you get a black eye.

The school: Louise.

Louise was among the people I bonded with the most during University. She was a person of brutal and rough honesty who wasn't afraid to say what she thought and act accordingly. And for this reason, perhaps, people tended to stay away from her. At the age of 11, she was raped by a group of teenagers.

She told me this one afternoon while showing me the new apartment she had rented. She told me as one tells how the trip to the lake with the family went, without changing tone, without dramatic notes, continuing to roll a cigarette. I didn't dare to say anything; every word seemed wrong and out of place. She closed the conversation by saying, “That's why I'm a freak.”

The workplace: Meredith.

Meredith was my sunny, energetic, pragmatic colleague. I have never seen her sad, but she was always ready to do something. She was always well groomed and made up, with painted nails and glitter on her teeth. She was what is said to be "a beautiful and good girl."

One day, her partner came to visit her at the place where we worked, and the emphasis of his hug hurt her. She ran into the bathroom; I went after her: "Meredith, are you okay?", "Come in," she said to me. Her jaw was

hanging out. She put it back together with a mechanical gesture, like zipping up her trousers; when her jaw went back in, she made a blood-curdling snap. Only one tear came out of her eyes.

She explained to me that it often happened since she had been raped and beaten. It had happened on the train while she was returning home late at night. In his case, too, it was a group of young men. “I had a miscarriage afterward,” she told me. “Maybe I won't be able to get pregnant again. The doctor told me that after cases of rape, women no longer get pregnant." The doctor was wrong, and today, Meredith is a mother.

The catering: Nina.

Nina worked in the place where I used to hang out with friends. She was a funny mix of androgynous poise and maternal warmth, and she quickly became part of our company.

One evening, after too many beers, she started crying, and she told me that her father abused her; that was the reason why she had lived alone since she was a little more than a teenager and she still had a bad economic situation. In the days that followed this confession, she behaved as if nothing had happened, as if she didn't remember what had happened under the influence of alcohol, and I, out of respect, did not return to the subject.

The hospital: Gemma.

I accompanied Gemma to the hospital to have an abortion, together with her partner, after an indescribable journey in finding a hospital and a doctor who was not a “conscientious objector.” The hospital admitted her without telling us when they would operate on her and leaving me and her partner outside the ward without indications. It was a very long day. Her partner came home because he was tired, and then "if she was afraid of being pregnant, she could take the morning-after pill." he said, "I told her so."

When they let me in, Gemma was exhausted and depressed; she had been without water and food since the day before and was having a nervous breakdown. She was wearing clinical pajamas, which left the entire back of her body bare, and she was bleeding because they hadn't put any wound dressing on her. I went to look for a doctor; someone told me: "he will come." I asked the nurses if it was possible to have some water and something to eat, and they replied, "If you want to give her something, go and buy it for her at the supermarket." While I was starting a lively argument with the healthcare staff in the middle of the ward, the woman who was hospitalized in the bed next to Gemma's and who had gone out to smoke a cigarette called me aside, "You're the friend of the girl who had an abortion?” she asked me "I lost my baby by mistake, but she who wanted to lose hers on purpose is worse off than me." I thought she, too, wanted to blame my friend, and I was already about to start responding in kind, but instead, she wanted to warn me, "Here it is,a den of objectors." She said to me, "Do you know what they did to your friend before putting her to sleep with anesthesia? They showed her the ultrasound of her fetus and told her, 'Look at the baby you're killing.'"

If in every place you go, there is a person of your same sex who has suffered violence, you end up thinking that violence is an integral part of being a woman because it is everywhere around you, and no one complains about it, and no one protests. If women keep silent about violence and men minimize it, your very concept of violence changes; it ends up coinciding with something more evident, more definitive, more tragic: a black eye, death. And the insults? The whistles on the street? The abuse? What are they then?

Normal things.