“Does patriarchy lead to sexual violence, or are submissive or absent mothers also at fault?” this panel was headlined.
The event featured Anchien Troskie (Die Besoeker) and Casey B Dolan (An Appetite for Peas), and it was chaired by Eusebius McKaiser (A Bantu in my Bathroom).
The talk produced a strange mix of feelings in me, ranging from profound interest to disappointment and anger. It started off well enough: Eusebius McKaiser did an admirable job as the chair of the conversation, and it was refreshing to see actual victims of sexual violence talk about sexual violence. Between Anchien Troskie and Casey Dolan – two completely different kinds of people – I was sure that interesting and varying insights would be delivered. Redi Thlabi, unfortunately, could not make it and I cannot help but feel it might have been a very different talk had she been there.
The event went straight into the subtitle rather than the actual topic – the question of a mother’s moral complicity when wrong is being done within her family. “Sometimes mums are victims when they don’t stand up for children, but sometimes we also would have to ask some tough questions,” McKaiser said.
Troskie said of her character Anna’s relationship with her mother – who didn’t believe the young Anna when she told her about the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather: “I definitely think mothers can be at fault, not only because they don’t listen to you, or don’t believe you, but any woman who stays in a toxic marriage is sending a message to her daughter that it’s okay to be treated like this.”
“Shouldn’t we then also contextualise these mums in the patriarchal society they come from?” McKaiser asked of Dolan. She then gave a strange definition of patriarchy in which the male is not dominant – something the good folks of Oxford English Dictionary might have to check out. She backtracks on this, though, adding that her grandfather was “tyrannical, the patriarch of the family ... a dominant, domineering person”. Her thoughts on the “knock-on effect” that these patriarchs have are, however, smart and well-articulated. The women in the house are made weak, and thus choose men that dominate – so giving us a clear understanding of how the patriarchal system proliferates through generations.
McKaiser comments on how entrenched such systemic marginalisation of women is. “We don’t have a voice,” says Dolan, interrupting Troskie for the first (but not the last) time; “we’re struggling with finding a voice when it comes to male-dominant relationships.” About her mother, Dolan says she wasn’t a good role model, but she has worked through her anger and forgiven her mother. Throughout the talk she places much emphasis on forgiveness and “letting go”. “Instead of taking blame and saying we [women] are at fault, I believe our fault lies in not being in sisterhood, not loving each other enough, and not helping each other to get to that place of forgiveness ... and from that place of love we can break the cycle.”
This is met with spontaneous applause from the audience, but it is the point at which I become irritated – of course love and forgiveness are all very well and good, but how does one forgive a man who rapes a baby to death?
How does one forgive a group of men who rape a women and then proceed to lop off her hands, letting her bleed to death on the side of the road?
How, exactly, does one forgive a man who rapes a woman merely because of her sexual orientation under the auspices of “bettering” her?
And finally, how can we forgive ourselves as a society for allowing these horrors to be perpetrated?
Troskie also found this rhetoric troubling and said that she could never, under any circumstances, forgive a rapist. This is a feeling with which I completely agree. These questions burn at the back of my throat, but by the time the Q&A comes around, ten minutes before the end of the talk, there isn’t enough time for the panellists to address my question.
“I don’t have an answer for you,” were the last words of the conversation, and I left seething with anger at the supremely bourgeois assumption that we can put a stop to the femicidal sexual violence that is endemic in our country through the power of “love”.
This report was written by a member of the Contemporary Literary Practice (English) honours group at Stellenbosch University. The CLP module includes report-writing in the mould of literary journalism, along with other forms of writing and literary practitionership. The report was co-edited by group facilitator Leon de Kock.