I May Destroy You.
October 26, 2020
Jessa Ciel
Sometimes, there are things that feel too dark to even write about.
Surface
It’s the running of the water that gives us the first tip-off that something is wrong. The increased volume of the tap of fingers to keys on keyboard becoming the tat tat tat of drops pouring over black skin and down into the drain. It’s in the jump cut, in the mirror where she scrubs her teeth and tongue with a washcloth. This is when we know she knows. She spends the rest of the show denying it; to herself, her friends, her agents, her publisher. He has broken something within her and as her insides rearrange themselves to account for the damage, she is becoming something else. In I May Destroy You, Arabella spends her time recovering lost pieces of self; things that she didn’t even realize were damaged or missing until her traumatic drug-assisted rape.
It all starts with a sound. That’s what I remember about being raped. Not the texture, not the smell, but the overwhelming swell of opera music on high volume. It was all so dramatic, and maybe that’s what he was reaching for, to feel alive. A place where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. I couldn’t see my own face so my only memory is his; closed eyes, mouth open. Me, grappling in slow motion, trying to understand how I ended up beneath him, my tights and underwear gone. Whatever had been in that smoking pipe, was not tobacco or weed and this wasn’t the effect of champagne. The operatic nightmarish sound reminded me of a Robin Cook novel where the surgeon lulled his victims into a coma with a musical track. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t react, the only tool the world had weaponized me with was a smile. So I moved my mouth in my best approximation. It never occurred to me to say “Stop.”
“We cannot yet be carefree without repercussions. Our cautioning mothers were right.”
Michaela Cole is the thing she’s depicting and can therefore point out the fallacies and the nuances without losing the soul and humanity of her characters. Arabella has tried on carefree black girl persona, the one who goes dancing in the night, fearless. The mirrored universe ridicules her optimism for a world that does not yet exist. We cannot yet be carefree without repercussions. Our cautioning mothers were right. Black girl bodies are not safe to inhabit unless you are not a black girl. Arabella tries on white male persona, the only one that gets close to being a full human being. Her embodiment of full humanity is a slap in the face of a patriarchy designed to slap her down. Of course she is to blame. Who gave her the idea that she deserves freedom?
I have never travelled alone but I walk at night beneath the moon and stretch my legs and feel like the woman of my dreams. I know from the tales of my mother, I am designed to be interrupted. Pain of repercussion comes later. We see Arabella’s bruises on her thigh, her hip, her mouth. How did she not feel it sooner? We are so used to pain as black women that we forget what it feels like without it. We bear it, and because we do, we get no peace from it. Even our doctors shrug off our diagnosis. Whatever the cause, the root is simple, we are born for pain.
Within
Terry is surface, the party girl, Arabella's friend who is constantly performing except when she is onstage. Terry doesn’t spend her time swimming in the dark of her deepest emotions, she is light with deep shadows. Kwame prefers to drown out his pain in the nameless, faceless noise of sexual partners. We are all looking for something. My best friend was caught in the moment of our respective and collective death, and the birth of what we’ve become in the aftermath. I watched the elevator doors close that night on him and a Catholic priest. I looked longly at him and called lightly, gaily, “Be careful.” I didn’t think he was safe but it’s difficult when a person is choosing their unsafeness. I almost said, “Stay.” I wanted to say, stay. But something in me bit my tongue. This is what she does, is what Terry said. Just leave her. So I did. I turned my back to the mirrored reflection of the closing doors, as it laughed at the back of me and my devil, hand in hand, strolling to my own undoing.
My raper wasn’t a stranger, he was the best friend of my best friend, who returned from the elevator to the ruins of a crime. They were two gay men of color with their own limitations of power and lack of proximity to safety. It was in their gayness that I mistook comfort for safety. Gay does not mean safe. I often repeated the events of the fallout in my mind. My rapist former friend who insisted it was just a mistake, it was just a trifle. I didn’t rape you, he said while he hugged me as I turned cold stone. I struggled with so much guilt and shame. I kept thinking, if I wasn’t a black girl, if I was more powerful, if it meant something to take something from me; I wouldn’t be here now. There are no repercussions for destroying me.
“I didn’t think he was safe but it’s difficult when a person is choosing their unsafeness.”
Like Arabella of I May Destroy You, I took to social media to ease some of the trauma by restoring a sense of worth to my ego. I had spent 4 years not really processing what had happened to me. I had scrolled past photos of my best friend with my rapist, arms wrapped around each other smiling on my feed. I had left for another bout of academia, and I think it was easier for everyone to pretend like nothing had happened. It wasn’t until returning home, and turning around to a shot of tequila being handed to me by my rapist while I was dancing with my friends in a gay club that I had finally had enough.
After tossing and turning and holing up in my house for days, I crafted a FaceBook manifesto. Unlike Arabella, I could name my rapist and I did so boldly and without doubt. I had a screen to separate me from the pain of my mother’s reaction but it did not stop me from weeping. My best friend and I held each other through our tears, forever connected by a darkness too deep to divide us. My birth is your birth, my death is your death. Without forgiveness, without each other, we would have individually been destroyed. I, too, ultimately deleted my Facebook after months of waging war on injustices to likes and cries and laughs and loves with bits of humor mixed in. It had given me a voice and a platform which opened the door to healing. Naming my assaulter publicly lifted the burden of shame and humiliation that I had been carrying for years from my shoulders. But in order to truly heal, I had to leave my posts of public performance and find internal solace and strength.
Beneath
Danielle LaPorte gave me this gift. “I call all of my power back to me now. I am whole and complete.” This is something I would chant in my bedroom, or on the public transit bus. I imagined that all of the pieces of me were flying through the air from various parts of the world where they had nestled and comforted friends and lovers. I need these back now, I said in my head. I called them back from my ex-boyfriend who’d shattered me into tiny pieces with an envelope left in our shared car. After dropping him off at the airport, I opened what appeared to be an overdue bill and unraveled a record of arrest. Who is this stranger you’ve given so many parts of yourself to? I meditated in a constant flow of everything I’d given away, calling in the little shards I’d left in job interviews and universities and traffic stops; the little drops that scattered when knee hit sidewalk, or elbow hit brick. Give me back my power world. Give me back everything I gave you.
“I call all of my power back to me now. I am whole and complete.”
My Terry is still wracked by the guilt of leaving me in my nightmare while dabbling in his own. I am still wrecked by the tragedy that we cannot even protect each other. Michaela Cole understands the levels of brokenness that we are clearing. She has written all of our fallibilities and trauma in a way that leaves us with more than simple victimhood. She has pointed out our culpability while leaving us innocence. In the search for freedom, we sometimes fall into trap doors. That doesn’t mean we deserve to be raped in them. This isn’t an allusion to Michaela Cole being some sort of deity. It’s just that her depiction of the nuances of human nature make a better Bible.
I May Destroy You is something of a reckoning, both internal and external. It is the water that is our life-force that we fight to keep from drowning in. Michaela Cole reminds us that we cannot fight what we are. Real power is in acceptance. I cannot go back to the woman I was before waking up to a familiar stranger on top of me. I have been to the Ego Death Bar. If it doesn’t destroy you, it will evolve you. And in the cases of Arabella, Michaela and myself, it has done both.