It's been 5 years.
**Warning: This blog post contains graphic content, photographs and descriptions that may be disturbing to some readers. **
I have this reoccurring nightmare. I am in bed and open my eyes to see the outline of a man standing over me holding a machete in his hand. I recognize he is wearing the jacket that my guards wear, but the hood is completely shadowing his face so I can’t see who it is. As he slowly raises the machete above his head I feel fear, but mostly I feel betrayal.
The first time I had this dream was shortly after Lily’s rape. I woke screaming and scrambling up my bed. Today I no longer scream, but wake up in a panicked sweat and lie perfectly still in my bed for a long while ... afraid to move, afraid to breathe … hoping the mirage of the man my mind still believes is in the room won’t notice me.
August 23rd, 2012. It’s been 5 years. Friends, I can try to tell you to the best of my ability what happened. But, I cannot TELL you what happened. Only she can do that. And she has bravely decided to do so with her new book: The Dark Seed (click here for her website). It's not an easy read by any stretch of the imagination, but only by reading it can one truly understand her strength and resiliency.
I can tell you however, what happened to me through what happened to her. You see, when you rape someone, you don't just hurt that one person. You don't just rob that one person of their sense of safety, and their of peace of mind. You don't just violate one person. You rob us all. You violate us all. You change us all. And we all have to figure out how to navigate in this new reality that has stripped us of our security.
By August 2012, I had already been living in Malawi for 2 and a half years. At the time I was working in the tourism industry, living at and managing a beautiful 5 bedroom guesthouse in the capital city of Lilongwe. I had spent the evening of August 23rd with Lily, her two kids, my boyfriend and another close friend at Chivimbo; a lodge Lily and her partner had recently taken over. As a regular haunt of mine, I already loved this lodge. It was on the edge of Lilongwe, with nothing but rolling hills on the horizon. Chivimbo – “see the best sunsets in Malawi” - was the ongoing marketing joke for Max and I. Mzungus (white people) love a good sunset. We left Lily at about 11:30PM. My boyfriend and I headed back to my guesthouse and settled in for the night.
Less than an hour had passed before we got the first phone call - maybe even 30 minutes. Chivimbo was being robbed as we spoke. Lily had managed to get one phone call off. Confusion ensued. I remember sitting nervously in bed with this knot in my stomach, waiting for my phone to ring again. The next phone call came maybe a mere hour after I had walked out the door of Chivimbo, leaving my friend and her children. “You need to come to the hospital. Lily has been raped.” Those words were so difficult to comprehend. We just left. We had just left. The knot in my stomach turned to nausea. In some ways, I feel like that nausea has never left me.
That night is so clear. Disturbingly clear. Raped. Gang Raped. I remember standing at the top of a long outdoor corridor at the hospital and seeing Lily at the other end; barefoot, in a blood stained t-shirt with a small towel wrapped around her waist, arm cradled in front, bandage over her eye. My stomach churned. Tears swelled in my eyes. I somehow gathered all of my inner strength, swallowed down hard every bit of emotion I felt, walked down the hall, and went into action mode.
The weeks and months that followed were a blur. A blur of watching Lily attempt to deal with what happened. A blur of the details slowly coming out; details so disturbing that any sort of empathy I had left was knocked flat out of me. I numbly went through the motions. I could not afford for myself, or for Lily, or for her kids, or for her partner to fall apart at this juncture. So, I did what needed to be done. No tears. I swallowed it all. For 2 years.
**Warning: this video contains graphic content that might be upsetting to some viewers.**
The guilt I dealt with after Lily’s rape tore me in two different directions. Although I had no way of knowing what was about to happen that night, I felt an incredible amount of guilt for leaving her and her children alone. What tortured me even more, was the guilt that crept in in the months that followed - for feeling relieved; relieved that I had left, relieved that I was not there. That is the guilt that tore me up; a truth that felt so awful I could hardly bring myself to admit it. Believe me, I have played every single possible scenario of that night over in my head a million times, trying to figure out which one could’ve brought a better outcome. In reality, if the attack had happened 10 minutes earlier when the four of us were there – I am fairly certain none of us would be here today.
I remember when I found out that one of the men who was part of the attack had subsequently died in police custody. It was the first time in my life I felt no remorse over the brutal beating deaths that could happen in Malawi. In fact, I believe my exact response was “good.” After the rape, I felt like I had no empathy left in my heart. As time passed, it became harder to shock me. I photographed the scene of Lily’s rape the day after for evidence. I meticulously captured broken down
doorways, stains on bed sheets, belongings trashed and trails of my friends blood spattered through the hallways. These images were vital, a scene so disturbing that now I can hardly believe how calmly I walked those hallways with my camera. As the years passed, it felt like circumstances continued to unravel around me. As we left the hospital that same night, I watched the police dump two beaten bodies outside the doors before driving off. Hardly a month later, we peered through a crack in the curtains, hearts thumping waiting for the external security force to arrive after blood curdling screams from the gate shocked us awake. Curled up in bed, I listened with actual relief to the “thwaping” noise of my boyfriend hitting a man who had come into our bedroom one night as I laid alone, saved by the German Sheppard that had settled down beside me in the shadows. I stood staring at the blood soaked steps of my friends’ home the morning after her ex-boyfriend had smashed all her windows trying to break in. These things were not normal, but somehow we had come to accept them as the norm. As the days and months passed I began to feel like I was just biding time, because eventually it would be me. I watched it all happen, but didn't allow it to break through the emotional safety barrier I had built for myself. Somehow, I still didn’t want to come home. I didn’t know how to face home anymore and yet I had figured out how to function in the face of everyday trauma.
That I stayed in a relationship that was suffocating the life out of me for two years - mostly out of fear that someone was going to hurt me – is an irony not lost on me. His arms provided the safety I needed, yet a constraint that was deadly. It wasn’t until there was no other choice but to leave, that finally the walls I had built around me crumbled. The fear that had been festering under the surface for the better part of two years confronted me when I finally found myself truly alone; back home; in a world that no longer made sense to me. I kept it together during the day, plastering a fake smile on my face and going to work. But alone in the dark of the night I was coming apart at the seams; finding myself setting traps around my tiny Toronto apartment for intruders, and crouched for hours with my back pressed against the corner of my bedroom wall, waiting, and sobbing. I didn’t know how to stop being afraid.
I didn’t realize that the stress of years of suppressing my emotions related to these traumas could eat away at me until I was so paranoid and broken that I was actually hallucinating intruders. The fact that I felt like “nothing had directly happened to me” had stopped me from addressing my emotions in any real way. In reality, I was dealing with vicarious trauma on top of vicarious trauma on top of vicarious trauma resulting in a wave of PTSD symptoms that came to light in the safety of home. This was not something that I recognized as valid for a very long time.
It wasn’t until years later that I was able to share with Lily the fallout that I dealt with after her attack. Such a senseless act of brutality had shaken me to the very core of my being. She was able to relay to me how calm, cool and controlled she had thought I was. I was what she needed me to be and that’s what matters. In her book, Lily quotes an African proverb: 'However long the night, the day will break.' While it begins the chapter where the attack finally comes to end, I believe it is also a strong metaphor for healing in the wake of this trauma.
When my friend Jean-Paul Bédard (an author, athlete and advocate himself) was asking for stories of resilience earlier this year, I had no hesitation to give him Lily’s name. Her strength and resiliency in the face of such trauma has given me the strength and resilience to move on also. Her mantra has become: "Forgiveness. Dignity. Faith." Today as I reflect on the last 5 years, I cannot begin to explain how proud I am of her for the steps she has taken not only in her own healing, but now speaking out as an activist for other women.
And to Lily: From the day I met you in Cape Mac to the days lounging by the pool at Forrester; our friendship was always easy. You have been a gift in my life. While one heinous event has bound us together more tightly than we could have ever anticipated, it has also bound us together for life. And for that, I will be eternally grateful. I love you.
Till we meet again …. X
If you would like to purchase a copy of her book, please visit her website: https://thedarkseed.com/
