My Unreality

There is a moment during sex when the continual thrust inside me begins to hurt, and I have two choices: to say nothing — insist, in fact, that all is well and I am enjoying myself, that is to lie — or to say, “I am hurting, you are hurting me,” which is ostensibly true but feels false. To say that I am hurting is to grant myself a personhood that experiences things, is present; a personhood that exists, is real; when in fact, I am not real, and have not been for a long time.

In November last year, about two weeks after a huge swath of the American population used their franchise to disempower themselves and those more disadvantaged than they (women, children, people with disabilities, poor people, Latinx people, Black people, Jewish people, Muslims, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and otherwise queer people), I had my worst ever rape dream. In the dream, my rape was a concerted act of violence against me. Rather than a thing that happened without cause or preamble, it was instead a weapon against me, punishment for challenging a state agent. The election made many of us feel violated, like we were in a reality not of our choosing, one we had no desire to be a part of. And so we wept. I felt and understood this grief more than I ever had any other because I empathized deeply with being caught in a reality not of one’s choosing.

My life, whatever coherence can be ascribed to it, is always occurring alongside the lives of the people who came before me, whose traumas are enacted in the different ways that my relatives dissociate from and interact with this world. I traveled back home to Nigeria this past Christmas, and if through therapy and friendship, I had started to form a coherent, present self, this trip home — an entirely different one than the one I’d left, with new parents and siblings, including the parents I’d always had but whose new lives and priorities had changed them — split me into several different shadow selves and I entered into a new, deeper silence than I had ever experienced. I could not speak to these people because I did not trust them. Everything I knew about who they were when I was growing up, and who they had become in my absence, revealed to me that I would only be met with the misunderstanding that comes from fear; from living a life predetermined by all the different ways that your parents and your parents’ parents, and religion, and colonization, and everything pre-colonization, have fucked you up. Before the trip, I’d been working as an assistant for more than a year and this being always only in service of others had dealt several blows to my ego (that is, my subjecthood, my independence, my self-determination) and the November 8th elections compounded this ego loss. But returning to Nigeria and becoming a person unable to speak fully and completely about my experiences and my beliefs (about God and his inadequacies, about sex and sexuality, about neuroses and mental illness), to the people closest to me, was what finally destroyed my ego, my status as a speaking and feeling subject.

For seven months now, it has been difficult for me to speak intelligently and express opinions. I have kept mostly quiet, choosing only to speak when I must. The silence is comforting, easy. But it is also deceptive. Life is chaotic, dynamic, antithetical to silence, which is placid and stagnant. My own life will very soon no longer allow for silence. In a month, I begin graduate school, begin studying our world as it is right now (farcical, evil, illogically right-wing), and no matter how unreal I feel, no matter how dissociated I have become, I need to relearn intelligent language. I must try to speak more fully, and become real again. I must insist on my hurt instead of removing myself from my body. There is too much happening for me to be absent.

I, we, need to be able to say, to the many who assault the most vulnerable: “you are hurting me.” To speak of ourselves as real and feeling, to grant ourselves subjecthood, is to make it more difficult for them to objectify us, reduce us, erase us. To speak of ourselves as real and feeling is to try and save our lives.