A week ends in which something has definitely changed. A politician, spokesperson for the main left-wing party in Spain, has resigned. Two days earlier, a woman had sat at the keyboard to recount the sexual and psychological assault she had received from a man. Then he had sent it in the form of a message. That man, the one portrayed by her, was the resigned politician, but the woman did not say it in her text, she did not give his name. That is to say, several women, various testimonies had to mediate between the text and the politician, so that they would be forever linked. When the woman decided to write, probably, almost certainly, she did not think that her story could end the politician’s career. When I published his testimony on my Instagram account, neither did.
It was not the first testimony he received and published in which “a politician from Madrid” who behaved in a similar way was named. I thought of Íñigo Errejónof course, but without any certainty. I also didn’t ask the woman who wrote to me who she was referring to. I never do it. I don’t engage in conversation with women who want to send me the attacks they have suffered. To begin with, because I couldn’t do anything else, there are hundreds a week. Also, because it’s not my role. When I started that archive of stories that my Instagram account has become, I was clear that I had to define my role: to be a channel. That’s all. It is not my role to advise, counsel, console, denounce, articulate… anything. I thank each of the women who write to me, I send them a kiss or a hug. That’s all.
The vast majority do not give me the name of the man who attacked them, or of the men, because they often narrate a succession of violence that runs through their lives. Those who do, usually ask me not to publish their story, because they are afraid of reprisals.to be recognized, to whatever. They sent it to me, I understand, as a form of relief, a release. Narrating, recounting what has been experienced, is a way of stepping back and looking at it, of taking distance. It also lightens. I always think that we insist too much on insisting that our children read and not enough on writing. We should write as much as we read. Words make up an artifact that is more manageable than emotions.
So that woman sent me the story of the violence she experienced and I published it, as always, like every day for more than a year, like so many others, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. He began by saying: “I had been warned about his treatment of women, but given his political position I couldn’t believe that was true.” It ended with something that caught my attention: “There are details that I prefer not to tell, but if a woman comes across him, let her know that she is not crazy, that he is a true psychopath, and that his airs of a normal person hide a true monster.” . In that phrase there was a spirit of communication with other women, the certainty that these “others” existed and were going to recognize themselves in her narrative. And so it happened.
What happened next is known. Several people captured his words, reproduced them here and there and indicated that they recognized Errejón’s behavior in them. There were not only victims, but also women to whom those victims had told what had happened, and they in turn had told it to others… But the image of Errejón as a man capable of sexually assaulting a woman was not just talk, what they have called these days “a rumor.” There was a fact, and between “a rumble” and a fact there was reality. There was a previous testimony, that of a young woman who a year and a half ago already published on the networks that the politician had harassed her at a feminist party. I remember it well, because then it was known that it had been silenced.
Everything that is silenced interests me. I know that silence is the greatest punishment, the source of all rot, the room where the girl is locked to harm her for the rest of her life.the place where men and women are confined so that they never have peace, the slab that crushes decency. Silence is the greatest evil of our country, ask those who have been retaliated against by the dictatorship, those who have been tortured by what some still dare to call the “model” Transition. Women have been condemned to silence throughout the history of humanity.. But not anymore. Suddenly, we have tools to narrate ourselves, and at the moment I don’t see how they are going to be able to avoid it.
So that woman who sent the message did so like someone who threw a bottle into the dark ocean of silence, a “this happened to me”, a “we are not crazy” floating in the universe of networks and messages. What we didn’t know, neither she nor I, was that there were many castaways waiting for that message to cling to it. Because some things can no longer be silenced, including sexist violence carried out on a regular basis. Those who believed that by covering the mouth of the first person attacked by Errejón they would be able to stop the rest have no idea what we have changed. They don’t know that the stories of thousands, millions of women are there for others to latch onto. Because that was what we were missing. We did not need to report. We needed to know what exactly we were denouncing, to know what was happening to all of us, to know that we are all, to know that together we have neither fear nor shame, to know, as that woman said, that we are not crazy.
And then, the attacker fell. He did not fall because a woman publicly denounced him, but because a woman recounted what she had experienced and felt.so that others could know that that was what they, who were many, had experienced and felt. This week something has definitely changed. We know that we have the tools and that they are efficient. Efficiency is the basis. We have tools created by ourselves, not inherited from patriarchy. They are based on testimony, on collective memory, on words. And they work.
#tools #work
