Aftermath

Another story from academia.
Based on real events and on my imagination.

“He who passively accepts evil
is as much involved in it
as he who helps to perpetrate it.”
Martin Luther King

„There were people around.“
Aslı Vatansever *

I heard what happened to you from people who do not know you.

You were a student assistant studying and working at an old university in Germany. You were a young woman working in an environment dominated and run by men. You worked for a promising young scholar, a label that only a man can ever acquire in such an environment. He had received the label through the support of those in power. He thus had reason to feel self-confident, assured of his future in academia, thanks to the powerful male hands providing him with opportunities.

You could not know that this promising young scholar had already left a trail behind him at his previous workplace. A trail of transgressions, of incidents and therefore – if we are able to use our imagination properly – a trail of tears. Tears of female students, tears of promising young women.  

You could not know this. He was charming. You could not know this. He was interesting. When did his charm cross the line of harassment? When did it turn into a form of misogynist belligerence? Did you notice it immediately or did it take a while? He wrote e-mails, and e-mails, and e-mails. You told him to stop. But no matter what you said, the flood of e-mails would not stop, the flood of words crossing every boundary, words meant to penetrate into a realm that should have been, and should have stayed, yours, and yours only and forever. The realm necessary to find a voice, to cultivate precious thoughts and powerful questions. You tried to stand up for yourself, you tried to push him away, you tried to set your boundary, you tried to stay yourself and to protect your self.

To. No. Effect.
Worse.
The worst. Happened.
At a party.
No one seemed to notice.
Did no one notice?

He knew he could do it.
He felt protected
when he destroyed
all of your protections.
In one stroke.
 

At this point. After this. In this aftermath. Even in my imagination, even mobilizing all my empathy, there is a blur. I try, and fail, to imagine how you made it from this moment to the other one. The moment when you printed all the e-mails. The moment when you put them in your bag. The moment when you left your house, went to the university, knocked on a door, entered a room, stood before the men with power.

I do not know where your bravery came from. How did you tell them? How did you find the strength, how did you find the words to tell these men what he had done to you? How did you carry your body to that door? Your pierced and aching body, shouting at you beneath your clothes with every step? How did you muster the minimum amount of hope necessary to act? The minimum amount of energy necessary to move again into the world in this way, and not to withdraw from it, shutting it out?

His e-mails were too much. Even for those powerful men who were used to brushing aside female perspectives, to say the least. They were too much to ignore that something disastrous and criminal had in fact happened. Too much and too clear. These e-mails went up the university’s hierarchy and when they arrived at the top, the top spoke: he must leave now and never come back here. And he left. But. Only a few months later he landed a good academic job in a different country. The top had spoken. Immediately afterwards, the men in power with their supporting hands must have written letters. About the young promising scholar who deserves every opportunity. Academia and the catholic church in one and the same sophisticated league of male power.

Those men in power had to explain to others why their promising male colleague had disappeared so suddenly. They told them what needed to be told and then they obliged everyone who heard it to never talk about it to anyone. Reputation management can be a nasty business. Don’t mention the rape. One of the female colleagues who were told to be silent told me the story, which was later confirmed by other people who had heard the story from those in power.

For quite a while, whenever I talked about this with good friends, my hands began to tremble. (If my hands trembled, what did your hands do?)

One friend of the promising young scholar once talked to me. He seemed to know, and he seemed to know that I knew. After all, the story circulated. And he worried. He worried about his friend. Not about you. Would this continue to haunt him? he asked.I only managed to say: There is a reason that society has courts to deal with this kind of thing. It is too much to deal with in private.

I don’t know what precisely you asked for in your courageous act, when you talked to those men with power and stood your ground, a ground that had just been shaken by an earthquake. I do know that the men in power worried, too. They did not want you to bring charges in order to protect the reputation of the university. Did you want to bring charges, but refrained from it because of this reaction? Another unanswered question.

Sometimes I wish I did not know the scholar’s name. Since I heard about this story, I never lost the feeling that I, too, have become complicit. Simply by knowing about it and by doing nothing. It happened, after all, in my academic neighborhood.

The scholar is now less young and promising but rather in the midst of his blossoming academic career, receiving prestigious prizes. Nowadays, from time to time, he appears in newspapers, sometimes even on TV, making me feel sick in the pit of my stomach whenever I can’t prevent noticing it. And then I always wonder how you feel.

How did your life go on after all this? Did those men with power have the decency to offer you other kind of support? And if they did, was it the kind that could help you at all? I cannot stop wondering. Many years have gone by. Were you able to put yourself together again? If so, how did you do it? I would love to think that you continued in academia, if that was your passion, but I find it very hard to imagine. I find everything about the aftermath hard to imagine. I hope you had, and have, really good friends with whom you could share an experience nobody should ever feel the need to share. I hope you found your way out of the darkness, your way of honoring your scars and growing into a new powerful you. “There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself” says Hannah Gadsby. I hope so much that this is you.

But I also know, it might not be you, because courage and strength are not enough for this kind of recovery to happen. It takes luck, the right surrounding, the right kind of help, the right material and social conditions, and enough time, a lot of time, to grieve, to let the humiliation and brokenness withdraw into a cocoon in which the beaten, shattered and wormlike self might, eventually, mutate into a butterfly, strong in her vulnerability, and with a new voice, who flies back into the world and sings her very special song, and contributes her words, her questions and her wisdom. I so wish this is you. I don’t want to imagine the other – very real – possibility. The possibility that the violence stayed with you and drowned out your voice.  

I hope your voice is there,
somewhere.
This text is my own
little
and helpless
song
in its honor.

And then a different question. What happens to a man who beat and shattered a woman‘s life and then received continued support from people who knew this well but did not care about the woman, people with power inside the institution? How does such a life move forward? How does such a self evolve? While building a life and a career on lies, on hiding the truth, on banalizing and ridiculing the destruction that it produced and that his mentors condoned. How does such a self impact other people? How does it pull the people around him into a toxic dynamic while pretending that, as a scholar, he cares very much about humanity? How can anyone expect that, under such circumstances, the violence of his past will not be repeated, again and again, in a myriad of different, smaller and bigger, sophisticated and not so sophisticated ways, by himself and by those who have become complicit, thereby spreading poison to even more people in an already poisoned institution.

If the worst kind of violence
is so skillfully forgotten
another kind will build careers

and produce a silence
that grows hearts into stones
stones into walls of power
and walls of power into
an insidious culture.

A culture
that thrives
on absent voices
and unimaginable

aftermaths.

*  Aslı Vatansever, „Survival in Silence: Of Guilt and Grief at the Intersection of Precarity, Exile, and Womanhood in Neoliberal Academia“ in: Olga Burlyuk and Ladan Rahbari eds., Migrant Academics‘ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe (Cambridge, UK: Open Books Publishers, 2023), 145-154.