In a recent post I referred to the twenty five years since my writing journey began. Two and a half decades and only two novels published, two pending. Are you are really slow writer? Um, yeh, I guess I am.
I came to writing late. I was a mature age student at UTS in Sydney, in my mid-thirties when I did my undergraduate degree. The first person in my family to go to uni.
But my writing/publishing journey includes a lengthy disruption of nearly ten years when I was stalked.
I've never publicly talked about this, but it's significant.
One of the reasons I've not talked about it is because, as every trauma survivor knows, revisiting the trauma is like living it all over again. So, I'm being oblique here, to keep the horror at arms length. Even as I tap those words out I feel nauseous.
See, the body never forgets.
The stalking wasn't the first trauma in my life. The other injuries began in childhood. More of a similar nature, piled on in my teenage years, plus some new ones specific to my gender and sexuality as a young adult. A fairly substantial mountain of wounds.
So, when the stalking began in my early forties, it sat on a historical accumulation of damage. Things were intense.
Without going into detail, suffice to say that at a point when my writing habits and production were getting established, I was dealing with police on an almost daily basis, and later on, courts and lawyers as well. For years.
I was dealing with an extremely determined and malevolent individual. For my own safety I changed my name and moved several times. I lived in hiding.
With that level of attention and violence, it's not easy to maintain a working life, but my writing literally helped keep me alive. I clung to it, documenting what was happening to me.
The nature of the violence I endured was both misogynistic and homophobic.
I still can't write the specifics because it does my head in and skirting even thinking about it takes me to a place of such despair and horror and grief I can't/won't go there.
I eventually left NZ, again, and when I returned six years later, I occasionally ran into the vet who was a witness for our court case. He would always ask me, "What happened to him? What did the police do?" and I'd have to tell this lovely man that the perp essentially walked free, because on the day of the trial and swearing in of the jury, the court deemed there were too many child sexual abuse cases to deal with that day.
So the judge "passed over" our case. The judge also apparently decided that since the perp hadn't reoffended since the Protection Order was placed, he'd basically done his time. As I said to the Senior Sergeant who'd dealt with our case and was reporting this to me as we waited in the Witness Room, "He hasn't fucking re-offended because I'm living in hiding." The court rewarded the perp for and by my constrained and constricted life. The lengthy list of offences prior to installing the Protection Order were nothing. The Local Court Victim Support person who dealt with our case for years, said that they'd never had such a huge file of offences for one person. That file was the accumulation of what he had done to me and my dog.
But I never got my day in court. I sat in a Witness room after my life had been all but destroyed for nine years. A Crown Prosecutor and a judge made the call. I never met them, but I've never forgotten the name of the CP. He's pretty high profile now.
No one has ever been able to explain to me the legal finangling that resulted in that outcome, but after the nine years spent pursuing 'justice' I was done with it and wanted what remained of my will to live, to go into writing 'our stories'.
And to honour myself and my then partner and our murdered dog.
There, I've said it.
So, my writing journey/timeline has a massive rend of nearly ten years. Hard to produce much when you're packing up and moving, again, and barely functioning because the violence happening to you is not simply specific and personal and oh-so-real, but also part of a bigger narrative of your own history of abuses, and also more broadly, a conjoined abuse/violence/trauma/grief/of women/queers/butches/Othered/Othered/Othered that is not confined or specific to yourself alone. The Foreshore and Seabed protests and hikoi were going on in the midst of my own traumas. I joined that hikoi twenty years ago. Two hundred years and it's still going on.
I'm a pakeha. I have white privilege by dint of my birth in this country. That privilege is not insignificant and its cost is born by those whose sovereignty was stolen, Maori. The cost is borne by every successive generation post white-invasion because we all now pay for the paucity of white-supremacy culture and thinking. None pay more than Maori, who are expected to function in this wasteland of industrial capitalist rampage and destruction of the whenua, while dealing with institutional racism, massive cultural losses and land-thefts and generally being behind the 8-ball in every possible way. How they manage this while exhibiting generosity to tangata te tiriti is testament to their open-handed and high-minded manaakitanga.
Our world is splattered with people being Othered, domestically, socially, nationally, ethnically, globally. Every one of those individuals, their whanau, their communities, carries the grief of loss and the profound disturbance of living with historical and current trauma.
My writing was and is the thread I cling to. My writing is my obstinate vow to make something of the losses, the anguish, the hopelessness I sometimes feel.
So, yeah, slow process.
Getting there. Doing the stuff.
Trying to make meaning.
Sending much love and a big hug. And many thanks for clinging to your writing: may that beautiful thread keep right on growing!