What I Amost Know
On a Sunday morning in May of 1975, I was raped outside the town of Avignon by two unknown young Frenchmen, a groom and his best man on the way to their wedding luncheon. This last December, I spent the month in the small town of Delft in The Netherlands with my husband and family attending our daughter’s doctoral dissertation and staying on for the Christmas holidays. While we were there, the rape trial of Gisèle Pelicot in Avignon filled the local papers and social media. On December 19th, Gisele’s husband and fifty other men were found guilty of rape. The ease with which these assaults took place in the same local was startling. So too, was the possibility that the rapists from 1975 couldhave been carrying on their casual practice these many years later.
What I Almost Know is a look at the culture of rape as reflected upon through the ordinary days of a family celebrating Christmas together while the aftermath of the Pelicot trial and a previously untold story fifty years earlier runs in the background of the mythical telling of Jesus’ birth story. It also presses the reader to release the idea of rape from the tidy boundaries of sexuality to discover we are all practiced in the mechanisms of taking what does not belong to us by gift or invitation.
The writer considers the culture of rape to be based on a worldview of separation, which only humans with their hubris and disregard for what was in existence before their ascension could embrace as a reality. All other entities – time, space, the more than human, the elements of the cosmos – know separation to be a falsehood. Time to be released from the lie. And time to see that the justice we seek through our courts only seeks to keep us incarcerated in white stasis, unable to release us from modernity, a worldview that is no longer of service.
The author is a spiritual director, poet, and modern-day anchoress living in rural Ontario tending the needs of her community. What I Almost Know is 35,600 words, 113 pages and twenty-five chapters long. It is a book of creative non-fiction, told mostly in third person, occasionally in first.