The Word: Some Thoughts on What She Was Wearing by Shawn Aveningo Sanders

The first time I heard the word I was 9 years old, sitting with a group of girls around our Camp Fire Girl leader's kitchen table.

We'd just come back from a field trip -- a haunted train ride through Portland's zoo. The girl sitting beside me on the train's metal bench was so scared she gripped my hand, and when someone wearing a gorilla suit reached into the open car, my seatmate bit my finger. When we got to a tunnel, we were told to get off the train and walk through the darkness. By the tunnel's exit was a black-robed figure -- a mannequin, I thought. As I passed it, the figure sprang, its arms extended as if to grab me by the throat.

Later, as we sipped the cocoa our Camp Fire leader made for us, someone in our group said she'd heard a neighborhood woman had been raped.

"What does that mean?" another girl asked.

Our leader, the mom of one of the girls, said to ask our parents when we got home.

I don't think I ever did. Somehow I knew it was the word for an unspeakable act, and as soon as I heard it, my heart tightened like the iron vice my father kept clamped to the edge of his workbench. From that day on, the word has been a dark-robed figure at my heels. Sometimes the figure fades to a puff of dust or smoke floating in the attic of my subconscious, but it's always been, in some form, present.

A few years ago a woman in my writing group said, "I don't think I know any woman who hasn't been sexually abused."

Sitting in a theater or lecture hall, standing in line at the airport or grocery store, how can we know how many of our fellow humans -- women and men and children -- have suffered some form of sexual assault/abuse? How many have been able to say the words aloud?

For so many, silence feels like the only option, but on January 8, Annie Bloom's Books held a reading for Shawn Aveningo Sanders' book What She Was Wearing, a collection of poems about the author's nightmare of being raped at a fraternity party and her three-decade fight to heal from the trauma.

One of the first poems in the book, "What I Was Wearing," begins by describing in loving detail the outfit Aveningo Sanders put together for the party: "Pink sheet twisted into a toga/over a white one-piece swimsuit/pink chiffon bow in my hair/Nana's rhinestone dangle earrings."* Next, though, come the details of what she wore running home: a drop of blood and a swimsuit sliced with a knife. By including both "before" and "after" descriptions of what she wore that night, the author highlights the horror so many victims face: living in a society that too frequently casts an accusing eye on a woman's attire rather than condemning the perpetrator's crime.

Aveningo Sanders' story is hard to read, but this vivid account belongs to all of us. Whether we're mothers or fathers, whether we've been victimized or not, we, as a society, are the caretakers of our selves and friends and children and parents and neighbors and co-workers, and in order to protect one another from this crime, we can raise one voice that says rape is an act that devastates too many lives.

Last week Aveningo Sanders shared a work of art born out of pain. In return, the room was filled with support for her, and the word of the evening was respect. The word was healing. The word was power. The word was hope. And love and love and love.


What She Was Wearing can be purchased by clicking here or at Annie Bloom's Books. Fifty percent of all proceeds will go to PAVE: Partnering Awareness & Victim Empowerment.

*Aveningo Sanders, Shawn. What She Was Wearing, Beaverton, The Poetry Box, 2019.