Idra Novey Invokes June Jordan, Flannery O'Connor in Response to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's Testimony

At the Paris Review, Idra Novey responds to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's recent testimony with an essay drawing on stories, essays, and poems by Flannery O'Connor, June Jordan, and Shirley Jackson, to reveal the ways that women write about silencing and sexual assault. She lands on June Jordan's essay written in response to the Anita Hill hearings, "Can I Get a Witness?" and Jordan's later "Poem About My Rights" to explore parallels between then and now. Novey writes: "In 1991, the poet June Jordan published an essay about Anita Hill titled 'Can I Get a Witness?' Jordan points out that Hill agreed to take a lie-detector test, which determined that her responses were true. Thomas, meanwhile, refused the test, and we all know what happened next." From there: 

In Jordan’s enduring “Poem About My Rights,” she evokes all the predictable ways that allegations of sexual assault get dismissed, especially when the victim is a woman of color. Forty years after the poem’s publication in 1980, it is devastating to consider how little has changed:

I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age
the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the
wrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic
the wrong sartorial I
I have been the meaning of rape
I have been the problem everyone seeks to
eliminate by forced
penetration with or without the evidence

With the relentless repetition of “wrong” after “wrong,” Jordan captures the pervasive racism and misogyny that lead victims of assault to become resigned to what—to others—presents as silence. Jordan mixes up the tone of the list, moving from “wrong nose” to the mocking courtroom diction of “wrong sartorial.” She evokes the bottomless well of excuses used to shut down an allegation. “If this Government,” Jordan wrote in her essay about Hill, “will not protect and defend her, and all black women, and all women, period … then we will change the Government. We have the numbers to deliver on this warning.”

Twenty-seven years later, we still have the numbers to deliver on that warning in the midterm elections. I fervently hope that this time we will. And perhaps, finally, readers will be able to turn to a classmate in a literature class and say, I hear it. I hear what’s roaring in the silence of this line.

Read more at Paris Review.