Violence is the Grammar (Essay, Fall 2020)

I don’t know where fear originates, but I know that it always makes its way into the body, and that a body always begins with a mother. My mother taught us that we had to look carefully for the ways our bodies would betray us. We were her only children, my sister and me, born native into foreign America, a land she was still trying to understand. 

Let me tell you: we used to believe her. After all, wasn’t it the flesh that dragged Adam and Eve out of the Garden and away from God?  We read our illustrated Bible at night as little girls, and wondered what we would have done, if it was us in Eden, standing before the serpent, the man we were torn from, and the fruit of the tree.

We were ashamed to be descendants of Eve’s. It hurt sometimes, to imagine how perfect the world would have been without her misguided desire. It hurt sometimes to live it; our legacy as woman, the desirable one, the devious one, the one who shouldered the first blame, and many blames to come.

My mother’s reassuring way was to promise us that most bad things that happened to us were in some way our fault. What did you do to provoke them? Why did you talk back? Perhaps she thought that this would keep the unfairness of the world from corroding us before we had a chance to live.

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