This is not going to be a review in the traditional sense of the term, mostly because I don’t think I can bring myself to dwell on this novel for much longer. Which isn’t to say I don’t think it’s good — it is. I’ve been following Roxane Gay’s writing online for years, and she’s become one of my favourite feminist thinkers and cultural critics. She’s also an amazing writer. There’s ample evidence of that here.
All the TWs in the world for the rest of post.
A Untamed State is about Mireille Duval Jameson, a Haitian-American woman who’s kidnapped just outside her parents’ house in Port au Prince when she’s visiting from Miami. Mireille is taken by a gang of armed men in front of her husband and baby son. She’s held captive for thirteen days while her father negotiates her ransom, and during this time she’s repeatedly beaten, tortured, and brutally gang raped. An Untamed State is about those thirteen days, about Mireille’s life up until that point, and about the months that follow. How do you survive something like this?
I knew A Untamed State was going to be difficult to read, but even so it was more difficult than I could have imagined. Over the years I’ve had many conversations with friends about novels like Deerskin, Tender Morsels and Bitter Greens, and about feminist writing about sexual violence in general. That’s in part what this post is going to be about, but before I get there, I wanted to make it clear that there’s nothing gentle about this novel. There’s no fade to black here: the violence is graphic, the brutality is detailed and plain to see, and I completely understand and respect the fact that some readers will not be able to go there.
I tried to read A Untamed State alongside something comforting, but I couldn’t do it. The contrast was too jolting. In the end I stayed up until nearly 1am to finish it because I needed it to end. I needed to put this story behind me. But of course that I never will, not entirely, and that’s part of what this novel is doing. There’s no putting the reality that we live in a world where something like this can and does happen behind you.
There are plenty of people I respect who won’t read about rape, and I completely understand where they’re coming from. I understand staying away from the subject because it’s triggering. I understand doing so because it’s upsetting. And I understand being wary in general, especially when so many fictional depictions of sexual violence are lazy, exploitative, glamorised and poorly handled. I understand caution and fatigue. Having said that, I always have a pretty strong emotional reaction to seeing rape carelessly listed among “overdone tropes”, unless that statement is very, very carefully qualified, for all the reasons Kari Sperring explains in her brilliant post “Rape in Fiction: A Rant”.
I’ve gone back to that post more times than I can count over the past two years. None of the people I know who avoid stories about rape are actually saying “Enough of this. We’re bored of rape. We won’t hear it” — and yet I’ve seen the two be conflated much too often. What I’m trying to get at is: I’d never, ever tell anyone that they have some sort of moral duty to engage with a story about something that deeply upsets them. I’d never evoke “awareness” to justify pushing a brutal and upsetting narrative on someone — plenty of people are aware; that’s why they need a break. But at the same time, I’ll always maintain that a novel can be as brutal as An Untamed State and still be fiercely feminist. And I’m grateful that smart and thoughtful feminist writers like Gay are writing novels like this, because otherwise the only depictions of sexual violence we’d be left with would be the crass, exploitative, misogynist ones.
To explain how I made sense of An Untamed State, I’ll have to make use of a concept from something else I’ve read recently — The Ministry of Stories and Truth from Kristin Cashore’s Bitterblue. For those of you who haven’t read Cashore, this is an institution created by a young queen who’s trying to help her country recover from more than thirty years of brutality inflicted by her father. Bitterblue is one of the smartest, most compassionate stories about recovering from trauma I’ve ever read, and this is part of the reason why. Here’s how Bitterblue puts it:
She had one more ministry to build. Of all of her ministries, it would be the one with which she would take the most care. She wouldn’t force it on anyone, but she would make its existence widely known. It would be a ministry for all the people whose pain could be acknowledged, maybe even eased, by the telling and recording of what their own experiences had been.
As I said last year when I wrote about Rose Under Fire, there’s no universal trauma survival narrative — there are only different stories, and we need all of them. We’re all individuals, and you survive however you survive. This is why revisiting the specific details of the very worst thing that happened to someone can matter. As someone who heals through words, I understand the impulse to say it out loud, write it down, and get it right, down to the very last bruise. This won’t be true for everyone, of course, and not even necessarily for the same person from one day to the next — sometimes we need to just leave things alone. But for some of us, some of the time, there’s potential for healing in stories about the very worst kinds of experiences. There’s solace in hearing them and telling them, and that makes me grateful for their existence.
In his Washington Post review, Ron Charles says the following about An Untamed State:
But the boundless savagery of Mireille’s kidnappers soon makes any kind of sociological apology for their behavior sound obscene. Despite the beatings she receives for talking back, she shreds her captors’ pompous class-warfare cant, refusing to let them imagine that the injustices they’ve suffered absolve them. We’re left not with the tidy explanations of Karl Marx, but the fathomless mystery of evil and what it wreaks on one woman.
I understand what this is getting at, but at the same time, I’m very wary of conflating sociological analysis with apology. Of course that what happens to Mireille happens within the context of deep inequality and is impossible do dissociate from this context. But addressing this (very untidy, if you ask me) fact doesn’t equal giving her captors a free pass. Mireille’s experiences are still the result of a group of men deciding they were willing to brutally hurt a woman. And there’s a second layer of sociological analysis that’s relevant here: why is this brutality so clearly gendered? Why do angry, terrified, hopeful and desperate men so easily imagine that the most effective way to hurt another man is by brutally raping his daughter? Why was Mireille stripped of her humanity in yet another way — by being thought of as a means to an end? There’s no apology or absolution in seeking to understand the structural gender inequality that plays into this, and I appreciated Roxane Gay’s willingness to ask all these questions.
One last thing: I’m terrified that if I go looking for more reviews of An Untamed State, I’ll eventually come across one that praises Mireille for being “strong”, for remaining defiant, for not begging for mercy or breaking down crying. Conversations about victims of violence are often framed in such terms, and this kind of praise makes me furious because of its implied counterpart: you praise “strength” as opposed to “weakness”; you admire a lack of tears while deriding their abundance. This understanding of things is seeped in, as this piece puts it, a deep-seated contempt for pain and the people who show it. What would you think of a woman who did cry and beg for mercy? While reading An Untamed State I felt deeply for Mireille, an individual human being who is subjected to appalling violence and who responds however she can. But all my compassion for her didn’t mean I placed her above some imaginary “weaker” counterpart. A woman who responded differently would be just that — a different human being. She wouldn’t be any less deserving of my compassion, and her story wouldn’t be any less horrifying.
There’s no right or wrong way to respond to something like this, and there’s no way I can conceive of Mireille’s story as anything other than an account of one individual woman’s experiences with horrifying violence. Which brings me back to why I value novels like An Untamed State — because we’ll always need more stories, more voices, more perspectives. It’s only by capturing the infinite variations within even the most horrifying experiences that we can understand and do justice to all the different ways you survive: as a unique human being, which is, shock and horror, what women are.
They read it too: 1330v
(You?)