The Brooklyn Rail

I was standing in front of a body of painted glass, layer upon layer of collage, nerve endings and synapses stretching, thinking, trapped in the neural pathways of my mind like white water rapids. Dustin Yellin’s warehouse in Red Hook felt like being trapped in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Standing there, still processing the ending of Girls Play Dead, my own story started to press outward, finding a rough-skin boundary. A friend pulled me away, the same friend who told me on the subway, you get to choose which stories you tell about yourself. By which she meant trauma.

In Jen Percy’s exploration of trauma, she’s getting at:

How it can change our relationships with experience and memory, giving life the feeling of unreality. And women are often wondering if the experiences they’ve had, of deep hurt or victimization, are “real.” Maybe part of that has to do with not being believed, but I think another part has to do with the way trauma affects storytelling.

There’s a lot of stories I’ve told myself, stories I’ve told others, stories that I’ve tucked away and kept at bay. Reading Girls Play Dead, I saw my own reality and unreality weaving in with others.

The basis of Percy’s investigation of storytelling and trauma is, in part, to acknowledge the acts of self preservation our animal bodies have adapted to employ in the face of danger. Many survivors blame themselves and carry the shame of not fighting back. This playing dead, tonic immobility, is involuntary. It’s what happens to sharks when flipped on their backs, frozen, their bellies up to be conquered by the killer whale. Percy writes of a shark stalking her nightmares and daydreams.

Like tonic immobility, dissociation is a survival mechanism. In a section called “Rapture” Percy explores the way rape and ecstasy are entangled. Recounting a story of a South Carolina woman choked and raped in the front seat of a car, she reports having “ascended to a light where she was warm, safe, and whole, and separate from her body.” Near-death experiences like this are reported by some survivors of sexual violence, their minds forced to flee into the light. In a moment of terror, the human mind can rewrite the present in an act of escapism.

In the aftermath of sexual violence, the storytelling is just beginning. Percy takes the reader into the room where police and social workers are being trained on how “traumatic events are more difficult to recount in a linear matter.” When recording the stories of victims, police often write off extremely specific memories during an assault as irrelevant, like a song playing down the hall or the features of a digital clock. For the victim, however, these details are the story. The negation of sometimes critical information, like if a condom was used, is superseded by these imprinted details. Percy notes that survivors are not lying if the story is disjointed, rather the disjointedness points to a trauma-afflicted mind.

Months pass, then years, and many survivors must confront their story in new ways. Percy talks about a patient in therapy after suffering childhood abuse:

That’s a memory she holds but does not feel. She was too dissociated to have access to the emotions. Her therapist thought it would be important for her to feel the memory. They visited the memory from [her] perspective first … she felt nothing. Instead, she went back into the memory from the perspective of her neighbor … she had to inhabit a different body, a different perspective, to be able to feel any emotional connection to her own experience of fear and pain.

The same way fiction writers invoke empathy for their characters with perspective, this method can help survivors see their own stories with less shame. Percy brings in the voice of her own trauma specialist, assuring her that revising a memory is not tricking the brain, but the nervous system: “Our nervous systems don’t know the difference between fact and fiction.”

Some of the stories Percy included served to further complicate an already complicated narrative about sexual violence. She introduces the reader to Chelsea, a woman who admits to lying under oath—if not about the rape, then at least about verbally saying no. Percy doesn’t pretend to know what happened. She lays out the evidence, including the virulent racism against the young black man who was accused. Percy admits how rare it is for women to lie about rape, but she refused to omit Chelsea’s story in this tangled tapestry she has woven—depicting sexual violence as inextricable from society’s hegemonic structures.

Percy describes Logan Correctional Center, a women's prison in Illinois, in some of the most beautiful prose of the book:

It was the end of May and everything was blooming. Insects flew in and out of the tall wire fences to pollinate the prison’s small gardens. Women walked around unchained … clouds with glowing edges and dark centers gathered in the sky.

She introduces the reader to Debraca Harris and Antheshia “Angel” Lee, and the lawyer fighting for their resentencing, retelling their stories to acknowledge the abuse they have suffered. Their lawyer, Rachel White-Domain, says:

Even if no one listened to their stories now … maybe one day they would, and people would hear the stories and they would say how they couldn’t believe anyone was ever treated the way Debraca and Angel were treated. “The same way we talk about slavery or the witch trials.”

Percy demonstrates the failures of storytelling to bring about timely justice, even as she engages in the retelling.

I am moved by the way Percy’s own PTSD informed the storytelling in Girls Play Dead. The curiosity, searching for patterns in her reporting, finding recognition in other’s stories, and circling back to the self, her own memory. The structure of the book mirrors the intricacy of a mind healing, not by any means linear. Girls Play Dead doesn’t ask why abuse happens, but how we survive violation, how we respond to fear, and how we tell our stories.