50 ways to groom your trauma

Yoshitomo Nara, from his exhibition New Works in Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, 2016

“Grooming” is a term I recently found about.

As written in Cambridge dictionary it can be:

“the things that you do to make your appearance clean and neat, for example brushing your hair or the things that you do to keep an animal's hair or fur clean and neat

the act of cleaning an animal, often by brushing its fur

the act of making the surface of snow smoother, flatter, or harder so that it is easier to ski

the criminal activity of becoming friends with a child in order to try to persuade the child to have a sexual relationship”

Make one’s appearance neat, making the surface smoother, make things easy for persuading a child to-

Why grooming? What is “groomed” by the paedophile? His personality? The child’s doubts? The space between them?

I am thinking about children grooming tenderly their pets or dolls and at the same time wild predators “grooming” their fur, sharpening their teeth, fairytales with fake-gentle wolves and little girls or malevolent creatures transformed into beautiful women; whiches with candy houses; children tales are so full of grooming — of course in most of them the deceiver is a woman but this is the second stage of covering.

In the #true story, it is all about the mightier and the powerless, the masculine and the feminine.

I find the term “grooming” creepy, freakish and disturbing; it makes you think again and again about what has gone so wrong with the human race that a term like this had to be created. That something so unthinkable became so regular to have its own term.

I don’t want a language full of terms implying violence.

There are indigenous people that their language has no words for ideas very common to the western civilization.

The Amondawa language has no word for time. In Native languages of Alaska, there is no word for art.

What makes grooming such a necessary notion to have its own term when there are people who do not need a word for time or art? Maybe I am confused or naive but grooming should be all about taking care of yourself or something you love, and only.

As far as it concerns the language, I agree with the structuralists.

I think that more than us speaking a language, it is rather the language that “speaks us”. I believe that our language, in a way, creates us. Thus when a language uses a word that means sexual intercourse like “fuck” to imply something violent and encroaching like “fuck”, then it creates or strengthens rape culture. And if a language contains “grooming”, there will be “groomers”.

Barthes believes that the only way to disrupt the language-cage is through poetry. And art, I could add.

I wonder if there is any way to reverse this path, to restore a society without sexual criminality, without paedophiles, sexual harassment and violence. Without any kind of sexual exploitation.

Tough plan to mess with desire and power.

I don’t know if it is possible, but I choose to believe it is as I choose to believe in art and poetry as a way to disrupt a language that promotes rape culture and child abuse.

What is definitely possible is to talk.

To talk about it if you meet it, to protect the powerless, to uncover the predator, to prevent more crimes.

(In the recent child abuse scandal in Greece, on the contrary, the predator seems to has been far well covered by an entire government. And the government is still there.)

All these came to my mind while trying to write something about a book I read recently and thought about a lot.

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell is not a book that can change your life, but it discusses two very urgent issues regarding the #metoo era. Firstly the illusion of consent in a relationship between an under-aged with an adult, and secondly, the right of the victim to silence.

The protagonist and narrator is an extremely intelligent teenager who feels ignored and different in her environment. (And who didn’t as a teenager?) Seeking desperately approval and recognition of her skills and wit, she falls in love with her much older teacher, who shows her an open and obvious admiration for her mind and talent. Who actually grooms her.

Their relationship is long and disastrous. He makes her lie to protect him; she is humiliated and insulted but sickly attached.

It is actually a story about obsession, teenage insecurities, mind games and what can go wrong in coming of age. Vanessa is as confused and dark as any female adolescent. This turbulent darkness is used by her teacher; this darkness is groomed to become even darker.

Some years ago, Anish Kapur had bought exclusive rights to use Vantablack, the blackest of blacks.

Black absorbs every other colour. Vantablack is like the black hole of colours. Nothing comes out of it; it is like an end.

The darkness.

I remember the darkness of my adolescence, the darkest of any dark. The Vantablack of darks. Deeper and more absorbent than any other state. Anything that could bring some light in this absolute darkness would make me vulnerable to it.

Adolescence is a sensitive and turbulent period. Consent is a precarious word when it concerns a relationship between an adult and an adolescent. And one of the successes of the book is that it manages to delineate this precariousness.

Vanessa is deeply traumatized by her teacher abuse but not aware of her trauma; she is full of anger but doesn’t have a complete acceptance of it. She is grooming her trauma, beautifying it, making it seem like an adolescent adventure, an exciting story, a passion. But it isn’t.

Years after their relationship, when an adult anymore, Vanessa is still seeing him. She is still obsessed with him and rumours about his life. And he keeps this connection like keeping a wild animal in a cage. Vanessa cannot leave him because he doesn’t leave her to leave him. Although he is still yearning and harassing under-aged girls, he keeps her, although an adult, as a prisoner of her festered desire. Afraid that if he doesn’t, she will speak.

When some urgent events make her finally start realizing her condition, she is not able to talk.

And yet, although as a reader you wish she could, you totally understand that she just can’t. That victims are not always able to talk, and we shouldn’t blame them or accuse them of this inability. That talking is a huge leap, and our world is not the easiest place to land. The bravery of the ones who speak doesn’t make the ones who don’t speak guilty or less traumatized.

Her therapist recognizes that speaking up could harm her. And Vanessa chooses not to do it. And she has every right. The victim has every right to remain silent, the one who knows, no.

More than any other moment today art —in all her expressions— has a moral obligation to become the advocate of the one who knows, the voice of the silent, the way out of the sexist and abusive culture that our very visual and spoken languages still promote. And My Dark Vanessa is a book that in its quiet but functional way serves this purpose.