When Language Fails Us: Gabrielle Goliath’s ‘This Song is For…’
This is part of an ongoing series with the working title “Unreliable Narrators.” CW: rape culture, sexual violence and abuse, femicide.
Image and caption from Gabrielle Goliath’s website: www.gabriellegoliath.com
On this blog I contend with most regularly with the subject of contemporary narrative approaches to fiction about rape culture. These are works of art about living through experiences of gender-based violence, living among allegations, dealing with consequences and aftermaths of sexual abuse -- as a person who has done harm, or as one who has been harmed. I’ve written about recent work by Miriam Toews, Susan Choi, Lisa Taddeo, Sara Sligar, Hanya Yanagihara, Anna Burns, and others. All are writers deploying literary point-of-view as a weapon against the failures of language in narratives of survivorship.
These new literary approaches, I propose, bring about deeper anti-sexist reflections and insights for readers. We could think of these approaches as interventions into narrating otherwise inscrutable stories of harm — stories that are continually made inaccessible by journalistic tropes inscribed in rape culture. Put more simply, we can’t tell ‘good stories,’ transformative stories, about survivorship, about abuse, because those stories are always already polluted by these cultural biases.
“He Said, She Said”: In Search of Reliable Narrators
We’ve all heard of the “He said/She said” cliché, knowingly reappropriated in the superb book (and recent film adaptation) She Said by NY Times journalists Meghan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, about their herculean effort to break the story of Harvey Weinstein’s systematic sexual abuse of women in the film industry, as well as his and other powerful men’s use of Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) and pay-offs to silence victims. With a title like She Said, Kantor and Twohey truncate the cliché; what if, for once, we focused on what she said, and took it seriously? They implicitly acknowledge that the burden of proof for these cases required not only their best journalistic work — triangulating sources and forensically uncovering a paper trail — but also the more nebulous task of convincing NY Times readers that, indeed, these women are reliable sources.
It is precisely because of this undue burden of proof — this endemic incredulity in the face of rape and abuse allegations — that fiction is a fitting and even knowing terrain for reimagining stories of sexual violence. Fiction is our problem. For survivor protagonists in our real world, being seen as an unreliable narrator is not just a clever mode of withholding information for the sake of a juicy revelation at the end of a plot. We are unreliable narrators.
Of course, much more rarely and in the formulation of the Madonna/Whore dichotomy, we are perfectly reliable, the angelic victim undeniably deserving of a form of justice that is punitive to the aggressor. That survivors’ race, socioeconomics, gender identity, nationality, and more shape the degree of reliability of their story should not surprise us after decades of rich intersectional feminist scholarship. Moreover, survivors are often exclusively permitted to become reliable in service of a carceral model of justice. Once again, the rape culture that made the violence, and that will make and remake it, fades into obscurity, so that a singular aggressor may be scapegoated and the system may continue.
So, while it may be the important work of journalists, advocates, and the justice system to uncover the truth of a violent situation and bring about accountability and reparations -- and while #MeToo has taught us so much about the intricacies of the conspiracy to silence victims -- literature has other work to do. Literary fiction has the capacity to simulate the psychological dimensions of rape culture, for all of us, in ways that I argue will allow us to encounter the real-life stories with new tools.
“The Complete Insufficiency of Knowledge to Change Faith”
I started this project imagining that it was about “#MeToo Literature”: that is, literature responding to a new collective consciousness about gender-based violence, its ubiquity, its psychological dimensions, its relationship to racism and classism, its long-term traumatic impact on a survivor’s life. I thought I was writing about how the mass spontaneous autobiographical narration, via social and other media, of harassment, abuse, and rape, seemed to be changing contemporary “feminist” fiction on the subject: ironically, the more we were interested in real women telling their real stories, the less literary fiction seemed to represent these points of view directly.
What I came to observe was that authors writing about abuse and rape needed to solve the problem of ‘unreliability’ in new ways — ways that inadvertently respond to this mass recounting of lived experience. These feminists seemed to understand what Jia Tolentino has called “the complete insufficiency of knowledge to change faith.” That is, despite our extensive knowledge of patriarchy’s machinations, and of statistics that make plain the ubiquitous nature of gender-based violence, we remain an incredulous society built on the specious assumption that these are acts performed under extenuating circumstances, by criminal outliers.
“Suspension of disbelief” takes on a new meaning in this context, for the problem of belief, when it comes to patriarchy (and its siblings, racism, classism, and other oppressive structures), may be unsolvable. Even when we see video footage of abuse, there are those ready to invent context off screen that would justify it. (May we conjure George Floyd, and the countless others whose abuse and even murder on screen did not stop a sickening full-court press of media speculation about the victim’s ‘reliability.’)
What I began to notice, however, was that instead of capitalizing on #MeToo’s increase in collective goodwill to reinscribe victims’ reliability (à la feminist refrains of ‘Trust Women,’ ‘Believe Survivors,’ etc), feminist literary authors were generating a space beyond the reliable/unreliable binary.
Thus, the feminist fiction I’ve been writing about could be described as post-reliable. It is no longer concerned with whether or not a narrator really, in the universe of the novel, experienced what she did. And not only because a narrator’s own experience is rarely reliable to her; from what we know of memory and trauma, questions of reliable narration of violence are complicated at best. But ‘post-reliable’ feminist literature, I argue, centers the problem of truth by complicating point-of-view insofar as you, the reader, are the one whose biases fuel the story’s tensions (and, thereby, its revelations).
So for us to be moved; for us to find ourselves in survivors, abusers, and bystanders, and to find our own authentic relationship to justice and accountability and repair: this will require truth-telling that happens structurally, beyond a direct experience of language.
Gabrielle Goliath and the Sound of the Aftermath
Therefore, in search of theoretical grounding, I find myself in a multimedia art exhibition, in Cape Town, South Africa, in December 2019. It was Gabrielle Goliath’s, This song is for….
Born in 1983 in Kimberley, South Africa, and based in Johannesburg, Goliath began as a fashion designer, and “as her clothing designs became increasingly research-driven,” she moved into the conceptual art space (African Art Now, 95). Her installations use video, performance, music, and ritual, all in service of authentic “human-centered encounters” in which “the ritual of mourning becomes a socially and politically meaningful act” (African Art Now, 95).
Here is how I described my encounter with her Cape Town installation, This song is for… in my notes the night after a friend and I witnessed it together:
“...a large, dark, purple room, from which loud, haunting music emanates. When you enter, you seem to be walking into an eerie nightmare. On the walls are blocks of text that offer a name, a popular song title, and a brief personal narrative. It becomes clear that each story is one of the trauma of sexual violence. The survivors of this violence either tell their stories, or respond in some other way (poetry, a letter, a description of their trauma and pain). The real effect of the exhibit, though, is in the soundscape.”
Thinking back, I wonder how much the visual bias of the art museum had me reading the wall text before even noticing that the nightmarish music was undoing me even more than the stories on the wall. As I take it all in, the exhibit’s meaning “dawns on me in stages”:
“Two floor-to-ceiling screens depict musical artists […] performing covers of the songs from the playlist created by these survivors. But at some point along the way in these recognizable songs (REM’s ‘Everybody Hurts’; Rachel Platten’s ‘Fight Song’; and others), a broken record effect kicks in. The artist has intentionally created a rupture in the beautiful music to repeat one strange clip of the song, seemingly infinitely, over and over and over.
“It was ingenious how she had chosen the moments in the songs [to rupture] -- they tended to be right on the verge of a moment that you want to lean into [and] belt out, but instead you found yourself trapped in listening to this awkward repetition. I felt deprived of the ability to hear the rest of the song. And then I felt nauseated, and generally uncomfortable. I left the exhibit many times and then went back in. The meaning -- emotionally speaking -- of the exhibit dawned on me in stages.”
Image and caption from Gabrielle Goliath’s website: www.gabriellegoliath.com
Gabrielle Goliath’s exhibitions primarily deal with themes of sexual violence. In addition to This song is for… —which traveled around the world from Cape Town to Kyiv to Paris to Stockholm in the late 2010s — Goliath has a series called Elegy, which focuses on the “absent presence of a specific woman, or LGBTQI+ individual, raped and killed in South Africa” (Ocula.com). In Elegy, performers step into a spotlight, one-by-one, and sing a high note, holding it as long as possible. “As one performer begins to lose breath, she steps down from a low podium, allowing another performer to step up behind her holding the same note” (African Art Now, 96). Performers’ bodies begin to suffocate on the grief, but before they lose their voice, another takes up the labor of this elegiac vocalization.
This song is for… stages its “sonic disruptions,” its broken-record-loops, in order to create a new space of connection and empathy, according to the Iziko South African National Gallery (where I saw the exhibit). The womb-like purple room is haunted, but it is also therapeutic. Stacks of pillows and bean-bag chairs fill the center of the room. The music is beautiful up until the moment when it isn’t. As curator Ernestine White-Mieftu explains, rape “forever created a scratch in the lives of the survivors” (New Frame).
Image and caption from Gabrielle Goliath’s website: www.gabriellegoliath.com
Of her own work, Goliath has said: “In a work like This song is for… I am seeking to resist the violence through which black, brown, feminine, queer and vulnerable bodies are routinely objectified, in the ways they are imaged, written about, spoken about… What I have in mind is a more empathic interaction.”
She continues: “When language fails us, when conventional therapy fails us, art allows for a different kind of encounter, a more human encounter perhaps. One in which the differences that mark our experiences of the world become the grounds for our mutual acknowledgement and care,” concludes Goliath.
Goliath does not only address aftermaths -- “what comes in the wake” of violence, she has said; she builds new kinds of aftermaths, new kinds of wakes (perhaps à la Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake). In this way, she is a kindred of the feminist writers working in the post-reliable mood.
For Goliath, the problem of silence can only be redressed with sound. It is not just direct accounting of violence for the sake of procedural justice. Her art simulates, requires, the soulful connection to survivors that is so absent elsewhere. Like the literature in this project, it works on us, finding a different way, a new way, to collectively reckon, and to personally heal.
Sources Referenced
https://www.newframe.com/gabrielle-goliath-creates-songs-for-survivors-in-scratched-melodies/
Bonsu, Osei. African Art Now: 50 Pioneers Defining African Art for the 21st Century. ILEX, 2022.
