Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down

I’ve been thinking about The Handmaid’s Tale a lot lately. It took me years to watch the television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s book, and to this day, I still haven’t been able to open her novel. Words on a page hold power that the screen can’t capture, so I will likely leave those tucked away safely within their binding. Growing up as a girl in America formed scars that split open when confronted with the themes that run central to Atwood’s story, so for years, I just avoided it altogether.

The timing of my entry into the author’s fictitious post-American Gilead could not have been better or worse as I made it to the final season while simultaneously watching our country shift into reverse. America had begun, once again, to prove itself the unwavering patriarchy we always knew it to be, but this time, things felt even heavier. This time, people weren’t hiding where they hoped this rerun would lead. They laid out their plans in 900 pages of policy recommendations to fast-track our multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy toward a monolithic “Christian” state where God is used solely as a means of control. Not the best time to wrap up a dystopian drama where Christ calls women to serve as either walking wombs, domestic slaves, or docile, celibate wives.

Much to my surprise, though, it was not the murder or mass kidnapping or rape that leveled me. Out of all the grotesque imagery, one seemingly small detail, one brief scene stayed with me long after I logged out of Netflix. Mid-way through the series when the handmaids of Gilead travel to the Capitol, the main character, June, is violated in a way I never saw coming. While dressing for the day, Aunt Lydia, the handmaids’ caretaker, pulls out a red, cloth muzzle that the handmaids of the Capitol are forced to wear. June looks to Lydia, begging her not to require this final assault upon her body. But this is what the Capitol demands in post-democratic America, and wracked with sobs, I watched in horror and overwhelming grief as June cried and Aunt Lydia fastened the muzzle across her mouth.

I did not expect such a visceral response to this seemingly calm silencing of our heroine. Other women in Atwood’s tale had had their tongues cut out while I observed in dry-eyed anger. I thought it would be the scenes of sexual violence that would ruin me or the frames of children being torn from their mother’s arms. No doubt, those wrecked me, too, but the picture that stays, following me around like some crimson-cloaked ghost, is June’s face wrapped in a muzzle of red cloth. Already stripped of her husband and daughters, already raped and beaten at the hands of her Godly keepers, June is denied that one remaining dignity—her voice—and with that, I am completely undone.

There have been times in my life when I have felt silenced in this way: as a little girl who learned from quietly listening that women who spoke their minds were the problem; as a young woman who was repeatedly reminded that my body was not my own; as an adult who has been told my own words about my own experiences should be censored so as not to disturb; and finally, as a mother, in the midst of childbirth, being chided by a male doctor for not submitting to his preferences, namely that I receive an epidural. In that one, I’m the ghost.

Having already birthed two children naturally, I remember assuring him all those years ago that I could handle it. The man stared back at me in annoyance, asserting that I would need to “be quiet then, no screaming or carrying on,” so as not to “scare the other women on the floor.” If I couldn’t bring my child of my flesh and my bone into this world under his terms, he would silence me in whatever way he could. The sense of entitlement and willful ignorance it takes to look a woman in the eye and tell her to be quiet while bringing forth new life is the same entitlement and ignorance that has gotten us to this place. I prayed in whisper through the remaining delivery for strength and speed, not wishing to share one extra minute of air with him. Nearly a decade later, when I think of that day and how I allowed some statue with a stethoscope to take my own knowing voice from me, to in any way limit my presence at the birth of my son, I see June in her muzzle made of fabric and I cry.

I am crying as I type this now, as state by state, people in this country lose their voices to the powers that be. We can be silenced in so many cruel and clever ways—through condescension coming from a white coat or by far meatier means like calls for lawsuits, imprisonment, and deportation coming from the White House. There are sneakier methods to quiet the masses through denying medical care or access to housing or education and more sinister ones like manufacturing starvation. And how they pride themselves in the quiet that has come from alienating Americans from one another as this administration sows distrust every place they touch.

Really, though, their greatest weapon is the simple fear that any one of these things might happen—but that fear is just a piece of flimsy fabric covering mouths that were born to call forth something new. It is a man standing inside a room trying to dictate the unfolding of a sacred event that was written long before he ever existed, one he could never fully understand or deliver on his own. His body does not hold that knowledge or power, but mine does and yours does, and those ghosts—a muzzled June right before her rise and that mother who, for a moment, forgot her own birthright—those ghosts visit every day now to remind me.

Ashley, Woman of a Certain Rage