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Belinda Kate

Day 6 - Rage

Updated: Nov 29, 2022

****Trigger warning. Rape, sexual violence****. In this post I talk about rape and the effect it has on women, society and specifically on me. These writings are the first time I name my experience as rape and speak of it either publicly or openly. It has taken me 15 years.





Is it only day 6? I feel I have been here a month at least.



Mudcrab we caught and cooked. Made me think of the boiled frog analogy as I was choosing photos for this particular day

I went with the islanders to drive fish into nets off the beach the other day. Was it yesterday? We pulled in lots of longtons and dozens of small pan friers. Lagi had the job of swimming out the nets while we threw breadcrumbs and drove the fish in the shallows. There were so many fish that we needed a wheelbarrow to move up the beach to the next location.


I don’t feel that I have a whole lot of enlightenment to contribute today. But this is why I set my habits. I will follow them and hold the space, trusting that creative illumination will follow.





Today I am grateful for;

- The islanders welcoming me as a friend. Langi, Nasa, Paula, Tui, Kini, ana, all beckoning me to join the island crew after they knock off, to share kava and song. I helped pull in the mud crab pots as the punt cruised past the mangroves after our village tour today. I was pulled up onto the roof of the boat by Paula and as we lay on the roof we talked about our families, the tourists loaded like cattle beneath us.

- That sleep found me last night. That after two nights of lying awake and tingling with the enormous space in my heart filling with joy, that I finally found a restful sleep. I am sure the sunday sesh (kava of course) helped.

- The strength filling my body, my tummy feels firm and strong, my back straight, the headache I had been carrying in my right shoulder finally dissipating. The morning yoga serving both my body and my mind.


My writing is slow. I have breakthroughs. And I have written some scenes that I thought would be difficult. But I am am yet to string the narrative together as a synchronous whole. Sometime I wonder why I am even trying. As each moment passes us by we are already telling ourselves a story about it; the truth becoming obscured and even irrelevant in mere seconds of passing time. What is far more meaningful than truth is the story we tell ourselves about an event or circumstance. This becomes a lasting narrative, packed up and labelled “memory” and filed in accordance with the genre of story the event became in our minds.



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I ended my writings of day 6 with the paragraph above. But time and time again over the last few hours my mind has returned to an inner monologue. I have not been truthful. Or rather, I have obscured the truth; littering my writings instead with carefully considered statements of partial truth that deliberately fail to communicate the true experience this ‘Deep Thought’ resort was intended to be for me.


On day 4 I shared that I wrote the rape scene of my book, and above I say I have written some scenes that I thought might be difficult, but nowhere have I stated that I wrote the rape scene in my book as it happened to me. And that this trauma is why I imagined it would be difficult to write ‘some scenes’ in my novel, which has autobiographical elements. There are a myriad of reasons that I do not wish to make this confession, (see here my language is already penitent - as if to share culpability for the trauma and apologise for voicing it into your experience), one of them being that for a long time I did not consider the sexual violence as it occurred to me to be rape in its true form. That is, a females vagina is penetrated by a males penis as she screams no no no and fights for her life. ( I originally wrote ‘pure form’ here instead of 'true form' but could not bare to place the words 'pure’ and ‘rape’ in such close proximity). Because in believing that this is the definition of rape as perpetuated by our white supremacist masculine societal norms then the circumstance of my own account is very pedestrian and - I thought - hardly worthy of being considered a trauma at all let alone a rape. And so for many years I dismissed and belittled the experience to my inner self, even believing myself to be partly the author of this violation. Yet to me it was deeply traumatic, and I knew it, I just felt that it shouldn’t have been. It was an ordinary experience in the life of woman who by her choice of career and interests would be constantly surrounded by men and who knew she was capable of inciting white-hot desire both in herself and in others, but who did not in any way invite the unfolding of this particular evening. But by her very nature (female? seductress? attractive?) felt she was somehow complicit in its occurrence and therefore accepted responsibility as the author of her own trauma and recovery (which has consisted of mostly denial, self-destruction and aggressive compartmentalisation).


I did not want to be around my family as I excavated the trauma of this event for my novel, knowing that to write it well, I would have to go deeply back into the experience itself. The writing of it in itself would be the transformational experience necessary to completely reconcile any remaining trauma. This is why I chose Fiji - to be unable to return home until a set date, and to feel a very long way from home.

There. I have confessed. I have let the truth have a voice. It happened to me too.


It is remarkable, now that I have written the above, that as I look back over the years following this event that shouldn’t have been so traumatic how closely the narrative of my life mirrors that of a survivor of sexual violence. Denial, dissociative events fueled by alcohol, oversexualisation. I have concealed myself well through the filter of my competence.


Here is another plain truth that I have obscured in my writings to date. The novel I am writing is both the story of this trauma as it happened to me and the recovery, but also the story of a girl called to high adventure; the price she would pay for it and the heights she would ultimately reap. This story, I feel, must be told because I believe that there are many others like me; trapped in the restraints of societies dominant definitions of rape, and in the sharing of this story I know others will find their own voices, their own reconciliations and only all together can we change the dominant straight-male-centric sexual narrative in our culture. Only when this is culturally changed will we, as women but also as a whole society, be able to have a deeper more intimate and satisfying relationship with each other and with sex.


Ahh, day 6. I knew you weren’t finished with me.


Somehow, photos seem flippant and inappropriate now.



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Musings on return from Fiji and reintegrated into family life:


I wonder, having released this truth to paper, whether I will actually have the strength to release it to the world. Once a writing a has left the writer is ceases to be owned by them, it becomes public property for comment. I feel extremely vulnerable to comment, even fifteen years on, without my armour of "conceal, don't feel" (to quote a famous disney character).


I hope I do. Because I believe I am not just telling my own story.



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