The Clarity of Violence
On rereading Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and confronting the trauma of sexual assault.
The morning after I was raped, nearly eight years ago, I got in my car and drove home. There, in my teenage bedroom, I took the pair of tights I’d been wearing the night before out of my bag, put them back on, and looked at myself in the mirror. The tights were torn across the crotch: not a ladder, but a gaping, deliberate tear that went across both thighs and between my legs. At the tops of my legs, on the skin exposed by the tear, were bruises. I took the tights off and threw them away, along with the underwear I had been wearing that night. I was due to start my first year of college in a week, and my mind was pushing down the memories of what had happened the night before. Even then, I was already rationalizing the tears and the bruises as something consensual, something I had either invited or agreed to.
The mind has ways of burying what has happened to the body, during and after trauma. If this has
