What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape

Women's March 2019 (Sierralupe)

What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape by Sohaila Abdulali

A book of short, conversational essays about rape, rape culture, and the importance of talking about this “unspeakable” taboo subject. While Sohaila Abdulali has studied and written about rape for much of her adult life after being gang raped when she was a teenager, this new book was occasioned when an essay she wrote after that long-ago attack resurfaced and went viral on the internet as a part of the #MeToo movement, bringing to the immediate forefront an experience and time of her life that she’d in many ways moved away from. Instead of passively allowing this essay to be discussed and circulated, Abdulali engaged in the discussion herself, writing first an op-ed for The New York Times and eventually this book.

The stories of various survivors thread throughout the book. These stories recount the experiences of famous people, unnamed people, Abdulali’s friends, people she encountered in the course of her work as a rape crisis counsellor and researcher, and people from many different countries and backgrounds. While Abdulali acknowledges that rape effects people along the gender spectrum, she mostly focuses on the experiences of women in this book; she also never discusses rape as an act of violence that non-men can commit, an unfortunate oversight in an otherwise thorough book.

Each essay here is brief and readable. While the subject matter is often, of course, horrifying, Abdulali does not glory in the abject. Instead, she writes transparently about both particular events/experiences and political/historical realities from the vantage point of letting the light in on a subject that (often white supremacist colonialist/capitalist) patriarchy has kept shrouded in a cloudy hall of mirrors rife with double standards, blame, excuses, guilt, and obstruction. While her tone generally errs on the side of the pithy and even upbeat, four “brief pause” essays interrupt the others—“a brief pause for horror,” “…fury “…ennui,” and “…terror”—make space for these undiluted emotions, inextricable from the topic of rape.

Honest, non-linear, global, individual, condemnatory, powerful, and empowering, Abdulali’s accessible, non-academic approach, flooded with personal experiences and opinions, makes this book engaging. What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape is fruitful as a jumping off point from which readers who perhaps haven’t thought deeply about this subject can continue their reading and thinking; for readers who have considered these issues deeply or who can identify with some of the narratives within, the book serves as a bracing reminder that one is not alone in knowing that the world as it is is not the world as it should be.

Subjects this book includes that some readers may be sensitive to: many forms of rape and sexual assault, including incest; abuse and violence.