An account of surviving assault mixes horror and humour

Book review of 'Mean'

Mean

Author: Myriam Gurba

Publisher: An Emily Books Original/Coffee House Press

Pages: 175 

Price: $16.95

In slasher films, there’s a famous convention in which the last woman alive faces down the killer — Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween, for example. Film theorists call her the “final girl.” She lives in order to tell the story.

Myriam Gurba is a self-professed “final girl” and Mean is her testimony: a scalding memoir that comes with a full accounting of the costs of survival, of being haunted by those you could not save and learning to live with their ghosts.

As a college student in the 1990s, Gurba was assaulted by a man who went on to attack several other women, gruesomely raping and killing one — an itinerant worker named Sophia Torres. “She wound up dead. I mostly didn’t,” Gurba writes, in her signature deadpan. “I’m unqualified to tell the story of Sophia Torres, but since she’s dead, so is she.”

Arriving as it does in the thick of the #MeToo movement of women bringing forth their stories of abuse and harassment, this book adds a necessary dimension to the discussion of the interplay of race, class and sexuality in sexual violence. Gurba is queer, and half Chicana, and she turns over what it means that she, her attacker and Torres share ethnicity.

There’s not a trace of piety, however. Mean calls for a fat, fluorescent trigger warning start to finish — and I say this admiringly. Gurba likes the feel of radioactive substances on her bare hands. She wants to find new angles from which to report on this most ancient of stories, to zap you into feeling. She hunts for new language, her own language, to evoke the horror and obscene intimacy of sexual violence. “Somewhere on this planet, a man is touching a woman to death,” she writes. “Somewhere on this planet, a man is about to touch a woman to death.”

Humour is usually her electric prod of choice. “A stranger chose me to rape. There was no nepotism involved,” she mock-boasts. “Stranger rape is like the Mona Lisa. It’s exquisite, timeless and archetypal. It’s classic. I can’t help but think of it as the Coca-Cola of sex crimes.” Having provoked uncomfortable laughter, she swivels into seriousness. “After a stranger ambushes you and assails your private parts, everything becomes new. Everything is reborn. Everything takes on a new hue, the colour of rape. You look at the world through rape-tinted glasses. You understand that you live in a world where getting classically raped is possible and that classical rapists lurk everywhere.”

She becomes paralysed with fear. PTSD, she notes, is the only mental illness you can actually give someone else. She imagines she sees her rapist everywhere — at the supermarket absently squeezing the hot dog buns. She diets and exercises to the point of sickness (“death by anorexia is a fail-safe sexual-assault prevention technique”).

In a way her attacker is everywhere. She can’t escape him or the ubiquity, even the mundanity, of sexual threat. (Her rapist, she says, “looked so average it horrified me.”) Gurba grew up in California near Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. He was a major employer in town, and there’s the suggestion in the book that he prowled video arcades “determined to taste what was there.”

The judge and prosecutor from Jackson’s trial for molestation served in the murder trial of the man convicted of murdering Torres. On and on, Gurba uncovers these links: A childhood classmate who molested her and several other girls was himself a victim, she discovers, of his baseball coach, an especially prolific local predator. “My catechism teacher, a white nun with sky-blue eyes, taught me that god is omnipresent,” she recalls. “Rape is everywhere too. Rape is in the air. Rape is in the sky. Rape is in the Bible. Rape happens at the neighbour’s.” She can’t resist a grim little joke: “Rape gave birth to Western civilisation and maybe your mom.”

The book keeps revolving between these poles of horror and humour, sometimes wobbling on its axis. Gurba is addicted to terrible puns, and they get worse and more numerous as the book goes on. I had to brace myself against their onslaught — embarrassing plays on “Rambo” and “Rimbaud,” “memories” and “mammaries.”

It’s not that the jokes are inappropriate or in bad taste — it would be a form of madness to ask for good taste in a book about rape, and I’m all for Gurba’s more opulently offensive humour, even when it makes me a little queasy. It’s the lack of care that’s so puzzling, especially in a book so attentive to language.

Worse, the compulsive punning and jokiness distract from the book’s more ambitious possibilities — and its most interesting tension. Gurba has said she had no intention of “performing” her victimhood in this book, and indeed she holds some of the details of her attack close; she doesn’t want to offer them up for our consumption or titillation. But she’s oddly cavalier about the suffering of others.
 

© 2017 The New York Times