What She was Wearing
How long can you keep a secret before you’re completely unraveled?
So begins Shawn Aveningo Sanders’s achingly honest chapbook of poems What She was Wearing (The Poetry Box Press, 2019), a chronicle of the sexual assault she suffered when she was in college.
Sanders held her tongue longer than 30 years before she broke her silence. In the #MeToo Movement, her courageous voice is a testament to the strength, compassion, and resilience of women everywhere. It is especially meaningful that her poetry was the vehicle through which she gave voice to the unspeakable.
A quick scan of the poem titles reveals the confusion, pain, and uncertainty that she felt: “To Call or Not Call the Police”…”How to Survive Suicide”…“The Day I Saw My Rapist at the Corner Texaco”… “What Happens Later—Sometimes Much Later.” The 25 poems in this collection are told simply and with honesty, but they also are achingly complex. In “I Make a List,” she evaluates her actions in an “I did this; I did that” way:
I trace each step
trying to remember
exactly
how it all happened,
trying to account
for each mistake
I may have made.
She continues with this listing, finally concluding the poem from the vantage point of many years of silence:
I had a few drinks.
I believed he liked me.
I did not report the rape.
I did not trust in my friends for help.
I kept my secret bottled inside for years.
Each of the poems is an act of bravery, but it is the final poem—“There Will Be Days”—that especially strikes me. In this poem, Sanders rises from the position of a person whose life is “just” one terrible, life-altering event (“A trigger will transport you/where you didn’t plan to go—“). Yes, the sexual assault contributed to the person she is, but she also is so much more (“But there will be many days—when happiness persists—”). She is a person who has lived and loved and gathered friends and family around her—accomplished…confident…and, notably, triumphant:
and through it all
you will re-discover yourself,
your purpose, your essence,
your sexuality,
and finally realize
how beautiful you are,
how strong you always have been,
and how to accept love
from a man who never once asked
what you were wearing
