by Anitra Kitts, Munich IWC
This is a story about my black eye.
Actually, it’s a story about how people reacted to my black eye.
No, that’s not right either.
This is a story about our cultural norms, women and violence, and unexamined assumptions. It is also the kind of story that wants to end with answers and advice, but this story won’t go there. It can’t, because I don’t have answers or advice. Just observations and some questions.
Let’s start with the black eye. I fell. Typical tourist crash and burn in the middle of Lisbon, Portugal. Among other minor injuries, I cut the skin around my right eye. A head wound plus blood thinner medicine soon bloomed into a black eye that a makeup artist would be proud of. One that practically glowed in the dark.
Being a bit of a not-fully socialized geek, I posted photos of “The Eye” to my Facebook page. I thought it was interesting: look at the biological science happening right here on my face! And I do appreciate the caring comments about “get better,” etc.
What surprised me was the advice on how to disguise the wound. How I should get some makeup or big, dark sunglasses – and I wondered why. Do we attempt to hide a broken leg or a sprained wrist? No, we don’t. So what was it about a black eye that prompted a need to hide it?
It was in a third group of comments that I began to find the answer: violence.
First, there were jokes about inventing some sort of cool cover story involving boxing – and it was boxing specifically, not any other sport. It makes sense that a sport (and I use that word loosely) that involves blows to the head is tied to black eyes. But the boxing references were still steps away from the true unease: violence against women. Especially spousal violence. Like “your man hits you in the face simply because he can” kind of violence.
The jokes covered the anxiety, as jokes are wont to do. Even my husband expressed a little concern about police perhaps noticing us walking together and accosting him with difficult questions. As a joke, he said it. But he wasn’t really joking. He really was a little worried.
I thought – wait, what is up with all this, and of course put up another post on Facebook wondering about the jokes. “Oh, I always assume some woman is getting hit by her man when I see a black eye,” one friend said.
What?
Always?
And thats when the penny dropped for me.
Black eyes on women are shameful. It is most of all shameful because of the violence generations of women have experienced. Worse, it is shameful because for generations, our culture, along with the abusive family member, make it the woman’s fault. The woman carries both the injury and the shame. Not the hitter, nor the culture that wants her to hide her wound, but the woman injured also gets the shame. The woman is carefully and repeatedly instructed on how to cover the injury up and how to pretend nothing happened. I didn’t know that our black eyes are shameful, even if we earned them with simple faceplant on a plaza with an unseen hole in the pavement.
And this bothers me.
While several women noticed my shiner, only two people got serious about confronting me. The first was the guy who sells me my fish. He came at me from across the store’s floor, wanted to be sure I was okay. The other was a complete stranger, a woman who joined me in a doctor’s waiting room. She spoke only German and I was quickly learning how to say “I fell” when she looked hard at me. Older then me by a few years, she started questioning me intensely and would not let up until I figured out how to reassure her that it was only a fall, not a bad husband. It felt like in her presumption of violence, she was going to tell me how to get help, not how to hide the strike. The language barrier was thick that morning so I don’t know all that she asked, only that she didn’t stop asking.
And maybe that is what is bothering me. She did not know me, but she wasn’t going to let go of me. I know abuse in relationships happens. Perhaps not as visible as a violent bruise on the side of the head, but also emotional and spiritual. I know abuse travels with us; it isn’t something we leave back home in storage when we take the transfer to someplace else. I think I may have seen it in a couple of relationships in my club – and I kept silent.
I didn’t know what to do or when to do it or how to confront it. I still don’t know how to say something now. It seems complicated and not suitable for fast, simple answers or suggestions. I have no advice for you, dear Reader. On this subject, we both need to do our research and find the answer for the specific situation we witness.
I do know it bothers me that we are living in a culture that starts with the presumption of violence when looking at a black eye. Does violence against women run that deep? And then worse – at least part of our culture appears to want the one who receives the violence to hide the consequences of the impact. What are we afraid of seeing?
I’m not going to hide my black eye. It’s nearly healed in any case, although my right hand which tried to break my fall still aches invisibly. You can see my pain if you watch carefully when I pick up a cup of coffee or put on my coat. But you need to be looking for it and I’m not sure we want to see pain. Pain confronts us with the demand for change, and change is very hard. Pain in others calls out the pain in ourselves, both emotional and physical, and who wants to look at that? Pain is a sign that something has to change in our bodies and in our culture. My pain not only points toward a hole in the Lisbon pavement, but also toward the hole in funding for safe passageways in Portugal, an economically challenged country in the Eurozone.
Maybe the best we can manage when confronted with the results of violence is to stand still, like the woman in my doctor’s waiting room, and hold our gaze. If that's all we can manage, then I hope that’s still better then demanding the one who is in pain to cover it up.
Maybe the first relief we can offer is to say, “I see you” in whatever words or actions we can muster together. While I was lying on the ground, bleeding from the head wound, a complete stranger rushed up to my grown daughter and pressed an entire roll of toilet paper into her hands when maybe a couple of handfuls of tissues would have been enough. On that open plaza on the edge of the river, in that land and language I did not know, that roll of toilet paper told me that I was seen. That giant roll of toilet paper told me that my new, fresh, wound-generated needs were going to be met by a community I did not know I had around me.
But to get help, I needed to be seen.
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