I was born in South Africa in 1949. My father was Charles, a doer man from a Calvinistic family who spent days and nights drinking in the pub, coming home drunk and then beating my mother, me and my sister. My humanitarian mother, Isabella, was rebellious and an activist with a big heart. She became active in the Trade Union Movement in the Garment and Distributive Trade Union in South Africa where she worked first as a rank-and-file member and then secretary and treasurer, and finally became an organiser in the union, raising awareness and coordinating strikes.

Isabella says, “There, I really learnt about the suffering of the workers, and I had to become politically active.” She refused to remain silent even though it meant she sacrificed her family life. We, her children, also bore the brunt and difficulties of leaving our homeland when Isabella was banned and had to flee imprisonment and we left behind everything we had known. Our family moved from house to house, often the three of us staying in one room. This was not unusual for the less fortunate in the world; for a middle-class Jewish family, it was. Also, to escape Charles’ torment and abuse and for Isabella to find work, our family moved countries: South Africa to Zambia to Botswana and Zimbabwe.

Explicit memories are hazy, but I do remember being with our African nanny, Regina, whom I called Beauty. She was the opulent mother – big, all-embracing, solidly connected to the earth like the Great Mother Ma in Credo Mutwa’s Indaba My Children, where the nations were born from the tree, Ninavauhu-Ma.

Beauty wiped the blood running down my legs from the beatings. She held me close in her lap and nestled me in her arms to keep “Father Death” from me. When the pain and heaviness got too much, I sat on a cloud in the sky in my imagination, and would climb the tree outside our house and hide. From there I could see and hear my mother and sister calling for me. I would remain so still and quiet, as I had come to know that was the best way to be. If not seen, nor heard, I was less likely to be beaten.

Yet we overcame. We did not allow the beating of our bodies and minds to determine how we live our lives and define ourselves. We did not shut our hearts to loving and being loved. We found the hardship of others a call to comfort, and with this have been able to triumph through the abuse and exile.

I don’t know when, but one day I made the decision that the abuse in my family stops with me. I determined that I would love myself and others. I became a social worker and accredited mental health practitioner. My life’s work is devoted towards healing. And now I am writing my story, to share my experiences and offer glimmers of insight to others who have not yet escaped their childhoods.

Each day, I go outside, and reconnect with the earth. As the gentle breeze touches me, I return to the love and optimism that is the core of my being. For there I am free.

And from this place, I am my most powerful in the knowledge that I am here to bring love into the world.

Joanne Fedler Media blog joins the global women’s campaign, the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, which starts from the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women (25th November) up to Human Rights Day (10th December). We would love you to share these stories on social media (using the hashtags: #OrangeUrWorld #OrangeTheWorld #HearMeToo #EndVAW), with your girlfriends, mothers, daughters, friends and sisters.

During this period, Joanne Fedler’s book, Things Without a Name (10th Anniversary Edition), can be downloaded for FREE.

Download Things Without a Name E-book

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You are my terrible twin.

We were knotted together even as I slipped,

womb-blinded, from the darkness into light,

the cord severed.

We will always be as Janus was,

selves torn between the ancient face

that looks forward from the doorway

and the young one that looks back,

into the shadows,

different sides of the same shiftless coin.

No closeness has ever felt further.

No mirror glitters so cruelly

with false promise

as the one you hold up for me.

Joanne Fedler Media blog joins the global women’s campaign, the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, which starts from the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women (25th November) up to Human Rights Day (10th December). We would love you to share these stories on social media (using the hashtags: #OrangeUrWorld #OrangeTheWorld #HearMeToo #EndVAW), with your girlfriends, mothers, daughters, friends and sisters.

During this period, Joanne Fedler’s book, Things Without a Name (10th Anniversary Edition), can be downloaded for FREE.

Download Things Without a Name E-book

(Please check your email after clicking Submit for the download link)

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It is early evening after dinner, and I stare into the kitchen sink. I gently draw patterns with the bubbles that remain from the washing up. I herd them into the centre of the sink and I turn the tap on and let the water trickle slowly, washing some of the bubbles down the plughole. I admire my clean basin and sigh. Memories come flooding back, overwhelming me from my past.

I didn’t always enjoy the peace that comes from a sink of bubbles. There was a time when my life was controlled by rules. Not mine, but someone else’s. He had rules about these kinds of bubbles. The sink had to be immaculate. Not a single bubble could remain. If I forgot or became distracted, which was often the case, I would wear the consequences of those bubbles for days or weeks. So, on nights when I remembered, I would stand at the sink with cold running water gently herding the bubbles into the plughole. I knew that though it was possibly the stupidest, most pointless rule in the universe; it was a rule no less.

It’s not that I don’t respect rules. I appreciate and recognise that some are implicit, like manners handed down through families over generations, such as the ones my mother imparted to us:

‘Don’t speak with your mouth full’; ‘Give up your seat on a bus to someone older, pregnant or someone who may need it more.’ She taught us, ‘Do unto others as you would have done to you’; ‘Don’t disrespect your elders’; ‘No elbows on the table….’. Through these rules I learned how to be part of civilised society.

Rules have their place in the world – imagine the chaos if we didn’t have rules about how to walk on the left hand side to ensure the flow of pedestrian traffic, how to stand respectfully in a queue and not push in and how to merge into traffic one car at a time.

But then, inexplicably you encounter a rule that makes no sense.

When I first met him as an enamoured teenager, I couldn’t see beyond his long hair and rock star looks. He was four years older and he had chosen me out of all the girls in the small town in which we lived.

One day I was waiting patiently for him at his home like the lovelorn girlfriend I was. His parents invited me in and let me wait in his bedroom. Next to his bed I found a neatly stacked tower of black and red fruit pastilles. Perhaps he doesn’t like them, I reasoned. And so I helped myself to a few.

Little did I know I had broken one of his golden rules: you never touch his lollies. When he came home and saw what I had done, he exploded in rage.

I had trembled and hung my head, suitably chastened. I didn’t understand – they were only lollies. He had obviously never learnt the rule about sharing.

Despite this, I went on to marry him and from then on I learnt a new set of rules, ones I had never heard of nor been taught. Sometimes, without my knowledge, the rules changed but I wouldn’t be given notice of the alteration. I would wear the consequences later.

The consequences could also change. One day a simple back hander across the face, another day a beating, and some days a strange silence and an awful sense of foreboding. Some rules were so ridiculous that I took evil pleasure in breaking them despite the consequences.

He was obsessive about food routines. Every Sunday he demanded a full English roast. But no undercooked vegetables or meat. The potatoes had to be crunchy and God help me if there were lumps in the gravy. Every Saturday he demanded a full stew pot with vegies cooked with OXO cubes. It was revolting but he loved it.

Eventually, I got tired of his rules.

And one day, many years later, I grabbed my children while he was at work and escaped with nothing but a suitcase and a few possessions.

It took time, but in my freedom and in my own space, I created my own gentler rules and routines: no TV in the morning for the kids till everyone was dressed and ready for school. Dinner had to be eaten at the table. And when the theme song for Neighbours came to a close it was bedtime.

There were times when I allowed the children to break the rules as a treat. On these special occasions they were allowed to eat fish and chips in front of the TV, or spend the weekend in pyjamas lounging around free from household chores. Some days, as a special break from the rules, there would be no school – just a lazy day spent together. What joy I got from making – and breaking – my own precious rules.

And so it comes to be that thirty-five years later I still feel the pleasure of consciously leaving those bubbles in the sink. I smile and run my fingers through them as I make patterns in the foam. They remind me that in this house, there are no consequences to breaking the rules. They stay there, causing no harm to anyone, until I choose to let them go.

Joanne Fedler Media blog joins the global women’s campaign, the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, which starts from the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women (25th November) up to Human Rights Day (10th December). We would love you to share these stories on social media (using the hashtags: #OrangeUrWorld #OrangeTheWorld #HearMeToo #EndVAW), with your girlfriends, mothers, daughters, friends and sisters.

During this period, Joanne Fedler’s book, Things Without a Name (10th Anniversary Edition), can be downloaded for FREE.

Download Things Without a Name E-book

(Please check your email after clicking Submit for the download link)

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He was a rising Kwaito star. His callous nature and rugged looks evoked the kind of fear and enamour that was synonymous with guys from the township in those days. Some girls loved him but most loathed him. Their hatred and affection were badges of honour that he wore proudly.

I didn’t care much for him, although he was a persistent blowfly that I shooed away with each unwelcomed advance that he made. I had no regard for his “celebrity” or for any other because I’ve never subscribed to idol worship. Perhaps that’s what made me the perfect game to hunt. It was a power thing and still is; he had to put me in my place.

I was a teenager at a house party. I shouldn’t have been drinking but it was a season of experimenting in my life, and so I was. He seemed to have a knack for turning up at places where I would be. That evening was no different.  As usual, I paid no attention to him or his whereabouts throughout the night, but that became my biggest mistake. I didn’t notice that he’d followed me down the hall to the toilet, until it was too late.

I remember thinking, “Is this what I think it is? Is this guy seriously going to rape me?” as he shoved me and himself into a toilet that was big enough for only one person.

A male friend heard the scuffle whilst passing the toilet. He stopped and knocked, asking what was going on. When the scuffle wouldn’t stop, he started to push the door with such power that it flung open. He looked bewildered and asked if I was okay. The celebrity said that it was all a joke, and I just walked away.

I have never felt the need to speak out about that night, but I now find myself questioning my silence.  I had faced an undeniable threat to my safety, and yet my subjective emotional response to this event was to not report it. I didn’t keep quiet out of fear. When I think back on my temperament as a teen, I believe that I kept quiet to make a statement.

I was incensed. This guy knew that he frightened a lot of girls my age with his thuggish advances, and he thrived off that. He attacked me with the aim of achieving the same because he had failed to illicit anything more from me through previous advances. He had attacked me to put me in my place, but he didn’t succeed. He failed to disempower me because I refused to cower and give him the satisfaction of conquest.

I’m much older now. I realise that my silence then was the best tool in my teenage shed of defence. But today, silence means death. There is no room for reticence where countless women suffer attacks similar to mine and worse, daily. Justice has a voice, and it grows louder every moment through movements of activism and solidarity like #MeToo. Maybe if there’d been movements like these when I was younger, I would have responded differently to that attempted disempowerment. I don’t know. What I do know is that silence kills, and that is why I am using my voice today.

Joanne Fedler Media blog joins the global women’s campaign, the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, which starts from the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women (25th November) up to Human Rights Day (10th December). We would love you to share these stories on social media (using the hashtags: #OrangeUrWorld #OrangeTheWorld #HearMeToo #EndVAW), with your girlfriends, mothers, daughters, friends and sisters.

During this period, Joanne Fedler’s book, Things Without a Name (10th Anniversary Edition), can be downloaded for FREE.

Download Things Without a Name E-book

(Please check your email after clicking Submit for the download link)

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I work as a journalist in South Africa, a country known as the rape capital of the world. Every afternoon I switch on my computer, make sure my WiFi is working, and begin to trawl the web for news stories about criminal cases that have reached the courts. It is unusual if I do not find a story about a man in court for raping a small girl, a small boy, his partner, or many women. We are trained as journalists to be impartial, to strive for accuracy, conciseness and fairness, and so I do my best to make sure I get the facts straight as I summarise the cases for Legalbrief Today. I do not put a spin on what makes me so wildly, blindly angry.

Cultivating detachment is one way of coping with the volume of human trauma I am made aware of daily. Trying to understand it is another. I know that these abusers have often been abused themselves, that they are angry and powerless in a society damaged by apartheid, and that – facing hopeless futures – they make themselves feel stronger by victimizing the vulnerable. But rationalizing rape and sexual assault is not completely possible. There is the residue which remains like the ‘thorn, heavier than lead’ that Mary Oliver spoke of in ‘Morning Poem’.

I know that the personal is political, and it is not just as a concerned citizen that I am so bothered by the unravelling society I am witnessing. As a woman living in a patriarchy I too have felt devalued and wronged. As a daughter of a father who, while he never touched me, was too aware of me sexually, I know the terror that comes from feeling helpless. In a clumsy, unthought-out way I tried to write about that sense of exploitation and shock in my poetry collection, Conduit. In ‘Imago’, I write of the radio journalist I met ‘who speaks of being raped by a powerful man and how it felt when no one believed her’. In ‘Every Day’ I tell the story of a 14-year-old girl who was gang raped in Katlehong, trying to imagine how it might feel to have survived such violence. ‘Later, in dreams, maybe, they will come to her, /the faces of the men who feared her enough, /even after they fucked her, to imprint on her skin, /the small cigarette-shaped brands of those who feel powerless.’

Sometimes it seems that rape and sexual abuse in South Africa, and globally, has become intrinsic. It is not going to stop any time soon. As the mother of a five-year-old girl, the question I grapple with now is how do I teach Ella Lucy that her body is a gift she can choose to give anybody should she so want, when the world I’ve brought her into believes her body is a reason for her to be distrusted, diminished and denied? Living in a distorted society makes for distorted identities – no easy answers.

In the poem for which my book is named, ‘Conduit’, I write of a woman walking alone, ‘wondering, in the shadows /how she will ever know /what it is she needs to say’. Seven years on, I have not said enough. At times, I blame this incapacity to write on doing two jobs and raising two children, but it is not the logistics of my life that have silenced me. Perhaps it is a profound doubt that what I say about the everyday sexism I see all around me will change anything.

But it is precisely this despair I must work against.

It is possible to find a way forward. Joining this conversation is just one way that I can make my words in ‘From the sea’ become true:

‘You, poet, alone, immobile, at your keyboard,
The night sighing, a stranger at your back.
You wrestle with the anger of the invisible,
Lay it down.
Stop picking at the scabs
That make you mute. Look around.
Poets shoal within reach,
Breaching the surface.’

Joanne Fedler Media blog joins the global women’s campaign, the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, which starts from the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women (25th November) up to Human Rights Day (10th December). We would love you to share these stories on social media (using the hashtags: #OrangeUrWorld #OrangeTheWorld #HearMeToo #EndVAW), with your girlfriends, mothers, daughters, friends and sisters.

During this period, Joanne Fedler’s book, Things Without a Name (10th Anniversary Edition), can be downloaded for FREE.

Download Things Without a Name E-book

(Please check your email after clicking Submit for the download link)

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