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. The Journey .
 
Artist: Niama Williams

A novelistic memoir

On the book jacket:

DR. NIAMA L. WILLIAMS ON WHY I WROTE THE JOURNEY:

How could I have become this woman that I have read so much about and pitied? For whom I have felt terror, rage, revulsion. I am so angry at the person who did that with me. I can't even say to me. I was a participant. Somehow it became mine. I don't know where this is coming from. Somehow I linked the guilt of being chosen for that, and the veil of carnal knowledge that layered my childhood and tainted every other developmental process -- because I didn't know what it was I only knew it -- and knew its power -- and used it because it was the only thing that had worked. It was the only time anyone ever focused on me for very long.
---j., 26

"I think I was even aware then [as a teenager first showing her work to an older cousin] that a lot of what doesn't get talked about gets translated into violence -- racism, sexism -- and gets worked out in families as physical and emotional abuse. I still believe we are prisoners of what we don't know … what we aren't conscious of, deny."
---Toi Derricotte, poet, memoirist

In her 1992 text, Trauma and Recovery: The aftermath of violence -- from domestic abuse to political terror, Judith Herman, M.D., "cites an epidemiological survey conducted in the early 1980's by Diana Russell, a sociologist and human rights activist. Over 900 women, chosen by random sampling techniques, were interviewed in depth about their experiences of domestic violence and sexual exploitation. The results were horrifying. One woman in four had been raped. One woman in three had been sexually abused in childhood." That was in 1984. A good friend of mine is Program Director at a shelter for women in transition in Maryland. She confirms that the statistic is still one woman in three.

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