SA
Hi Amita! How are you?
A
Thanks for inviting me to be here with you today, Fariha! I’m doing well today, enjoying mostly not working today. A bit sleepy because my dog was up for a chunk of the night yelling at the bears who got into our trash can LOL.
SA
Bears! Wow. Where are you in the world?
A
My partner Patricio and I live in Los Angeles County, in a suburb in the San Gabriel Valley called Duarte.
SA
I was just in California actually. I was in Los Angeles and in the North sitting with medicine… and it’s such an interesting time to be just anywhere that isn’t home. I feel very spoiled.
A
California is my adopted home of 9 years now, but I’m from Bergen County NJ, by way of Queens by way of Ohio. So I’ve spent a good chunk of the COVID-19 pandemic trying to figure out how to go home to NJ to see my family (and NYC where most of my closest friends still live). It’s hard to figure out with everything that we’ve all had to navigate over the last 15 months!
SA
Yes. I keep thinking about how strange this time is and how nostalgic I’ve become. I’ve been processing and reprocessing a lot of grief and it’s been a really interesting cycle to keep moving through things in this really intense motion. I feel extra grateful that I get to have conversations like this, with people like you, because it’s all I seem to want to do these days. It’s made me hungry for depth and for healing in a very urgent way and there are all these feelings wrapped around one another.
A
I hear that! I think many trauma survivors, and let’s be honest, that’s everyone who’s a BIPOC queer and/or trans person, are having that experience of the fresh grief of the past 15 months forcing us to rehash old grief that has new angles to be examined and integrated/alchemized (and I think this is part of what “healing” actually is). It’s been a really exhausting and painful time, but with surprising moments of sweetness and joy, too, and just in general I can feel so much growth from all that is happening and has happened. I’m so grateful that the work of Mirror Memoirs over the last 5 years, and before that the work of Secret Survivors (which started 11 years ago), has really made nearly all of my time engaged in conversations that include this kind of depth and intimacy. It feels like such a gift and a privilege.
SA
Can you talk to me about what led to the genesis of Mirror Memoirs?
A
Sure. Do you want the long answer or the short answer? Do you mean the entire path leading up to the idea, or just what led to the idea in a shorter timeline?
SA
I don’t mind — if it feels right to say the long answer, I’d say go for that and maybe that will also bring in Secret Survivors…
A
Okay no problem. I like to ask because these days I often feel like I’ve told the story publicly so much that I might bore people to death (LOL).
SA
I feel like it’s so intimate and I’m so grateful… as long as you have capacity.
A
Oh, I’m a Leo moon and a Leo mercury, I could talk to you about this all day long. And I’m pretty much an open book, so just ask whatever you want to ask.
So okay, how did I come to create Mirror Memoirs…well, I think you know some of my story from writing and other storytelling work I’ve published, but to rehash some of the basics: I grew up in a very violent home, which included a pretty textbook abusive marriage in which my dad brutalized my mom for 16 years. Within that dynamic, my younger sister (she’s 4 years younger than me) and I were also abused, I’d say by both of my parents but in very different ways. And honestly though my mom has plenty to atone for when it comes to me and my sister, I’m also increasingly compassionate about her own suffering within that marriage. I was raped and sexually assaulted and otherwise emotionally, verbally, physically and sexually abused by my father throughout my childhood. The sexual violence started when I was four and ended when I was twelve.
I disclosed the very first instance of rape to my mom when I was four, although I didn’t use the word “rape” because I didn’t know that word. My mom confronted my dad about something like “inappropriate touching,” and then nothing really changed except that I forgot ever telling her about the violence. I never spoke about it again until I was thirteen. By then, it had been a while (under a year but more than a few months) since my father raped or sexually assaulted me, and I had reason to fear for my sister’s safety from that particular violence from him (which I had to some extent been able to protect her from when it was happening to me). That’s what led me to disclose to my mom — for what I thought was the first time.
The disclosure when I was 13 triggered mandated reporting, which neither my mom nor I knew existed. The therapist, social workers, police officers and prosecutors who then descended on my family (something like 48 hours after my mom called a therapist to try to find help/support for me) were all white and very racist and otherwise problematic in so many ways. They threatened to prosecute my mom for being “complicit” in what had happened to me. They told me I could trust them and talk to them, because they understood “this happens more in your culture.” [insert vomit and angry emoji here] So I didn’t comply with the prosecution, and my dad admitted to the bare minimum and received five years probation and no jail time. This was all my 9th grade year, by the way.
My mom didn’t have enough community support to leave my dad at that point. And she was really worried about what our tight-knit South Asian (mostly Indian) American community would do or say if she got divorced. I think she was really ashamed and scared, too. And she was right to be afraid of my father. So she stayed with him until the summer after my 10th grade year. After that it’s a bit of a long tale about him continuing abuse because my sister wanted weekly visits with him, and the state allowed my mom to be the “supervisor” instead of sending a social worker on visits as was supposed to happen.
This is all relevant to Mirror Memoirs, I promise — it really informs why we have always been an abolitionist project, with a broad understanding of various state systems, including child welfare and psychiatric institutions, as part of carcerality.
Right before my 12th grade year, my mother’s divorce became finalized, and my then-12-year-old sister finally began understanding the gravity of what had happened in our family, and decided she was ready to disown my dad (I’d been hoping for that for a year at that point). So with him finally out of the house, I found the words to tell my mom the full extent of what I’d survived, and she was horrified and supportive and said she’d help me prosecute my dad (at that time I definitely was not a prison abolitionist, and was really hungry for my father’s punishment and suffering). We weren’t able to move forward with prosecution because of double jeopardy. But I did receive 100 free sessions of therapy from the state of NJ, and my mom and sister each received 50 sessions. My mom was ordered into therapy, too, and we had to go to mother-daughter therapy, plus we each had to attend support groups. My support group was with about five other assigned-female teenage incest survivors who had had state involvement in their lives, and my mom attending a corresponding support group with the caretakers of each of these other girls.
At 13, the youngest girl, Pauline, was also South Asian American (Indo-Guyanese). I was a 16 year old high school senior. We had a rather sibling-ish bond and I was really protective of her. Her story also deeply impacted me, because it made me realize how lucky I was. Until meeting Pauline, I hadn’t realized I could have had it worse than I did. Pauline was a foster care youth who was raped by her dad and brother for years, after her mom died when she was about 2. She was then put into foster care, where she was sexually abused again by her foster father. After that she bounced around to a few more homes, and by the time she got to our group, she was living with a lesbian couple because she found it so hard to be around men. Mind you, this was New Jersey in 1994: not exactly a time when states were supportive of lesbian and gay people becoming foster parents. In the early months of 1995, Pauline was institutionalized in the County psychiatric hospital, and a few months later, she hung herself and ended her life. I didn’t really have the capacity to feel much at the time, I was so very flooded in my own trauma. But after I went through a really devastating and abusive end to a long relationship I’d been in (actually, with the person for whom I originally moved to California), in 2014, out of nowhere memories of Pauline came flooding back to me. I had never forgotten her, but with the grief I was experiencing through the breakup, I was able to finally somatically and emotionally feel and integrate the grief and horror I’d felt when Pauline died. Sitting in my nonprofit office in 2014, I googled a bit about the case and learned there were two back-to-back investigations into the Bergen County mental health hospital in the spring or summer of 1995, both immediately after young wards had completed suicide. One of those kids was Pauline.
So literally three months or so after Pauline’s death, I found myself living in Washington, DC as a freshman at Georgetown University. That’s another long story that I’ll skip for now, but suffice it to say I had emotional whiplash from the contrast in these events. I ended up processing my trauma verbally a LOT with friends on campus, and often learned they were survivors of some kind of sexual violence too (a few of them were child sexual abuse survivors, but mostly I became the friend on campus that everyone disclosed campus rape to). I met two people during that time who were gay men of color who were also child sexual abuse survivors. I’m still very close friends with them today, and one of them is a Mirror Memoirs storyteller in our initial audio archive.
I interned at the US Department of Justice Violence Against Women Office between sophomore and junior year, and that experience helped me understand my own life as a microcosm of an entire global pandemic of child sexual abuse. It also really struck me that most of the women whose calls and letters I would answer that summer were white women who were married to or newly divorced from military or police officers who had abused them and sexually abused their children but who were essentially immune to prosecution due to the “blue wall” of protection from their colleagues.
I ended up working at our campus women’s center and co-leading Take Back the Night, which led me to work at a national “feminist” legal advocacy nonprofit after graduation. It was possibly the worst job I’ve ever had. The amount of racism and ageism from the white female attorneys who led the organization was astounding and, for idealistic young me who had just spent three years feeling so empowered by my own voice and the voices of so many other survivors sharing their stories with me, it was really heartbreaking.
I left nonprofits overtly involved in anti-sexual violence work after that, for a long, long time. I spent over a decade as a youth organizer in nonprofits working in NYC public high schools, specifically with low-income Black, Latinx and Asian American youth. But of course, where there is an adult who’s gained the trust of young people, there are countless disclosures of child sexual abuse. I was still pretty young then, too, 22 when I first started that work. So it still felt like slightly younger peers telling me their stories, and me then disclosing back to them (not asking them to hold any details of my story, but rather letting them know they were not alone in survivorship and there was no shame in talking about it). Insert lots of stories and witnessing, too, so many events of police violence against these young people, especially against those who were Black. We leaned into art as a transformative medium, together. I had the great privilege of supporting so many amazing and brilliant young people to lead arts-based campaigns to end military recruitment and policing in their schools, to end the curfew on the Christopher Street pier, to pass the DREAM Act, to end abstinence-only education, to end gentrification in their neighborhoods and hold slumlord landlords accountable…obviously, the campaigns were not always successful in terms of policy change, but many of the youth in these programs went on to be full-time organizers and cultural change workers. And sometimes after experiencing their first campaign or social action project, youth would approach me and those of my colleagues who were also publicly out survivors, and would suggest creating actions or art about survivorship and ending sexual and domestic violence. When I worked at Make the Road NY with Tanais, actually, they coordinated a performance of “For Colored Girls” by Ntozake Shange with several of the girls in our community center, and I coordinated a march, vigil and speakout against domestic and sexual violence with several of these youth, in Bushwick (Brooklyn). This was somewhere between 2005-2007.
I went to grad school in 2008, and thought I was going for education policy. But when I got to NYU, I started to have writers block again. This had happened during undergrad, too — it’s how I got diagnosed with PTSD (later Complex PTSD) in 1998. Honestly after years of talk therapy (which I’ve pretty consistently been in since 1998), I was surprised and dismayed that this could still happen. I had written a lot of my undergrad papers about child sexual abuse, and first started learning about things like the neurobiology of trauma in 1997 (someone gave me a copy of the book Trauma and Recovery, and it really planted the seeds for so much of the awareness I have now about trauma, disability, neuroplasticity and just in general my thoughts on what we can and can’t change after experiencing violence). But I hadn’t kept up with any of the research at all since leaving my “feminist” nonprofit job. So I shifted my focus in grad school to policy work as pertains to ending child sexual abuse. And obviously I had to address the writer’s block, or I wouldn’t have been able to write any of my papers. I had a theory that finding another medium through which to tell my story would help. And I had another theory that finally telling my survivorship story very, very publicly would end the dynamic in my life of some people knowing and some people not (which, for a lot of reasons, caused a lot of unhealthy behavior on my part). I also understood what the “1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys is a child sexual abuse survivor” statistic really feels like viscerally, because I was “out” as a survivor to all of my friends, lovers and political comrades — which usually meant I knew all of their stories of survivorship, too. But mostly, they didn’t know each other’s stories. It got to a point where every protest, house party, club night I went to, I’d look around the room and think, “Wow. All of these people were raped or sexually assaulted as children, and I can see the gifts and the obstacles that they have in common, but they can’t. What a missed opportunity for access intimacy [a term I learned from Mia Mingus], interdependence, and more empathy when navigating conflict.”
So all of that led me to conceive of Secret Survivors. I knew the work of off-off-Broadway company Ping Chong + Co. because they’d worked with Global Kids, where I was a Senior Trainer for four years. PCC has a storytelling theatrical format where they interview five or six people whose lives intersect around a shared identity or experience. The interviews are done one-on-one, and usually the interviewees don’t know one another. Then the Director weaves their stories together chronologically into a script, and the storytellers themselves become the performers in the play. I loved the model, and I asked them if we could use the experience of being an adult survivor of child sexual abuse who was also a prison abolitionist as the common thread. They said yes, and hired me as the Project Coordinator and also a cast member. I got to cast the rest of the show, given the sensitive nature of the work, we agreed it was important for everyone in the show to know me, even if they didn’t already know each other (though a lot of them did). That was May 2009.
Mirror Memoirs was informed by all of that. Secret Survivors got a lot of national attention, thanks to support from the NoVo Foundation and the Ms. Foundation, and a lot of individual survivors nationwide who invested in the show (funds to produce the play and to film the performance and create an educational documentary and toolkit). But as we were wrapping the toolkit up in 2011, I was also wrapping up my master’s degree. I came across a newly published statistic from the American Academy of Pediatrics. They’d found gender non-conformity to be a risk factor for child sexual abuse, with assigned-male children being most at risk (up to six times likelier than gender conforming children). I was stunned. I really felt like I’d gotten the work all wrong. We had been so deliberate in casting a racially and gender diverse cast in Secret Survivors, but we didn’t have any transgender women or even non-binary assigned-male survivors in the show, yet here was a study from a really reputable source telling me those were the most vulnerable people in terms of being targets of childhood sexual violence.
In 2015, I got a call from the newly created Just Beginnings Collaborative, one of the first-ever philanthropic entities solely funding work to end child sexual abuse. They were creating a fellowship to specifically support the work and leadership of BIPOC survivors, and wanted me to be in the inaugural cohort. At first, the funding was scoped to be two years at $100,000 per year. Due to a lot of harm (white supremacy and pathologizing survivors) done by the founding director of the foundation (a white woman who was not a child sexual abuse survivor), the fellowship was extended to a four-year-fellowship in total.
Thanks to all of the experiences I described above, I was crystal clear what my focus needed to be. In January 2016 I started the fellowship and created Mirror Memoirs. We’re now in our sixth year, and since February 2019 have been fiscally sponsored by the nonprofit Community Partners. We’re a national storytelling and organizing project intervening in rape culture by uplifting the narratives, healing and leadership of Two Spirit, transgender, intersex, non-binary and/or queer BIPOC child sexual abuse survivors. Within that umbrella, we prioritize the leadership of Black and/or Indigenous Two Spirit, transgender, non-binary and intersex survivors. Our audio archive is the backbone of our work, with 60 stories across 15 states in the US due to finally be released this year (one or two stories a week from April through November). Our approach is intersectional and intergenerational. We are an abolitionist organization rooted in the praxis of healing justice, disability justice and transformative justice. And I feel so tired but so damn lucky to be doing this work every day.
SA
Your story has pierced something deep inside of me, which is why I reached out to you in the first place. There are so many layers and elements to it that have helped me understand parts of my own story, which is why the legacy of your work and what you do with Mirror Memoirs is so particularly important—it provides reflection. I think a lot of us know things that we can’t articulate (or maybe sometimes don’t want tto) and seeing and witnessing becomes an act of survival. So, thank you. Thank you for sharing your own story, but also for going into such vast detail about your life and what necessitated the creation of your work.
I’m particularly stunned by the story of Pauline. It broke my heart to read that. To read the layers. I have long felt, because of the shame of South Asian cultures, and the silencing (on top of the shaming) that occurs, that there must be so many stories like ours. It pains me a lot, to think that as I also hold the story of my mother — and the complexity that I am a incest survivor from the hands of my mother — while also holding onto her own brutal reality of being gang raped as a teenager. It’s so cyclical, and yet so hidden, so mercurial, so unknown in so many ways.
A
It truly is. And thank you for sharing your own survivorship with me. I’m so sorry you and your mother have suffered in this way. My father is a survivor, too, and when the state intervened in our lives, that’s when he called a private family meeting and disclosed it to my mom, me and my sister for the first time. I had zero empathy for him then, but I have some empathy now, and really just a lot of pity. My mom is a survivor as well, and in fact, to my knowledge, so are all of the women, both young and old, in my family (to different extents). So I see my work as creating so much room for their healing and rewiring too, and there is and has certainly been a collective healing nature to my practice (even when it has caused immense conflict between me and my relatives). At this point, I am very glad to enjoy support and at times what feels like reverence from the women in my family, especially on my mother’s side. But wow, it’s been a journey. That seven generations backward and forward shit is so real (ha).
SA
It’s so real, and that’s why this work is so pertinent and so potent, we are healing in real time and hopefully helping our families heal… I am an abolitionist too, and I work with sacred medicines, in particular ayahuasca, with that work I’ve met so many survivors and it’s through witnessing their stories — the way they forgive and can hold multitudes of complex ecosystems, just as we are acknowledging the pain of our respective parents and their pasts — that’s helped me understand how deeply life changing this work is for everyone involved. Like even for folks within the peripheries. Does that make sense? Like this work has a ricochet effect.
A
It totally makes sense!
SA
I was in a lot of denial about my sexual abuse for most of my life. Mainly because I remember blocking the memories out as a kid and then over the years whenever I’d hear the term “repressed memories” I’d shudder… like I knew I’d have to confront something one day. Then when I was 29, these memories just returned out of nowhere on my childhood bed in Australia. It was just… so painful and yet also spiritual, as if I knew I was ready. I had just come out of my last long term relationship, and I had so many confusing questions about my gender, my body, my sexuality, so it opened up my entire process (and was also my Saturn Returns) that year I started trauma therapy and ayahuasca almost weeks apart from one another. They both had earth shattering effects on my life, mainly because so much of my experience has been a fear to utter what I am, and what I know to be true about my life. My mother is severely abusive — in all the ways — has tried to kill me twice. It’s pretty intense. So I think that everyday fear of survival was so present that the sexual abuse just felt like too much. Like why bother when everyday I have to just stay alive. It felt too heavy and it’s almost like I knew, as a kid, that when the time came I’d have to not only heal myself but begin to look at her own abuse as well. Somehow miraculously, not knowing why I started writing my novel Like A Bird at 12. My therapist thinks it’s a living testimony of what I couldn’t say out loud. Writing makes me feel safer.
A
Thank you for sharing more of your story with me, I’m honored to witness while sharing. I am wondering if you’ve ever read Hema Sarang-Sieminski’s essay in Good Girls Marry Doctors? Hema is an old and dear friend and also a Mirror Memoirs storyteller and also a non-binary femme whose perpetrator was their mother.
SA
No I haven’t. Wow.
A
There’s another South Asian (specifically Muslim, I believe Pakistani by way of Burma) non-binary person in Mirror Memoirs whose perpetrator was also their mother, but their story is anonymous in the archive. Perhaps with their permission I could introduce you though, if you were interested. We talk as a group in Mirror Memoirs a lot about the different ways to group our stories and foster connections. It’s such a rich community in the myriad ways our stories and identities and politics and visions for our world intersect.
I would love to read your writing, too. That is one way we can keep the conversation going – I actually have never gotten to be friends or collaborators or co-conspirators with another South Asian American incest survivor who is a published writer and who uses an alchemical practice of writing. So that would be fun 🙂
SA
It would be so healing to do this. I would be honored.
I find storytelling has become the main way I’ve begun to synthesize and process my own trauma. Being able to write and connect with folks, as we’re doing now, has really, really made me understand that this is a movement, this is an act of service to connect with other survivors. I believe we are the best dream-makers because when we sublimate what we’ve gone through to arrive at the possibility of a true abolitionist future, it’s truly a remarkable journey track. We’ve been harmed in inconceivable ways, by people who were supposed to protect us, yet we’re working towards healing. I want to ask if this is how it feels for you, and also how you began to heal and sublimate your own life?
A
No small question! Hmm well you wrote so much that has me thinking, let me try to pull apart the questions because I think they are all interesting. So, in terms of sublimation, for me I’m not sure I would use that word, because my own process of using art to share my story with people around me or the public in general has not always garnered social acceptance. There have been so many consequences to my choices, including getting disowned from my father’s entire family when I was 16 (because I not only decided to move towards prosecution, but also decided with my sister to cut our father out of our lives). Once I also came into consciousness that I’m queer, and later (within my self, maybe 20 years ago, and in terms of language maybe 10 years, ago, and in terms of being publicly “out,” maybe within the last 5 years) that I’m genderqueer (which sadly to me is now in the dominant lexicon as “non-binary,” ugh, it just feels so sterile of a word), that also had consequences in terms of inviting…well, I suppose bigotry in the broadest sense.
That said, I have always been a storyteller. I know I was a storyteller from the very beginning, before I was ever a survivor. Storytelling helped me in two big ways: when I was surviving the violence of my childhood (like you, survival was on the line for me most of the time, the rape and sexual assault was just one aspect of the violence in my home), I told myself powerful stories to be able to make it through. Sometimes it felt like Pan’s Labyrinth in my brain, imagining horrors that made the horror of reality seem tamer. Sometimes it was pure fantastical escapism. At some point, I learned how to build powerful mental walls that allowed me to dam up the trauma during the school day and social time with my friends (ie after school and extracurricular activity time) — I didn’t have Dissociative Identity Disorder, but something on the spectrum of that experience, like an alternate world in which I got to pretend any time I was away from my family, that I was just a “normal kid” (it really helped that I was so academically inclined, and incredibly extroverted and performative). (Side note: I have for many years hypothesized that most of the most talented actors and entertainers are child sexual abuse survivors, because we are the best actors – especially those of us who survived violence in our home for years. The violence went on for years because at some point early on, we all learned how to pretend it wasn’t happening.) So, my gifts as a storyteller helped me survive my childhood. But then they became an obstacle. I was an alcoholic from freshman year of college (1995) until 2011 and that largely stemmed from this dissociative or dual reality quality in my life. Not that I wasn’t chipping away at that wall with every disclosure, but it truly was the process of incredibly public storytelling (with Secret Survivors, and then the published essays in various anthologies, and of course, ultimately, testifying against Jeff Sessions at his confirmation hearing in the Senate on behalf of sexual violence survivors and LGBTQ+ Americans (LOL what is life?!) that really created an avenue for complete psychic integration internally. So the alchemy of storytelling ended up being necessary for my own healing, but a very different kind of storytelling than the very practice that helped me survive my childhood. Does that make sense?
SA
It makes so much sense. We are the best actors, the most ardent ones. I have so many perfectionist tendencies because of my abuse, and actually a lot of the things I like most about myself (my compassion, my ability to love, my ability to forgive, my endearing-ness lol) it makes abuse such a nuanced thing. I was a great actor also because I was pretending to be fine, right? I mean — I’ve suffered from substance abuse as well and suicidal ideation since I was ten, and I think being able to be at so many different ends of the spectrum, seeing so much and understanding humans in such a fundamental way… I don’t to vilify my mother but there’s something about her that’s so depraved. And I love her anyway. I don’t talk to her anymore, and maybe that was the first time—putting up a boundary—when I realized I didn’t have to act anymore. I could be hurt. I could be defiant. I could stand up for myself and say this was wrong! Which I never allowed myself to say. Now my dad doesn’t talk to her either. It’s so many things at once, when I started trauma therapy I was asked how it felt to have both parents betray me which… blew my mind. Like, wow. I didn’t have to do it all? I didn’t have to do that whole performance? I see it in my high functioning-ness too… like how ambitious I am. How hardworking I am. It’s all connected.
Thank you for sharing all that you are, it’s making me do the same.
I get you, also, on the difficulties you faced. I just want to tell you I’m so grateful for everything you’ve done in your life, all the things you’ve encountered, that’s brought us here. I feel so lucky to be sharing this space with you.
A
I’m so glad we are sharing more than this being an “interview” only, it feels much more aligned with the praxis we (all the key players in Mirror Memoirs, because it’s not just me anymore, and hasn’t been for a few years now, yay) are developing about the storytelling be a relational exchange. Lately I’ve been thinking of mycelium as such a symbol for the technologies we are crafting.
And in the meantime, there’s a Mirror Memoirs member meeting Feb 13, it’s open to any QTIBIPOC CSA survivors. You’re welcome to come! You’ll find the registration link within the meeting (which was our first monthly meeting).
Amita Swadhin is an educator, storyteller, activist and consultant dedicated to fighting interpersonal and institutional violence against young people.
