Revive the Archive: Laurel’s “They Say it Happens Everywhere” (1993) — Interview with Poet Lamyaa Alshehri as Intro
Revive the Archive is a series that showcases student works from The York Review’s extensive archive. These student works will vary each week of the series, ranging from pieces of writing to pieces of artwork.
Again, we return to 1993. A quarter of a century ago, a writer submitted a piece of creative nonfiction entitled “They Say it Happens Everywhere,” under the pseudonym Laurel. She bears witness to her best friend Cathy’s experiences as a young woman struggling with one abusive relationship after the next, living in York, PA, eventually off of Richland Avenue, during the seventies. We feel the chasm forming between writer and Cathy, the sense of powerlessness on both ends. The culminating tragedy does happen everywhere, still; this is a narrative that could be translated in countless languages and understood, whether it’s reminiscent of a personal event or something heard about moments ago on the news.
I decided to introduce this particular archive by having a conversation with YCP sophomore Lamyaa Alshehri, who won first place in the poetry category for the 2018 Bob Hoffman Awards. Her poem “The Dinner Table,” forthcoming in the next volume of The York Review, struck the audience on the evening winners read aloud their pieces with its confessional flow and political consciousness. Silence was personified over and over, taking the form of anything from an alley-wandering, light-dimming entity keen on enabling rape to the mouth that swallows whole every bullet. As the very final student to perform, Lamyaa reminded us all of our duty to do what can be so difficult: speak up.
We discussed the sensitive, critical art of speaking up, of bearing witness. The first step is having the courage to use one’s voice even when everyone else is too ashamed to make a sound, Lamyaa explained: “For the longest time, I felt like there was this barrier between me and the rest of society. I didn’t know what to call it for so long, but towards the end I realized that more than anything, what has set barriers in my way was silence, and the silence of people towards uncomfortable issues. Sexism can exist, but if we’re silent towards it we’ll enable it. Sexual assault can exist, but if we’re silent, it’ll continue. Same with racism, bigotry. Silence is a catalyst.”
Through storytelling, we can shed light on truth that perhaps wouldn’t have otherwise been conveyed. Laurel perhaps felt it was her duty, as the one who did survive, to write of her best friend’s suffering. Lamyaa read this piece prior to our interview and wanted to emphasize the effects of Cathy’s childhood and circumstances on the trajectory of her brief life: “Your family is the first source of love you ever face, or they should be. If the first relationships this woman had were abusive and manipulative, then she’ll grow up thinking that’s the only way to love someone, that that is the only love she’ll ever deserve. It’s not her fault that those things ended up happening. If you truly had the choice you wouldn’t choose to be addicted to heroin, and you wouldn’t choose to be killed or hurt. You wouldn’t choose to have a husband that abuses you. Nobody chooses addiction and suffering and abuse.”
Victim-blaming is something many people do unconsciously; art tends to be ambiguous, making it difficult for the person experiencing it to know the artist’s true position. Lamyaa stressed the beauty and openness of poetry as an empowering form for survivors and allies alike: “When you experience trauma, your brain sort of takes the trauma outside of the situation and boxes it alone. That’s why some people don’t really remember the time of the trauma or the specific details, but they remember fragments of it, the abuser’s body, the emotions attached. That’s how trauma works: you smell something, and you start freaking out, and you don’t know why. Through poetry, you can talk about, say, a certain smell, and you could relate that to sexual assault, and you don’t have to say it in a chronological order where this happened, then this happened, then this happened. Some people don’t have that.”
Women’s bodies have for millennia been sites of violence and possession. Their voices, too, face great risk and are sometimes never heard. Lamyaa reflected, “Oftentimes female writers have to be very careful about the language they use. I know I’ve experienced this where some words I use may have a different connotation than if a male were to say them. I may say something that would get me in so much trouble because as a woman, it directly reflects my identity.” This goes for women everywhere: “Anything you say directly reflects you as a woman.”
All of us contribute to this atmosphere, whether we realize it or not. Empowering a woman, a survivor, or anyone for that matter, can be as simple (and as complicated) as unpacking the layers of privilege you have accumulated over time and then listening — just listening — to their story. As Lamyaa put it, “Privilege is having the choice to join uncomfortable discussions, whereas some people don’t have the choice at all. The discussions are about them and their rights and opportunities; they are automatically involved even when they are silenced.”
Progress is being made, little by little, in spite of the dangers in our immediate surroundings and the wider world. YCP students received within the same day this October an email with a timely warning notification about an off-campus sexual assault and an email with a link to anonymously submit a story or poem “relevant to the experience of sexual assault, harassment and/or intimate partner violence.” Throughout last week, Marketview Arts incorporated submissions in the #MeToo Community Exhibit, allowing many voices to become one — a force against many centuries of injustice and the silence that too often accompanies it. About #MeToo, Lamyaa insisted, “Some may think the movement can’t save lives, but to somebody that hashtag is validating all of the suffering they went through. They can tell their story for the very first time.”
The unspeakable, floating in said silence, is the stuff of writing and art. Widely read works such as The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur, and Hunger by Roxane Gay reveal just some of the possible ways in which to express the body and its story. Spoken word artists, especially “outspoken” ones admired by Lamyaa such as Emi Mahmoud and Safia Elhillo, reveal the realities of intersectionality, of their unique combination of identities. However, college literary magazines are models, too. Many contributors are in that transition period between adolescence and adulthood, coming face to face with various so-called rites of passage or, at the very least, beginning to realize the pressures on their respective gender. Other contributors have been around for longer and thus speak to a wider historical context of injustice.
As for The York Review, there’s a vision at the heart of each volume. Unfailingly, we hope to be a space in which you are empowered to tell the truth, however raw it may be.
“They Say it Happens Everywhere”
by Laurel
Cathy was my best friend all through high school, maid-of-honor at my wedding three years after we graduated. We were always together, resembled each other, and people always asked if we were sisters.
Her parents were alcoholics, slovenly, unkempt, unable to keep or keep after anything… jobs, house, kids, themselves. Coming from that background, Cathy probably never even had a chance. Her mother hated me, said I talked Cathy into doing bad shit, got her into trouble. Cathy always told me I kept out of trouble and kept her away from the really bad kids. I took no prizes for common sense or good behavior in those days, but I could tell dangerous from just “fast,” and tried to keep out of the worst of it.
Cathy often was grounded for going away with me, wasn’t even allowed to talk about me around her mother. I think her dad liked me, he always schemed with Cathy to help her go away with me. My parents, however, always liked Cathy, and often invited to supper or to stay over at our house if we went to a concert that ran late. Even my grandmother invited Cathy to eat and visit with her. Cathy one time said she’d move in quick if my parents ever offered to take her in.
She wrote poetry, not neatly cadenced, rhyming stuff, but stark, emotion-laden lines that could sink long nails in your guts and twist them around. Some of it was just bitching about her parents, but, when Cathy was on the extremely dark end of a mood swing, she could cut deeply. Self-inflicted wounds, gouged with a green pen. I still don’t know that I’d even now understand them, but I recognized the pain and anger caught on those pages. I wonder if they were good. Her sister has them now.
She always gravitated towards the abusive boys in school. She’d tell me they beat her and made her go things she didn’t want to do, took her money and told her what to do and who to see. I’d talk, then yell, then rage at her, telling her she didn’t have to accept that kind of treatment from anyone. “But I love him!” “Bullshit, we’re in high school, you don’t love him, you want to get in his pants! It’s all hormones.”
There was one in particular: she’d break up with him, go back, then dump him again. He’d always treat her bad. I harassed her for months to just stay away from him, and I finally persuaded her she really didn’t have to put up with what he did. When she told him, “Later — for good,” and he found out I’d play a part in ruining his fun, he swore he’d get me. “Go for it,” I said, “I’ll hit back.” I carried a knife for a while after that, but beyond dirty looks when he saw me, but nothing ever happened. He later married another dumb girl and liked to put cigarettes out on his pregnant wife and turn her out for all his drunken friends. He was tied in with at least three murders or alleged suicides, but there was always a fall-guy, and he never did time for any of those, although he was in York County prison for theft and robbery.
Cathy mocked men who treated her good, called them pussies when she pushed them hard and they didn’t lose their tempers. She couldn’t accept a man who loved her and did things for her, and always told me about going out with other guys on the side. I couldn’t understand the mind-set, why cruelty was necessary in her relationships.
She met this junkie at work, moved into an apartment off of Richland Avenue with him shortly after. When she told me her did heroin and cocaine, I tried to convince her that this wasn’t the place for her, but she didn’t want to hear it. I’d visit her; she’d try to hide the needle marks because she knew I’d bitch her out for using, but I saw. She’d always been drawn to needles, and the concept of being stupid from drugs seemed to have a fascination for her. It was the late seventies, and even in a rural place like York, nearly everyone did drugs, so I wasn’t shocked about that, but I did not like it. I was recently married, caught up in renovating, our old farmhouse, and, gradually, visits became phone calls, phone calls became more infrequent, and we weren’t as close anymore. I’d become frustrated with what I knew was happening to her and her apparent desire for self-destruction. I regret every day that I didn’t fight harder. They were her choices, but I’d been influential enough before to pull her away from what I knew would harm her. I should have kept trying.
The last Christmas card I sent her had, tucked inside, snowflakes I’d made for her. I cut delicate, intricate designs, and the snowflakes catch everyone’s attention. She was so delighted with hers, she taped them up on her kitchen window. More than a year later, she still had them there when that useless junkie blew her away as she slept. She was 24, and when we last spoke, she was trying to save enough money to buy a car and move away from him.
They’d had a fight. She was tired of him stealing her money she saved for the rent or for buying a car. She’d hide it, he’d hunt for and find it, then beat her for hiding it from him. He sold drugs from their apartment, and the neighbor told police there were always strange men coming around at all hours, implying that Cathy was whoring. She was weary of his being who and what he was, and told him she wanted to move out. She lay down on a cot in the living room to sleep, her big Manx cat beside her. He claims he was cleaning his gun in the kitchen and it just went off.
On a dreary, rainy morning, late in March, she was cremated in the gown she wore in my wedding. The mortician had to arrange her just so in the casket: one side of her wasn’t there anymore. Although the funeral was here in York, no one from our graduating class showed up at her funeral, none of our old friends and hell-raising buddies could be bothered.
Her murdered weaseled out of the charges on technicalities, with his alcoholic mother swearing that her boy was not responsible for Cathy’s death. He spent some time in prison, until he got out on appeal. I expect that one day I will see him on the street.
On April 1, I went to the apartment to pick up a few things. Cathy had several of my drawings and paintings up wherever she’d lived, and I wanted those. She had some of my books and jewelry. Her Manx came to live with me and my husband. The cat died last May, 13 years old, and he’d never gotten over his fear of guns. When my husband took his hunting things out, the cat would sniff and inspect everything, but when the gun came out of the case, the cat would flatten himself close to the floor and scurry, wide-eyed with fear under the nearest bed. I wish he could have testified at the trial, I think he could have been most persuasive.
I left the snowflakes taped to the window.