Dorothy Allison
speaker
40 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dorothy Allison’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It was only when I... began to really deal with the problems in my own life that had resulted as being, that getting out of being the victim and into being a survivor was when I started to get angry. And it was nightmarish to be angry at her that way.
I became the one who got away, who got glasses from the Lions Club, a job from Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, and finally went to college on a scholarship.
There I met the people I had always read about, girls whose fathers loved them innocently, boys who drove cars they had not stolen, whole armies of the middle and upper classes I had not truly believed to be real, the children to whom I could not help but compare myself.
I matched their innocence, their confidence, their capacity to trust, to love, to be generous against the bitterness, the rage, the pure and terrible hatred that had consumed me. And like so many others who had gone before me, I began to dream longingly of my own death.
I began to court it, cowardly, traditionally, that is, in the tradition of all those who had gone before me, through drugs and drinking and stubbornly putting myself in the way of other people's violence. Even now, I cannot believe how it was that everything I survived became one more reason to want to die.
It's like math. It's like one and one. You take a child and rob that child of all self-esteem, you will get an adult that has no sense of their own worth. Wow. I spent a good portion of my late teens and early 20s trying to find a way to die without having to actually take the responsibility to kill myself. It's a direct result. I've seen it in so many other people.
I've seen it in some of my younger relatives. It's just, it's a devastating impact. The hard thing is to change it, to crawl out of that black depression and begin to think of yourself as a human being like other human beings instead of a monster. What helped you do that? I'll tell you the truth. I think it was feminism. It's...
I began to believe that there was an explanation for what had happened to me. And I came to it largely through a political understanding. I went away to college and somebody talked to me about Marx and showed me, you should be a communist. They said you're working class. Well, I'm not much good at that because communists need to do what they're told. But I started reading and trying to study.
Why is it that these things happen and why is it that everybody especially believe that incest and violence happens to poor and working class kids? And I lucked into a study group, a feminist study group, and all of a sudden it was bigger. It wasn't just that we were poor.
It was because I was a girl child and because girl children in my family are taught to endure and survive and not to fight back. And that began to let me be angry. It began to let me believe that I wasn't this monster that deserved what had happened to her, but somebody who had fallen under somebody else's madness.
Oh, I did something. I did a number of things nobody else in my family had done before. I was the first person in my family to graduate from high school, the first person to go to college. There have been two since. And I have come of an enormous family. It's just that both of my sisters dropped out of high school in the 9th and 10th grade.
It's just not something that we were given the idea that we could do. But a lot of it had to do with my mother. My mother believed that I was this incredibly special person, that I was... Brilliant. She thought that I was just amazing. So when I was five or six years old, she started getting me books, and she started saving money to send me to school. She would put quarters in a tip jar.
She did it my entire childhood. The point I went to college, she had almost $200, and she'd been saving for more than 10 years.
It wasn't exactly a life in which you could keep money. But if you make that decision with my mother's encouragement, believing that I was different, a lot of other things come along. The fact that I was so bright and won so many prizes and awards and things drove me away from my family. I didn't have any choice about leaving. I didn't know how to talk to them after a while.
The hard part was going back. Right.
I think I was about 11. And I wasn't entirely sure all of what it meant. Yeah. I just knew that I didn't have any of the same desires that everybody else around me. I wasn't much interested in boys or the whole cycle that you get into of getting boyfriends and doing that whole thing. But I was madly, passionately in love with a little girl down the street.
And I was always in love with a little girl down the street, no matter what little girl it was or where we were. I don't think there was a day in my adolescence that I was not madly in love with somebody, and she was always female.
Yeah, right. I began to think or worry that people would think that I loved girls because my stepfather had raped me. It was one of the...
Yeah, almost everyone that I've ever talked to says, well, that's it, that's why. But I don't believe it. I believe that my lesbianism has been a source of energy and power in my life. It's almost as if, oh, you must hate men because he did these terrible things to you. That's why you love women. But I don't think of it that way. I don't love women because I hate men.
I don't even particularly hate men. I happen to love women. And lust is a little bit more basic than running away, you know?
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