Shout

“The image of my father hitting / my mother picassoed in front of me / like Sunday sunshine slicing/through the church windows, fracturing / and rearranging the truth on the floor.” 

Here, Anderson tells her parents’ story about a moment in which her father abused and severely injured her mother. Although she did not actually witness this moment, Anderson conjures an image of this violence occurring in a church-like place, which is significant since her father is a preacher. Anderson has to create a new language for this particular event, referring to her mother’s face as “picassoed,” meaning she is so broken that she looks similar to the work of the artist Pablo Picasso. Truth is not literally fractured on the floor. This phrase is meant figuratively—both parents later refuse to speak of the event, or when they do, they cover up its severity, in one of the many lies by omission Anderson reveals.

“I learned then that words / had such power / some must never be spoken / and was thus robbed of both / tongue and the truth.” 

This scene occurs after Anderson accidentally swears in public as a child. This event becomes especially significant later when she finds herself struggling with staying silent about her sexual assault, and when she thinks about how women are often urged not to say certain things. Here she also equates language with power, a connection that resonates later when she studies abroad in Denmark.

“The boys circle, then frenzy-feed / crotch-grabbing, chest-pinching, / hate-spitting / the water froth / with glee and destruction. / Girls stay in the shallows / after their baptism as bait, / that first painful lesson / in how lifeguards / look the other way.” 

As a child, Anderson is unable to fully articulate why her male swim teammates feel so physical and so threatening. She is still naive at this time, yet adult Anderson is telling the story and imbues it with the menacing threat of male physicality. This passage also marks the first time she sees adults look away from men’s bad and untoward behavior, and she learns that men will rarely if ever suffer consequences for their actions.

“My mother lacked a mouth / in 1972, so she couldn’t / explain the mystery / of the blood. / She gave me a / pink box of tampons, / directions hidden inside, / then closed the door / between us. / No words.” 

Anderson describes her mother’s silence regarding puberty and sexuality in an attempt to rationalize the decision not to explain these concepts to her daughter. It is possible that no one spoke to her about the physical components of growing up either when she was a girl, as Anderson notes when calling menstruation “the mystery / of the blood” (40). Her silence and shame around being a woman create a mystery that Anderson has to solve by herself, further alienating her from her mother.

“I was new / to this kind of kiss and happy to play / by the creek with this boy whose hands then / wandered fast, too fast, too far / like a flash flood overwhelming the startled / banks of a creek that never once thought / of defense, of damming or the need for a bridge / to escape / his hands, arms shoulders back / muscle sinew bone / an avalanche of force / the course predetermined one hand on my mouth / his body covering smothering mine / I took my eyes off the rage / in his face and looked up to the green peace / of leaves fluttering above, trees witnessing / pain shame I crawled into the farthest corner / of my mind biding time hiding striving / by outsiding”

This quote describes Anderson’s sexual assault as an event that starts out “happy” but quickly spins out of her control. The diction in this passage indicates that Anderson sees this event as something fated to happen to her, specifically when she calls it “an avalanche of force / the course predetermined” (54). In other words, there was no alternative to the violence she endured. Towards the end, she attempts to find “green peace” in the woods and disassociates from what is happening to her. Disassociation, or feeling outside of oneself, is a common defense mechanism that many rape survivors report experiencing during an assault.

“I didn’t speak up / when that boy raped me, instead I scalded / myself in the shower and turned / me into the ghost of the girl/ I once was, my biggest fear / being that my father, no stranger to gaming with the devil, / would kill that boy / and it would be my fault.” 

Here Anderson describes the ways in which she began punishing herself for her rapist’s violation of her body. Rather than tell an adult what happened, Anderson internalizes her shame and guilt out of fear of what her father might do to her assailant. By scalding herself in the shower, Anderson sublimates her pain, hurting her skin rather than speaking the truth.

“But I had never seen a first aid kit for the spirit / or heard the word ‘trauma’ to describe / the way I’d hide, slide through the days unseen /or scream into the pillows / at the bottom of my closet / door closed ever though no one was home. / Rape wounds deeply, splits open / your core with shrapnel. / The stench of the injury attracts maggots / which hatch into clouds of doubt and self-loathing / the dirt you feel inside you nourishes / anxiety, depression, and shame / poisoning your blood, festering / in your brain until you will do anything to stop / feeling darkness rising within […] untreated pain / is a cancer of the soul / that can kill you” 

After Anderson is raped, her secret begins to tear her apart. Without the support and love of others, her mental health deteriorates, and the pain of her assault clouds her view of herself and the world around her. She doesn’t realize as a teenager that what she experienced was traumatic, and that her feeling of being out of control is due to her violation. An adult version of Anderson narrates towards the end, calling trauma a “cancer” that grows, spreads, and can kill someone if they don’t seek help.

“I escaped and avoided / the morgue after that.” 

When Anderson tries to date other men, in this case someone who works in the hospital morgue where she volunteers, she faces the danger of yet another sexual assault. She finds a way to escape but wants to avoid the morgue not only because it would be awkward to encounter this man again, but also because her pain has made it difficult for her to want to live. Her encounter with the man from the morgue foreshadows other unsettling and coercive circumstances Anderson finds herself in with men after her assault.

“one day we rowed a Viking ship onto the sea / till the land dropped out of sight / we rested our oars, hoisted the sail / compared blisters and dozed / as the breeze rocked us / back and forth, back and forth in our cradle / I unscrewed the top of my head / and rinsed out my brainpan / with salt water from the North Sea / and so began my next life” 

Anderson finds that her time in Denmark helps her being to heal from the trauma, stress, and dysfunction of her life back home. The image of her washing her “brainpan” is meant to symbolize her flushing out the darkness that has followed her throughout her high school years. It also acts as a form of baptism and renewal for her “next life,” meaning adulthood. Anderson also invokes the soothing quality of the water, a motif she calls upon throughout her story as a form of strength, connection, and self-confidence.

“I stopped thinking in English somewhen / in that winter / Danish filled my sleep and my waking, cascading / from my mouth like a strong river / victorious after destroying a dam” 

Anderson attempts to explain the joy of learning a new language and becoming fluent in Danish. Her pleasure is in part due to being in a radically new environment but also due to the pleasures of learning about new words and a new culture. Once again, she invokes the water motif, revealing her new sense of strength, momentum, and power thanks to her ability to speak this new language.

“My home in Denmark taught me how to speak / again, how to reinterpret darkness and light, / strength and softness / it offered me the chance to reorient my compass / redefine my true north / and start over”

To learn to speak her truth, Anderson needed to leave her home and her native language and engage with something entirely new. She refers to “strength and softness” to convey what she gained. Her newfound emotional strength, as well as her ability to become vulnerable to others again, helps her to move into a new stage of her life that is not as strictly dictated by her assault.

“ever been in a fight? / fists like hammers, punches thrown / rose-red bloom filling the room / as your rage catches fire / an exploding can of spray paint / when you see red / shit’s gonna get real / you’re gonna hurt someone / or do something stupid / probably both” 

As an adult, Anderson’s shame, guilt, and silence evolve into anger and rage at her assailant, but more notably, towards rape culture (in which women are blamed for sexual assault as opposed to their assailant) in the United States. Here she lists the ways in which anger manifests for her, conjuring images of explosive and violent rage. Her use of the phrase “rose-red bloom” calls back to the theme of strength and shame informing one another, adding in that soft femininity can live alongside fiery anger.

“one night, just as my oldest / started middle school / I heard a girl sobbing, brokenhearted / I jolted awake and checked on my daughters, / convinced I’d heard one of them, but no, / the crying girl was lost in my head / and she wouldn’t let me sleep / because she couldn’t speak / and she needed an interpreter” 

Melinda’s voice emerges for Anderson in a surreal audible hallucination. It could also be argued that perhaps the voice echoing in her mind was the voice of her younger self. This is the moment in the text in which Anderson’s ideas about silence and using one’s voice in the face of shame come together. Her love of interpretation and of giving a voice to the voiceless motivates her to write Speak.

“too many grown-ups tell kids to follow / their dreams / like that’s going to get them somewhere / Auntie Laurie says follow your nightmares instead / cuz when you figure out what’s eating you alive / you can slay it” 

Anderson instructs younger people to follow their nightmares as a way to invert the cliched phrase “follow your dreams.” Following nightmares opens up the possibility of confronting one’s demons and potentially finding peace. This is the path that Anderson took as a writer, leading to her success with Speak.

“Speak is a novel / rooted in facts, to be sure, / but a story bred with its own DNA / an invasive species growing out of a stump / of a tree hit by lightning / growing from the girl who survived” 

Anderson grapples with the question of whether Speak was inspired by her own sexual assault. She likens her story to “a tree hit by lightning” to remind the reader of her own fiery experience of trauma, yet Melinda’s story is rooted within this tree and sprouts forth on its own. What this means is that while the stories share a similar genesis, Anderson still considers their stories to be separate entities. With the phrase the “the girl who survived,” Anderson indicates that her resilience grows and becomes a springboard for her career as a writer.

“and they set the word / ‘raped’ / between quotation marks / ‘  ’ / feeling somehow wrong / about admitting their pain / knowing that others / hurt differently / I wasn’t ‘raped’ / locking the word / into a cage / ‘  ’ / filled with legal definitions […] Pain won’t be contained / by bars or marks / your scars deserve attention too.” 

This quote is one of the clearest examples of Anderson’s use of punctuation marks to make space for survivors on the page. Anderson weaves this motif throughout the book, but especially in the second half as she delivers her call to action. Here, she gives survivors the permission to call the traumatic violence they suffered by its name: rape. She reminds them that pain and experience are not determined by legal systems, but by the survivor’s own lived experience.

“the collective noun I’m seeking is ‘curiosity’ / we have a curiosity of boys / waiting on the truth / and when their questions / go unanswered / the suffering begins for / an anguish of victims” 

Once again, Anderson searches to find a better language to talk about sexual violence, and in this instance, how to quantify people by lived experience. Her previous work in linguistics and translation informs her understanding of collective nouns that work to define a group of living beings. She also does this to try and give a name to the boys she talks to who have genuine questions about sex, consent, and violence but may not know how to respectfully ask those questions due to a lack of education around the subject.

“nothing can offer relief / from the reality that you / failed and jailed / her happiness in a grave / too deep for forgiveness / the false innocence / you render for them / by censoring truth / protects only you”

Part of Anderson’s call to action is a societal reckoning. She asks for abusers to be held to account. In this quote, Anderson reminds the reader of exactly how much pain and suffering survivors endure. She also employs the word “censor” to reverse its effect after her book was banned from many school districts. Those who downplay or censor the truth about sexual violence while squandering sex education may argue that they are protecting the innocent, but they are in fact leaving students more vulnerable for the sake of the adults around them.

“The opposite of innocence / is not sin. Dearly beloved, / the opposite of innocence / is strength.” 

This quote is an example of Anderson’s attempts to redefine the words “shame” and “strength.” Rather than telling survivors of sexual violence that they are “ruined” or that their innocence is “lost,” Anderson inverts the idea, arguing that a traumatic loss of innocence can morph into a source of strength. Survivors aren’t sinners because they were raped, and Anderson reiterates that there is no moral judgment that can be placed on survivors for having been assaulted.

“Truth dawns slow / when you’ve been beaten / and lied to, / but it burns hard and bright / once it wakes.” 

Anderson uses this metaphor to illustrate how survivors can internalize their experiences and the shame that they feel. Abuse, particularly prolonged abuse, can make it harder for the abused to realize the truth. Once they can see their situation more objectively, the shame evolves into anger, and the spell they are under is broken.

“I’m sorry you didn’t get the help you needed / you deserved a soft afghan wrapped around you / people to hold your hands / while you learned to walk again / so stand with us now / let’s be enraged aunties together / enthroned crones, scythes blazing / instead of defending these men / who laugh at you when your turn your back / lean on me” 

Anderson directly addresses women of her generation, particularly women who may have survived sexual assault but did not recognize it as such at the time. Anderson speaks to them by offering compassion and “a soft afghan” as well as the support of other survivors. Rather than repress their own traumatic memories and defend the men in their lives (as many older women have done during the #MeToo movement), she asks these women to support and protect the younger generations from the same misery and grief.

“in Ballarat people tied colorful ribbons / to the fences / around the cathedral and the schools / where children / had been molested and raped / the ribbons loudly support the survivors […] the ribbons signaled revolution” 

Anderson highlights the Australian city of Ballarat for two reasons, one being her own experience traveling there to give a speech while the city was in the midst of an unfolding child sexual abuse scandal, but the other that this initiative is the kind of support survivors of sexual assault need to feel safe coming forward and speaking their truth. This idea would eventually inspire the Loud Fences movement. Anderson includes this particular story to give the reader a more solid sense of what she means when she calls for greater support for her cause. This quote grounds her call to action in concrete ideas and actions, rather than the more abstract concepts of reckoning, accountability, and support for survivors.

“Kin unpinned, my mother / was 100 percent wool, unprocessed / and itchy as hell, a hair short unraveled / then rerolled like razor wire / —carefully— / into a porcupine abristle / with resentment, / protecting her underbelly”

This quote includes a direct callback to the “soft afghan” Anderson wishes she could offer to women of her generation who are unwilling or unable to reckon with their sexual trauma. Here, Anderson applies this idea to her mother, describing her using fabric textures that are itchy or sharp. Anderson’s mother was unable to speak her truth as a survivor of domestic violence, and this silence turned her into a harder, rougher, and overall more vulnerable person, as Anderson points out with the word “underbelly.” An underbelly is the one soft, unprotected part of an animal that can be fatally wounded if it is attacked. This is meant to convey the hard exterior that hid her mother’s weak and extremely vulnerable interior.