Roxane Gay, panel debate the ethics of writing about trauma at Yale

Author Roxane Gay takes part in a panel discussion on writing ethically about violence at Yale University’s Battell Chapel Tuesday night. Author Roxane Gay takes part in a panel discussion on writing ethically about violence at Yale University’s Battell Chapel Tuesday night. Photo: Hannah Dellinger / Hearst Connecticut Media Buy photo Photo: Hannah Dellinger / Hearst Connecticut Media Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Roxane Gay, panel debate the ethics of writing about trauma at Yale 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

NEW HAVEN — Since she first wrote about sexual violence, journalist and author Roxane Gay has been preoccupied with what it means to write about trauma ethically.

“I wanted to make sure I was telling my story well and ethically, and I wasn’t writing scenes about violence in an overly stylized way,” Gay said at a panel discussion Tuesday night on the topic at Yale University’s Battell Chapel.

Other writers, Gay found, have shown a tendency to write about violence like it’s a beautiful experience from which immensely profound redemption emerges.

“That’s not necessarily the reality,” Gay told a crowd of hundreds. “Rape is ugly. I want the reader to not be able read it.”

When a scene depicting sexual violence is easily readable, Gay said, that means the writer failed to honestly and ethically portray it.

“There’s a fine line between being explicit and being open and truthful and also not retraumatizing readers who may have experience something like what I’m writing about.”

Another panelist, Tressie McMillan Cottom, a digital sociologist and professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, said some readers are motivated by a sexual thrill from reading about violence. When she writes about trauma, McMillan Cottom said her first ethical choice is to make sure the reader won’t be able to get through passages about violence unscathed.

“I want you to feel as though someone has reached inside of you and taken something out,” said the writer and columnist.

Honesty in the details of traumatic moments, she said, shows how brutal and routine everyday violence is.

Terese Mailhot, an author and professor from the Seabird Island Band indigenous peoples government in Canada, said often audiences look for “good victim” stories where the victim becomes a better person after their abuse.

“I wanted to write about the worst thing I did as mother,” she said. “It took the shame off that mental exhaustion and everything I went through. It made the potency of what happened to me even more potent.”

Poet, author and editor at Buzzfeed Saeed Jones said survivors of violence have a unique opportunity to push back on “good victim” expectations and show their humanity. Those who don’t survive are cast as totally naive innocent figures.

“Matthew Shepard and Tamir Rice can’t come back to say that they were people, too,” Jones said. “I am a victim, but victims are still people. My full humanity was in that room (during my trauma), which means I was just as complicated as the man that was trying to kill me.”

Gay said society’s singular idea of victimhood makes people who suffered into saints — if they are white.

“But in the alternative, a person of color needs be canonized to get some consideration,” she said. “Tamir Rice was a boy playing in a park, and people said he shouldn’t have been there. His mother has to say he was innocent, otherwise his life doesn’t matter.”

McMillan Cottom said she’s inundated with emails and letters— disproportionately from “angry white women”— asking to know details about her trauma that were left out of her work.

“Part of it is they don’t believe you,” said Gay. “What they are saying is, ‘prove it.’ They don’t want to believe this type of trauma can happen.”

Gay encouraged writers examining personal experiences to consider what they are saying and why they believe it’s important to put details of their trauma out in the world.

“Keep your boundaries firm,” she said. “People will try to compromise them.”

While using statistics and data to bolster personal experience can put trauma in context, Gay said she resists universality in order to avoid “flattening” all experiences.

“As black writer, it’s my goal to make sure that our stories matter and are heard, whether or not Becky can relate,” she said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story depicted a fictional novel Gay wrote as a memoir, incorrectly suggesting that she had been kidnapped.