Rape
by Adrienne Rich
There is a cop who is both prowler and father:
he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers,
had certain ideals.
You hardly knew him in his boots and silver badge,
on horseback, one hand touching his gun.
You hardly know him but you have to get to know him:
he has access to machinery that could kill you.
He and his stallion clop like warlords among the trash,
his ideals stand in the air, a frozen cloud
from between his unsmiling lips.
And so, when the time comes, you have to turn to him,
the maniac's sperm still greasing your thighs,
your mind whirling like crazy. You have to confess
to him, you are guilty of the crime
of having been forced.
And you see his blue eyes, the blue eyes of all the family
whom you used to know, grow narrow and glisten,
his hand types out the details
and he wants them all
but the hysteria in your voice pleases him best.
I will get to a place of hope and strength and the determination to fight, but it so going to take a while. At that point, I may be able to post more hopeful poems. Until then, my brain is on poems such as this masterpiece, a dark and realistic piece that would more accurately be called "After Rape," except that Rich is making the point that the speaker is being raped again when reporting her rape to the police.
The images in this poem radiate the intensity of emotion here. And we know from the start that this cop will be no savior; he is, among other things, a prowler. He is similar to the speaker, as he has been a part of her world (geography, race, socioeconomic class, etc.) but "he has access to machinery that could kill you." He is in control of her immediate future.
The poem focuses on that machinery in its images: boots, gun, stallion, warlords, trash, frozen cloud, unsmiling lips. She differentiates the rapist by calling him a "maniac," but this man of sanity--and a badge--is as brutal, misogynist, and violent as that maniac.
This is a fairly short poem, and the cop's "ideals" are mentioned twice--when something is mentioned twice in a short poem, we should pay attention. In the first stanza, Rich tells us this cop "had certain ideals" back when he hung out with the speaker's brothers. In the second stanza, while he is on his horse, his "ideals stand in the air, a frozen cloud."
What are these ideals that are so blatant yet unspoken? I believe we can find the answer in the third stanza. An ideal woman would not "get" raped: "to him, you are guilty of the crime/
of having been forced." (That "to him" grammatically goes with the phrase in the previous line, but Rich put it on the line with this phrase, making those two tiny words do double, and very powerful, duty.)
The last stanza continues in its force. We are told that who the speaker knows is not helpful in this situation; in other words, being friends with a cop's family won't keep you from being raped; in other other words, any woman can be raped. She must re-live her rape in detail to this man, whose eyes narrow with scorn, and then the last line is ghastly in its horror: "the hysteria in your voice pleases him best." As with the rapist, the fear of the victim, the sense of power and control, are the goals for this cop.
Although I used the term speaker here in my notes, Rich wrote the poem using the second person (you). For a poem with a topic such as rape, it makes sense. It pulls the reader in, reminds the reader that she, too, is a victim/can be a victim. And if the reader is male? He may have a sense of relief at first (oh, this is not about me), but the implication is that the other choices of representation in this poem for male readers is--if they reject seeing themselves as a victim of rape--either rapist or this cop.
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