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43 LINDSEY COLLEN  Over the three years or so that I was writing The Rape of Sita its title was always already there in my head. I was held in awe of the double meaning of the word “rape,” as both “abduction” of the Goddess, Sita, and as “physical violation” of my modern-day fictional character, Sita, who unlike long-ago goddesses was not protected by any manner of divine prophecy. But I was never blind or insensitive to the danger of the title. I was conscious, too, that Sita is an insecure deity, thus all the more dangerous for me, the writer. I knew all along that the words of the title were strong, very strong. I needed strong words right then. I was writing not only about all the rape victims I knew in person from my being active in the women’s movement for years. All that anger. But I was also healing my own psyche. Dealing with my own anger. And that was something I needed to confess to the reader. From the outset. On a personal level, as concerns names, I am, you see, in a love relationship of long standing with someone with the first name Ram, the same name as the abducted Goddess’s husband. So, I took the risk of strong words because I needed them. Because being Ram’s wife, I am Sita, in a childish name-code. This exposure of myself made the risk of the title all the more terrifying. But, I had to do it. I wanted in so doing to write a story to give my friends and to anyone else who might care to pick up a copy one day, the most beautiful story in the whole world as a present. And it was to me an important present to give because it would be made up out of the most hostile central raw material imaginable : rape, anger, burial, and obsessive memory. I wanted in so doing to get as near to the epicentre as I possibly could of the most irreducible conflict of the sex war: rape. I wanted to illuminate it enough to see the light in the middle of the wheel. So that whatever awful things may have happened to you in your life, Risks in Writing the Novel, The Rape of Sita CH012.qxd 7/15/09 7:35 AM Page 43 44 LINDSEY COLLEN or might in the future happen to you or to me, one day something beautiful can be made out of it. With words. Between and amongst human beings. With stories, and with stories within stories. So, that’s how I did it. I, of course, chose the least violent kind of rape for the central story. No wanton violence. Not a gang rape. No blood. No incest. No pregnancy. No vast difference in class. No special impunity for the rapist. The least violent of rapes left me free to expose all the more strongly the hideousness of rape. But the highest emotional risk I take in an on-going way in my life, and it is the risk that offers the highest prizes of all, is, of course, political commitment. And since I am engaged in political struggles and have been since I was a child, physical rape has the resonance for me of colonization, enslavement, pillage, land occupation, slave labour, modern wage labour. I didn’t have to impose rape as a symbol of collective subjugation onto the novel, as if it were a stamp from the outside of events. It came from my life experience of political struggles in South Africa against the Apartheid State and in Mauritius against the sugar oligarchy and State. And from the stories I have heard from before I could understand whole sentences. The reality was already all around me then. And until today, I see them. Anyway. As the time for the publication of the novel neared, the taboo subject of rape was suddenly in the news in strange and unusual ways that linked rape with politics and religion. A military attaché from India was accused of raping a very young girl in Mauritius. The Mauritian Ambassador to Australia accused of violating another very young girl. A Hindu priest accused of rape. All three events had punctual political fall-out. As the date of the launch approached, the title now seemed, by these chance events, to have become more dangerous than ever. I have to explain that The...

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