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Conclusion C O M I N G H O M E T O S H E L T E R T O S A V E O U R S E L V E S We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains. That’s what I want---to hear you erupting. You Mount St. Helenses who don’t know the power in you---I want to hear you. . . . If we don’t tell our truth, who will? UrsulaK.LeGuin E A R LY I N T H I S B O O K I explained that I had begun this work suspecting that the “cycles of violence” narrative that all professionals in the field and even the victims of domestic violence know well needed to be revised, or, at the very least, revisited in terms of how violence is approached from the point of view of the woman who is being battered. The cycle of violence pattern that focuses on the predictable details of his abusive behavior, and her responses to that violence, has both assisted and possibly hindered our attempts to understand and deal with the issue of male violence against women. I have suggested that it is possible for such a neat schema to become a kind of master narrative— one that could possibly work against the rights and the healing of women who live with violent men. In light of the work I have done for this book, I would like to come back to that concept now, in conclusion, but expand upon those earlier thoughts based on what we have learned from listening to women tell their own stories. Furthermore, I would like to explore what I believe can happen for all of us—readers and listeners alike—if we begin to examine our own lives as we move toward safety and healing, strength, and independence. Janice Haaken has suggested that we must identify within women’s stories a “complex subjectivity.” In Pillar of Salt, she compares women’s narratives with the Biblical story of Lot’s wife, who dared to look back and was turned into a pillar of salt, but notes that she hopes for contemporary women a better resolution to their dilemma. The first act in reconfiguring Lot’s wife’s story might be to note that Lot’s wife does not even have a name. We need to name thiswomanand,insodoing,breathenewlifeintoherbody.Thisbook,devoted to the hearing of women’s stories, offers an affirmation of Haaken’s claims that women should dare to look back, remember, and tell their stories as an act 155 156 W O M E N E S C A P I N G V I O L E N C E of defiance and transformation. I agree with Haaken that it is possible that “important truths reside at the periphery of what is most readily noticeable.” We have gone to the margins in these pages and we have listened well. We have heard here the kinds of remembering that women actually do in their recounting of a life. We see how they have bravely looked back, have marked turning points in their experiences, and have forged a narrative that traces deeds done and actions taken through a new lens, rather than talking about memory as a fixed entity. Haaken calls this the process of “transformative re-membering”; this “refers to the recollection of an event that serves as a psychological marker from an early to a later form of self-knowledge.” In that way, “the motivational and active dimensions of mind are in the foreground.” For the women in this study, the term “transformational re-membering” is appropriate, offering them, as Haaken says, “a new vantage point from which to view the past.” She continues: “The activity of remembering stands at the threshold between body and mind like a translator.” Put another way, her thinking and mine coalesce: “transformative re-membering refers to the creative use of the past in redefining the self.”1 I remember a small, half-page flyer that was circulating in the shelter for a time, typed out by a resident on the office typewriter. I do not know if it was her own composition or if she had read it somewhere, but the version she typed was certainly her own re-composition. It read: accept yourself as a whole person complete! If you feel...

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