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Overview
On a Paris night in 1990 when Karyn L. Freedman was just twenty-two, she was brutally raped. In the wake of the violent encounter, she found herself in a French courtroom, a Toronto trauma center, and a rape clinic in Africa. Her life was forever changed. At a time when as many as one in three women in the world have been victims of sexual assault and when many women are still ashamed to come forward, Freedman’s book is a moving and essential look at how survivors cope and persevere.
At once deeply intimate and terrifyingly universal, One Hour in Paris weaves together Freedman’s personal experience with philosophical, neuroscientific, and psychological insights on what it means to live in a traumatized body. Using her philosopher’s background, she studies the history of psychological trauma, drawing on theories of post-traumatic stress disorder and neuroplasticity to show how recovery from horrific experiences is possible. Through frank discussions of sex and intimacy, she explores the consequences of sexual violence for love and relationships, illustrating the steep personal cost and the obstacles faced by individual survivors in its aftermath. Freedman’s book is an urgent call to face this fundamental social problem head-on, arguing that we cannot continue to ignore the fact that sexual violence against women is rooted in gender inequalities that exist worldwide—and must be addressed.
One Hour in Paris is essential reading for sexual violence survivors and an invaluable resource for therapists, mental health professionals, and family members and friends of victims.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226117607 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Sales rank: | 965,112 |
| File size: | 224 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
One Hour in Paris
A True Story of Rape and Recovery
By Karyn L. Freedman
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2014 Karyn L. FreedmanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-11760-7
CHAPTER 1
Paris, August 1, 1990
Shortly after noon on Wednesday, August 1, 1990, I boarded a train in Amsterdam that was headed to Paris. I was twenty-two years old. I had just spent four days in Utrecht. Before that I was in Nice for three days, preceded by equally short stints in Florence, Rome, Munich, Budapest, Prague, Warsaw, Krakow, Berlin, Heidelberg, Freiberg and Vienna. I was backpacking through Europe for the summer. I had a Eurail Pass, which covered all of Western Europe and parts of Eastern Europe and which enabled you to board any train in any direction at your whim, so long as there was an empty seat. It was designed for guileless foreigners like me who thought that the best way to get to know Europe was to hop from country to country, and I was making the most of it. It was my first time overseas and it began with considerable promise. In May, my mom, dad, two sisters, and I flew from our home in Winnipeg, Manitoba, via Zurich and Vienna to Israel for a three-week-long family vacation. I had belatedly moved through my teenage years, which were drawn full of angst and rebellion, and for the first time in a long while I was relaxed and easy to be around. By all accounts, it was a great family trip. We had a sagacious Israeli named Michael for a guide, and he took us from one end of the Promised Land to the other, supplementing what I had learned about the country in my youth, courtesy of my private Hebrew school education, and by then mostly long forgotten. Every square mile of Israel was fascinating, from the historic old city of Jerusalem and the Western Wall to the cosmopolitanism of Tel Aviv. We swam suspended in the Dead Sea, climbed Masada, and picked our way through ramshackle Bedouin markets. We spent a quiet afternoon at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum, and had lunch at Yad Mordechai, a kibbutz that was renamed in 1943 in honor of Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (two months later I stood, awestruck, on Anielewicza Street in Warsaw, where the uprising took place). We skipped the Gaza Strip, which was unsafe even then. I have great pictures from this trip. It was fascinating and edifying, and it was a happy time. We stayed in nice hotels and ate good food and at the end of the three weeks we flew together to Vienna, at which point my mom, dad, and older sister, Jacqueline, returned home. My younger sister, Lisa, and I stayed in Vienna for a couple more days and then began our summer sojourn together. The plan was to travel for a week or so through Germany and then split up to travel with our respective friends for a couple of months before meeting up again in Paris in the second week of August. We were going to spend our last week there together before flying home on August 13. Instead, I left Paris, alone, on the morning of August 2.
My sisters and I have always been very close, and traveling with Lisa was marked by the kind of easiness you can only get with family. Europe was full of small miracles for us. We were endlessly impressed by the architecture of history, and each experience seemed richer than the last. We went to Berlin and stood where the Wall had come down the year before. We toured the Reichstag and naively poked fun at armed guards in East Berlin (who were humorless and impervious to our advances). There were vestiges of the Holocaust throughout Germany—indeed, throughout Europe—memorialized in monuments and museums. I have never been religious, but being Jewish has always been central to my identity, and traveling around Europe felt like a tour through the history of anti-Semitism. The attempted annihilation of the Jewish people became tangible for me for the first time and, seriously impressionable, I started to read Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. A month later I went to Poland to see Auschwitz and stood, at a loss for understanding, under the "Arbeit macht frei" sign at the entrance to the main camp, only to return to Germany for a second time to go to Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp outside of Munich. My immersion in Holocaust literature turned out to be a postrape saving grace, or at least so I thought at the time. It provided me with a clear juxtaposition: although what happened to me was bad, compared to the obscenity of the death camps and the mass extermination of the Jews, well, there was no comparison. What I later came to understand was that this convenient contrast was just one among many intellectual devices I was able to rely on in order to avoid facing the pain of my own traumatic experience.
After Lisa and I split up I spent some time traveling alone and some time traveling with a good friend from Winnipeg. Being on my own was a test that I felt I needed to pass. I had spent the previous couple of years cultivating an image of myself as an independent woman, and although I was occasionally lonely and insecure, I had this idea that if I beat down my anxiety then at least there would be truth in the persona. This would prove to be a recurring theme following my rape, and it wasn't entirely disingenuous. I did gain a robust sense of accomplishment from meeting the challenge of getting by on my own. It was an adventure and, at times, was thrilling. Still, it was a lot easier traveling with a friend. We went to Italy and Germany, but the highlight of our time together was Prague. Nineteen eighty-nine had been the year of the Velvet Revolution, which saw the overthrow of the Communist government in what was then Czechoslovakia, and one year later the country was just opening up to tourists. Prague was the most beautiful city that I had ever seen, and we spent weeks there. Cigarettes were a dime a pack and the view of the Prague Castle from the Charles Bridge was exceptional. Our days were idyllic. We ate waffles from street vendors and warm gusts of summer moved around us.
In early June, while still traveling with Lisa, I spent a day and a half in Heidelberg with my ex-boyfriend who was there for the summer, studying German. I think he now goes by his given name, David, but back then everyone knew him by his nickname, Stream. Stream and I met in 1987 in New York City. I lived there for two years while attending the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), where I studied fashion merchandising. I had gotten there by accident. I graduated high school—barely—in 1986. The rebellious years that I referred to earlier were at their peak then and I was struggling to find my way. I went through half a pack of cigarettes a day and spent my weekends smoking pot and getting high. Those were dark days. I would regularly sneak out of my house in the middle of the night to meet other wayward friends and then sleep through classes the following day (during my junior and senior years, my absentee rates were routinely higher than my grades). The only thing I was focused on was avoiding the emotional consequences of my privileged, middle-class, suburban upbringing.
My parents are intelligent, funny, and charismatic people, and they are also kind, loving, and supportive. They have nurtured us into a very close-knit family and I cherish my relationships with them both, but things have not always been smooth. They were the children and grandchildren of immigrants, and the first generation of Jews in Winnipeg not to have significant opportunities closed off to them through anti-Semitism. There was a lot of pressure on them and their contemporaries to become successful professionals and community leaders. They pulled this off with great finesse and today I am humbled by their accomplishments, but when I was growing up I wanted more time and attention from them than their careers permitted. I became an angry child and those feelings dominated my teen years, my rebellion a cover for my insecurities. I came very close to failing high school, and indeed would have were it not for the goodwill of a guidance counselor and a drafting teacher who had confidence in me at a time when I had none in myself. They helped me graduate by letting me run a fashion show for a couple of credits. It is a bit hard to believe now, but it was due to the success of that show that I determined that I had a future in the fashion industry, which is how I ended up in New York City at FIT.
Stream was from upstate New York, the Poughkeepsie area. If I remember correctly, he earned his nickname from being able to traverse successfully myriad difficult mountain trails and rivers and, yes, streams in the vicinity. He was also at FIT, and we were two fish out of water. I had decided pretty quickly after arriving that fashion was not for me. I can't pin down the precise cause or date, but after a couple of months in New York City I had a cerebral awakening of sorts, and I turned from high school dropout to aspiring intellectual. Suddenly, I was itching to study something more academic. (I took my first philosophy course at FIT from an imposing man named Spencer Schein who, as far as I can tell, is still teaching there.) I can't remember what program Stream was in, but he wasn't happy at FIT either. As soon as he got there (or maybe even before that), he decided he wanted to be a writer. He made up his mind to transfer to a good liberal arts university to study creative writing and poetry, which is how, a couple of years later, he ended up at Bard College, a prestigious liberal arts college in upstate New York overlooking the Hudson River. One of Bard's acclaimed faculty members, a poet and literary critic named Édouard Roditi, would eventually become Stream's professor and mentor. Both he and Stream would have fateful roles to play in the story of my rape.
Stream and I met midway through my first year in New York and dated for the next year and a half. I had been in love once before, but this was my first serious relationship and I fell hard. The relationship was full of emotional messiness, which struck me then as romantic but which I now see as a sign of our youthful inexperience. Still, we were truly in love. We spent all our time together and shared what we had to share, and the result was an intensely intimate connection. We stayed up late listening to Joni Mitchell and found ourselves in the dark. In the spring of 1989 I graduated from FIT and moved back to Winnipeg to pursue an undergraduate degree in philosophy at the University of Manitoba, enrolling full-time a couple of months later, in the fall of 1989. Stream and I broke up but remained best of friends. We talked often and wrote each other long letters. He came to visit me in Winnipeg that winter, over the holiday break, and we were together for another three weeks, only to split up again when he left. We agreed that a long-distance relationship was unsustainable but fell quickly back into our old roles when we saw each other in Heidelberg that summer. We were together for only thirty hours, but we had a great time. I was still very much in love with him, and I know this for certain because my journal entries from that summer say so.
I have kept a journal off and on throughout my life, starting in my late teens, and I had taken a fresh one with me to Europe that summer. I now refer to it as my "rape journal." It took me two months to fill the first half of it and close to three years to finish it. My writing was one thing that came to an almost full halt after my rape. I picked up the habit again with resolve in the mid-1990s and continued to write in journals for the next ten years, but none of these other journals exist today. Following the time that I completed my rape journal in January 1993, I destroyed each subsequent journal when I was done writing in it. I simply could not bear to reread them. I had been psychologically crippled by the trauma of the rape and this was transparent in most entries, which centered predominantly on the goings-on of one messed up romantic relationship or another. I could not hide from my own words, which I found exceedingly embarrassing. So once the pages of my journals were full I tore them up into pieces, or I burned them in a garbage can (just in case the message wasn't clear enough). I regret that now. I wish I had been less hard on myself. I could have learned a lot from those journals. The miracle is that I never threw out my rape journal. I now keep it in a Ziploc in a filing cabinet alongside my rape file. It's got a pretty floral-patterned cover, although the binding was never any good and the pages had already started to slip apart back in 1990. But I am very careful with it and though its pages are now well worn, I have not lost a single one. It makes me sad every time I read it. The entries leading up to August 1, 1990 are rich in excitement and anticipation, dripping with self-conscious melancholy and punctuated by regular smoke breaks. The uncertainty of youth is palpable but the overall impression is one of happy innocence. I would never sound quite that way again. The entries dated after August 1 read as hollow and sad, stunted. They are abbreviated; the adventure in my voice is gone.
Though Stream and I spent only a day together in Heidelberg in June, our plan was to meet up again in late July. He had a free place to stay in Paris and I was invited to join him there. We left it up in the air and promised to keep in touch. These were the days before the Internet and cell phones made communication in and across foreign countries easy. Instead, we had to anticipate where the other one would be and when, and hope that our letters reached each other through the American Express office in some stipulated city. In late June I wrote to him in Heidelberg to tell him that I would be in Budapest at the start of July. On July 2, I celebrated my twenty-second birthday with friends in Prague and the next day I boarded a train to Vienna, where I spent a few more days with friends before taking off on my own to Budapest. Had Budapest been my first stop in Eastern Europe I think I would have appreciated it more. It is a majestic city, but it couldn't compare to the beauty and charm of Prague. I stayed with a family in Old Buda who did not speak a word of English but who were very kind to me—they fed me, and even did my laundry, which, as any backpacker can appreciate, was a godsend. I spent most of my time wandering around the touristy parts of the city, hanging out in coffee shops and writing in my journal. After a few days on my own I met a couple of nice guys from the U.S. who were traveling with a woman from Holland, and the four of us stuck together for the rest of my time there. One day we went to a Stalin exhibit at a museum in town and then later that night, in mock contrast, attended a Pink Floyd light show at an open-air amphitheater. I got along well with the Dutch woman, who generously invited me to visit her in Utrecht later in the month. That turned out to be my final stop before heading to Paris on August 1.
I checked the American Express office in Budapest every day, looking for a letter from Stream. It finally arrived on July 10. He wrote that he had decided to leave Heidelberg earlier than initially planned so that he could travel around a bit before going to Paris at the end of July. He asked me to meet him in Hamburg before going to Paris, but I decided to delay our reunion and instead I returned to Prague, where I had a brief fling with a cute British guy. I made a couple more stops after that, first in Italy and then the South of France, before visiting my new Dutch friend in Utrecht. I stayed with her for four days, wandering around Utrecht and going on day trips to Amsterdam where, like most of my fellow backpackers, I spent a portion of each day, wide-eyed, hanging out in coffee shops, smoking pot.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from One Hour in Paris by Karyn L. Freedman. Copyright © 2014 Karyn L. Freedman. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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