Don't: A Woman's Word

By Elly Danica.
gynergy books, 1988.
Paper 95pp., $10.90
Review by Heidi Muench

I almost didn't write this review. I could not approach this book as if it was apart from my own body, because I felt Danica's words in my bones; in my flesh; in the scarred channels of my throat; in both my mouths; in the breasts and nipples I have always loved in spite of how they were misused by the father who raped me. So I have chosen to write this review as a body who feels in each of her cells what Elly Danica has written. I cannot critique Don't: A Woman's Word any more than I can critique the shape my body takes at this point in my life or the memories it still contains. I cannot critique anything this true.

Elly Danica is a survivor of incest. She is a woman who has healed a childhood and adolescence of unrelenting brutality. The path her healing took involved words: the writing down of dreams, fears, terrors, longings, memories, lies, facts, present under- standings. This was a difficult and largely solitary task. It took her a long time and often seemed both essential and impossible.

I do not know what it means to read such an account from the outside. I do not know or care how threatening this book might be to someone who lacks similar experiences. I cannot, therefore, declare as does Nicole Brossard in her introduction, that "Each word torments beyond anything we could imagine of the violence and terror that batter the child" or that "Reading this book, we share intimately what seems beyond words." Danica's words are, for me, very bearable. The experiences she relates are not beyond telling or writing down. What I find truly unbearable, truly beyond words, is silence. To witness a woman's breaking free of a stranglehold of lies, threats, disbelief and outrage; to see her reclaim the experiences and feelings of the children she once was does not torment me. It affirms and empowers me. Not only in the epilogue which speaks a blessing of wholeness and freedom, but in every part of Danica's journey.

Elly Danica's path to her Self leads her through six gates: lunar portal, body memories, the trouble maker, Daddy wants you, the Studio and years of silence. These gates and connected themes are explored in thirteen chapters consisting of carefully numbered journal-like entries. Danica's method of uncovering and understanding her life is not simply chronological. Each chapter contains a constellation of experiences drawn from all stages of her life: the children she was, the wife she tried to be, the mother she was forced to become, the woman she is now. Her language is the language of truth-plain in the most positive sense of the word, compelling in its clarity and courage:

8.19 Breakfast. What's eating you he says. Nothing. Sit up straight Where were you? I don't answer. He asks again. Threat in his voice. Where were you? In church. Doing what? I don't want to answer him. I don't want to tell him about the blue vigil light and mother mary and how they are keeping me alive. Finally I say, praying. And he laughs.

8.20 My mother is outraged. Tries to make him stop laughing. Last night she was not outraged. Why is she outraged now? I know. Last night was only rape. This is sacrilege.

Elly Danica is a woman of intelligence, generosity, courage, honesty and spirit. The book she has written contains all these qualities. Don't: A Woman's Word is essential reading. Not only for those of us who were beaten, abused or raped as children. It is essential for all of us. Because truth is essential to wholeness and because accounts of healing are essential to hope.

Heidi Muench is a writer, poet and feminist living in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Anne Miles is a poet, writer, editor
and single mother living in Gibsons, B.C.