My Dark Garden

Guest Post by Remittance Girl

I'm guessing that most writers can point, at least in the abstract, to 'barren acres' that prompted them to write stories or novels that, to one extent or another, could be viewed as success. (Hey - just finishing a novel represents success for me. )

But I do have my own quite specific barren acre. I have harboured fantasies of non-consensual sex as early as I can recall. For a long time, I found this very disturbing. Not just because I consider myself a feminist and this fantasy of disempowering myself seemed at odds with that, but because I have experienced rape in reality.

First, I think there the word rape gets thrown around a lot. And there's a propensity for society to conceive of rape as a certain kind of crime – heinous, deplorable, inexcusable and unforgivable. So I want to be careful to be careful about how I use the word in the context of my experience. My experience of rape wasn't particularly violent and my age, and the youth of the person who perpetrated it, were such as to mitigate the circumstances. I was pretending to be a lot older and worldlier that I really was, and he was too young to realize that. I was not traumatized in any deep or long-lasting way. Nonetheless, the realization that things were happening outside my control and without my permission – that feeling of helplessness and anger – stayed with me.

I want to be clear here: my puzzlement and, at a baser level, my disgust with my own fantasies were far more traumatizing, in the long run, than the incident of the rape itself. My barren acre was not the rape, but of my fantasies in juxtaposition to the event.

It has puzzled me why I would have such persistent and vivid sexual fantasies about being forced. It has remained an unreconciled paradox in my understanding of self. And questions of consent and power have, I think, been a consistent theme through a lot of my erotic writing because of it.

However, when I embarked on the writing of Gaijin, I did so with the aim to consciously and unreservedly give myself permission to explore unfettered the eroticism of these fantasies. Until that time, I had been very aware of the sensitivity of writing non-consensual erotica. I had, in fact, practiced self-censorship and the guidelines of my writer's group and of the vast majority of erotica publishers made it easy to do so. But I decided that if there was ever a way to really explore the paradox between my fantasies and the person I believed myself to be, then the best and safest way to do that would be in fictional writing.

I believe this resulted in three successes. To begin with, Gaijin was the first large work I ever published. Not quite a novel, it was nonetheless accepted for publication by Republica Press in 2010. And to this day, it remains my best selling work.

The second success is that its publication allowed me to legitimately enter into the debate on the limits of what is 'acceptable' subject matter for eroticization in fiction.

But for me, by far the most significant success originating from this 'barren acre' of mine was that it did offer me some insight, if not outright reconciliation, of my personal paradox.

Strangely, it wasn't until long after I wrote the book. Through twitter, I had the great pleasure of getting to know an extraordinary woman named Jane Princep. Jane lived through an experience of rape that was orders of magnitude more harrowing than mine. She has been courageous enough to participate in a series of extremely explicit interviews on the event and the long-term effects it had on her life (http://janeprinsep.com/2010/08/14/why-not-me-a-series-of-intimate-conversations/) as part of The Dialogue Project, directed by Karl James. http://thedialogueproject.com/ )I experienced a great deal of anxiety about Jane reading any of my stories and I warned her off them.

Getting to know Jane better, we began to discuss the phenomenon of the non-consensual fantasy. It was really in the context of my concern for her reaction to my writing (and her assurance that she actively sought them out and read my non-con stories because she found them very erotic), that I began to conceive of these types of stories, not as a re-visitation of the rape or a breaking open of an old wound, but as a vehicle by which the real loss of power, of dignity, of control might be overlaid by the repeated re-writing, editing, embellishment and repurposing of the event.

This bad experience, once imposed upon me by someone else, becomes mine. And in making it mine, I can then go on to over-write the parts I find distasteful to me, and replace those with parts I like better. And the more I do it, the more this new, better, more vivid, more pleasurable telling begins to eclipse the original event. In essence, I am rewriting memory.

For a while, I thought this was just a fuzzy, crackpot explanation I'd come up with until I saw this TED Lecture: The Riddle of Experience and Memory (http://blog.ted.com/2010/03/01/the_riddle_of_e/ ) by Dr. Daniel Kahneman on the construction of experience and memory. When we remember an event, what we are really doing is constructing a narrative remediation of that event. And we are not particularly precise about the way we do it at the best of times. It is perfectly possible for someone to be recorded experiencing an event, and remember it in an entirely different light. Memory is to some extent self-storytelling.

I'm not a psychologist or a neurologist or a psychiatrist, but the conclusions that I have come to ring very true to me. My non-consensual fantasies are the way by which I have in the arena of memory and narrative transferred power from my rapist to me. And my barren acre has become my riotously fertile, always filthy and sometimes savage dark garden.

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The Things We Carry Inside Us

It was not quite a lucid dream, but it was something I was meant to know. It had been given to me. I don’t remember dreams very well unless I wrote them down. I didn’t have to write this one.

I was a member of a clan, an extended family of peaceful farmers until the bad times came. We were attacked and drawn into a terrible battle with a rising empire of vampires. And this was way before vampires had ever come into vogue. The war with the vampires had gone badly. The human race had been massacred down to a small bunch of which I had become the unlikely warlord. My friends had been killed. I had seen my family killed. In despair I wanted only revenge before I died. I was filled with a hatred and bloodlust I would never have imagined could exist inside me.

Through turns of events I can’t remember anymore, we turned the tide and the vampires were defeated. The king and queen captured and brought before me in a kind of Viking hall, bound in silver chains. These were the two who had destroyed my world, and forced me to a life of violence.

I ordered the King vampire chained to iron rings in the floor, while the queen sat on a chair helplessly and watched.

The King and the queen were quite close. They were not monsters between themselves. I think in context of the dream they did love each other and had a great connection to each other. I wanted the Queen to watch. I wanted her to feel what I felt. The King spoke some final word of love to her as they chained him to the floor. I took the hammer and stake in my own hands and killed him in front of her eyes as she wept blood tears. Now there was only her, alone now that most of her species had been killed and the remainder being hunted down.

I had intended to just kill her and there an end.

I’m sure that was my first intention.

I saw her there in her doom and helplessness. At my mercy. I thought of all the bloodshed and all the harm she had done me who would have been happy to have been left alone. Where had she had mercy for me? And yet she was a woman, with heart, capable of love. Knowing that she was not a beast, that she could feel pain and loss and humiliation, I was filled with an implacable, insatiable hatred. Killing her, it was not enough. I wanted to make sure she spent a few minutes in Hell with me first.

I wanted to make . . . a statement.

“Strip her!” I shouted, throwing my armor and jacket to the floor. Suddenly every warrior in the room knew what was going to happen. Women fled from the room crying. Some women covered their mouths with their hands and turned away. My warriors stripped away her clothes until she was nude. Her body was pale and clammy, like meat in a supermarket. She was not beautiful or desirable. But I didn’t desire her. Not at all did I desire her. I wasn’t interested in beauty or even pleasure. I remember that emotion clearly. I was interested only in the most extreme humiliation I could possibly commit on another person who had ruined me so completely. “Stake her out. Legs apart!”

My warriors chained her to rings in the floor. She screamed and resisted, fought them with teeth and nails and tears, protested she was a queen as they splayed her legs far apart and chained them. When she tried to bite them, they beat her on the head. I kneeled beside her and put the wooden stake between her long teeth as a gag so she couldn’t attack me. She was nude. She was gagged. She was chained to a stone floor, her legs spread eagled.

Yes I did.

I did it with gusto and the utmost violence. I did it with the all hate and rage I could feel. This was not an erotic dream. There was nothing erotic about it. It was me using my male body as a battering ram of emotional violation. I was using my body as a weapon of degradation, a messenger of rage and hate, to drive the story home to her of her ruin, to crush her utterly, to drive home my personal rage for all the death she had caused me. I wanted her last thought on earth to be of me, her conqueror mounted on top of her, inside of her, against her wishes, against her dignity, against her personhood, tearing her and striking her and showing her how completely I had crushed her spirit beyond healing. I wanted her to hope for rescue and yet not be rescued. I who would have been only a peaceful farmer raising a family, if she had left me alone.

When I was done with her I took the stake from her mouth, her face filled with a kind of despair and resignation. I had shattered her, and the knowledge gave me bitter pleasure. I think if I had unchained her she would have lain as she was, hoping for death.

I took the stake and hammer and dispatched her. The warriors roared their disapproval. They had lost loved ones too and had hoped for a go at her. It was the only touch of mercy I showed her.

As I looked down at her face, streaked with blood tears, I felt the rage drain out of me and a great sense of despair, because I knew also in that moment I was no longer human.

And I woke up.


It makes me wonder what kind of things I’m capable of, what any of us are capable of, and in what circumstances those things might come out. I suspect that we are not what we seem. Joseph Conrad wrote often on the theme that our decency and civilization are a veneer as thin as paint that can be stripped away by the howling mob around us, or by circumstance. It’s easy to judge the wicked. But maybe the rest of us, maybe we’re just luckier that’s all.


C Sanchez-Garcia