Kiara’s Reviews > We Were Witches > Status Update

From the Acknowledgements: “Love and care, it turns out—love and care and public art—are the antidotes to shame.”

the talk-show hosts said that Antioch’s consent rules would mean the death of romantic spontaneity.
As if rape were romantic.
As if rape were spontaneous.

Very few people in power really care about other people’s sexuality.
They care about money. But shaming sexuality is easier because that realm is so vulnerable. And of course if you control sexuality, that’s power that can be transmuted into more money.

But I also wanted to sharpen my words into weapons.
I wanted to sit shotgun.
I wanted to take a stab at it.
Would we have a conflict here?
Would nonviolent language mean continuing to deny my anger?

I wanted to be a man-hater, but it had rarely been my father’s or my grandfathers who shamed me. That emotional work belonged first to the women’s sphere. I wanted to blame violence solely on men, but it hadn’t been my fathers who couldn’t control their rage. Domestic violence in our home belonged first to my mother’s sphere.

And it occurred to me that fairy tales are a kind of grooming.
I played along, but I couldn’t help crying, too, and I couldn’t help covering my face to pretend I wasn’t crying for all the ways I knew we would have to mold ourselves into princesses even though I knew perfectly well we were meant to be witches.

“The feminist agenda is […] about a socialist, antifamily political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and
become lesbians.”
I nodded at the televangelist’s revelations. I’d never wanted to kill my child, but the rest of what he said rang true. The rest of it rang very true to me.

The woman at the shelter gave me a xeroxed diagram showing the cycle of violence, and I
ran my finger around the circle […] The violence of life had always seemed chaotic to me. This order mesmerized me. If violence could be charted and predicted with more accuracy than my period, surely it could be interrupted.

They said the vagina was “potential space” because its walls touched unless there was something in it—a penis, a dildo, a hand, a speculum, a baby, a government, a
knife.
A book is potential space too. Its covers touch until you put a story in it.

And I wondered why female violence was always so quick to turn on itself.