"The Handmaid's Tale" and the Virtue of Waiting

I was excited but hesitant to watch Hulu's "The Handmaid's Tale." The book holds a place of near-reverence for me, and told as it is from the internal perspective of June/Offred, I was worried it might rely too heavily on voice-overs to cover the lack of communication between the characters. I have rarely been so happy to be wrong. But watching the first episode the other night, amid all the perfunctory horrors it imagines, there was one scene that gripped me in a deeply personal way. Offred is still June, ushered into the back of the class where she is to be reeducated. And she winces as the woman next to her mouths off. She is keenly aware of the danger she is in, and you can see that awareness playing out on her face, the internal monologue of "shut up shut up shut up" never escaping past her eyes, which stare straight ahead, waiting. 

In October of 2015, I was abducted at gunpoint, forced into the passenger seat of a car, and driven for the next two hours around the city of Chicago, then down to Hammond, Indiana, all with the gun digging into my side from the young woman in the back seat. I had a lot of time to think about risk. 

They wanted my money. That was very clear. And as little of it as I have, I was not willing to risk my life for money. So I kept my eyes forward, my tongue quiet, and I waited until I felt the fight would be worth fighting. 

I waited while the young man driving told me he would leave me stinking in an alleyway, waiting for the moment his actions would reflect his words. I waited at every traffic light, when looking to the window for just a moment was met with a further dig of the gun in my side. I waited while parked outside of convenience stores, as he went inside to try the cards he took from me that I knew wouldn't work, and she stayed behind to make sure I didn't try anything. I waited while they got on the highway, and while they drove me across state lines, never telling them they had just committed a federal crime because the last thing I needed was for them to get desperate. I waited as the woman argued that they should drop me off, and as the man leered at me and said, "no, she's cool." I waited as they parked in an alleyway. I waited as I eyed the houses on the street, hoping I would never see the inside of one. I waited as they got out and discussed what to do with me behind the car.

And I am extremely fortunate that the moment I waited for never came. That when they abandoned me in that alley, in a strange city, with no possessions, part of me was still waiting for the risk that would be worth taking.

In dealing with the psychological aftermath of my abduction, I often doubted the wisdom of my willingness to wait. Everyone told me that it was the best choice I had, the smartest move, but sadly the only thing that could convince me of that was learning that they had attempted to do the same to another woman days after, who resisted at the outset, and her resistance was met with a clock to the skull and a hospital stay, whereas I came out with psychological trauma and a few bruises. I hate that I found solace in another's misfortune, but I did. And I hate that reassuring myself that I made the right choices implies that she made the wrong one, which I don't believe.

I had not thought about the extreme anticipatory fear of those hours of my life for a while until I watched "The Handmaid's Tale," and seeing June's face, I remembered that feeling. It wasn't a full flashback, which I haven't had in about a year, but it was the type of memory that lives in the body. You feel it, rather than view it.

But there is a key difference. The threat I faced that night was a one-time occurrence, and the reason I faced it had little to do with my identity, and more to do with coincidence. And yet here was a woman displaying the same level of terror, evincing the same desperation to the internal struggle between the desire to fight and the desire to endure, for reasons that had absolutely everything to do with her status as a fertile woman. And in that lies a palpable warning.

That sort of risk assessment, of waiting for the risk worth taking--waiting until the scales balance, and what you risk is equal to what you could prevent--is something all marginalized groups experience on a daily basis, sometimes to lesser degrees, and sometimes not. That is not an exaggeration. Ask any POC how they feel when approached by police. Ask any trans woman how they feel when forced to enter a men's restroom. Ask any woman walking home alone at night. 

These are the more extreme moments, the ones where the fear is life or death, and they get the most attention precisely because of that extremity. But there are literally countless other scenarios where we risk less than our life. Where the cost of fighting is social or professional reprisal, and depending on circumstance, those things can be worth the risk or not. I say "literally countless" because they are. We live in a world shaped by misogyny, racism, homophobia, bi-phobia, transphobia, ableism, and ageism. And as much as fighting against those ideologies is the admirable thing to do, we also have to find ways to live in this world. To find joy. To find love. And success. And comfort. And it is inevitable that in order to do so, we will have to make some compromises. We will have to pick our battles. And wait.

But the injustice of this reality is compounded by the fact that when we do choose to fight, every moment we waited is used against us. Either as evidence that we must be lying, a tactic often used in cases of sexual assault or harassment, or by considering our resistance as an overreaction to a singular event, erasing the history of endured slights that came before. 

What "The Handmaid's Tale" does that is so viscerally terrifying is heighten the stakes for these smaller moments of injustice until every word uttered, every facial expression, every move made, carries with it the risk of life or death. It is why it feels so relevant, and bone-chilling. As women, the extreme fear of male violence is remembered in our bones, while the general atmosphere of being devalued and dismissed is often repressed for the sake of sanity. Imbuing the latter with the memory of the former gives us a sense of just how little distance there is between our current situation and the dystopia the story imagines. And that distance is paved by those who wait. 

In our current political crisis, I have found it hard to sort through the outrage. I have tried to focus on actions rather than words, in an effort to maintain sanity. The strange thing is, there have been so few tangible, legislative actions taken by this administration, so little done, that it ends up feeling like I am sticking my head in the sand. But as of writing this, the House has voted yes on a bill that classifies sexual assault as a preexisting condition, as though an act of violence perpetrated against a woman is her responsibility. The distance between fights worth waging and those that justify endurance is closing. It begs the question, what exactly are we waiting for?