Presentation Type
Oral Presentation
Category
Visual and Performing Arts (includes Creative Writing; sculpture, painting, video, dancing, music, reading, etc.)
Abstract/Artist Statement
“Divine Child: A Quilt,” a hybrid-genre creative work that includes lyric essay, research, and work with textiles, highlights the necessity of trauma-informed gynecological care and demonstrates how childhood sexual abuse is not an isolated experience but acts as a catalyst for cyclical traumatic events later in the survivor’s life.
In February 2023 my IUD embedded in my uterus, and I underwent a hysteroscopy to remove the rogue device. During the procedure, my body shook and screamed as, deep in my unconscious, I recovered memories repressed for more than twenty years of being sexually abused when I was a child. In the following months, I sought to understand the connections between my traumatic experiences. I began to think of their patterns and repetitions, their cyclical recurrences, in terms of a quilt, which employs repeated and related themes to make a whole of seemingly unrelated scraps. Quilting is an act of synthesis. Likewise, my lyric essay demonstrates on the page how trauma is often not singular but cumulative and manifold. Its fragmented form resists traditional tenets of storytelling, such as chronology or explicit connection. Instead, my “crown” of vignettes, wherein each piece starts with a variation of the line on which the last piece left off, builds implicitly. For example, the research I’ve incorporated exists alongside the narrative, in textboxes offset in the margin. This asks the reader to hold at once the personal and the experts’ accounts, while centering the survivor’s experience. Because childhood sexual abuse is often shrouded in what researchers call “Dissociative Amnesia,” wherein the abused child represses memories of their abuse in an effort to survive, many survivors of childhood sexual abuse, including myself, struggle to be believed. In telling my story, I hope to create space for many others to be heard.
Mentor Name
Chris Dombrowski
Divine Child: A Quilt
UC 329
“Divine Child: A Quilt,” a hybrid-genre creative work that includes lyric essay, research, and work with textiles, highlights the necessity of trauma-informed gynecological care and demonstrates how childhood sexual abuse is not an isolated experience but acts as a catalyst for cyclical traumatic events later in the survivor’s life.
In February 2023 my IUD embedded in my uterus, and I underwent a hysteroscopy to remove the rogue device. During the procedure, my body shook and screamed as, deep in my unconscious, I recovered memories repressed for more than twenty years of being sexually abused when I was a child. In the following months, I sought to understand the connections between my traumatic experiences. I began to think of their patterns and repetitions, their cyclical recurrences, in terms of a quilt, which employs repeated and related themes to make a whole of seemingly unrelated scraps. Quilting is an act of synthesis. Likewise, my lyric essay demonstrates on the page how trauma is often not singular but cumulative and manifold. Its fragmented form resists traditional tenets of storytelling, such as chronology or explicit connection. Instead, my “crown” of vignettes, wherein each piece starts with a variation of the line on which the last piece left off, builds implicitly. For example, the research I’ve incorporated exists alongside the narrative, in textboxes offset in the margin. This asks the reader to hold at once the personal and the experts’ accounts, while centering the survivor’s experience. Because childhood sexual abuse is often shrouded in what researchers call “Dissociative Amnesia,” wherein the abused child represses memories of their abuse in an effort to survive, many survivors of childhood sexual abuse, including myself, struggle to be believed. In telling my story, I hope to create space for many others to be heard.