Farid Matuk on “To One’s Honor”

On “To One’s Honor” 

“To One’s Honor” and my notes below try to think and feel their way through experiences of sexual assault. I’m interested in how staying soft despite assault may offer a generative power that includes and goes beyond survivorship. My investment in susceptibility isn’t a prescription. You’re not more ethical or more radical if you share it. And even if you do, no permeation is universal. Even in a world without systemic power imbalances or interpersonal violence, we would still enter and be entered, as a friend reminded me, to the extent and in the particular ways we can and can be. 

I often suggest to my students that not every poem is for everybody; the idea of a general literary public is a weird construct that flattens our political positioning, lived experiences, and so on. Poetry exceeds literature, and poetry’s incongruities don’t sync with the standardizing assumptions of literary studies and literary institutions. My poem doesn’t have a right to any reader, and no reader owes anything to my poem. 

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The summer I turned ten, two different men on two separate occasions tried to have sex with me. One night in grad school, when I was 27, I heard my own scream from far off, and it woke me to find a stranger in my bed with my penis in his mouth. 

To say these encounters, particularly those that occurred in childhood, were isolating is not quite enough. Through the rest of the summer of ’84 and at least until high school, the last thing I would do every night was lie in bed trying and failing to forget. If I could forget, I reasoned, it would be as if those things never happened. It’s like I had a box inside me, and I needed to make sure that box was empty. This wasn’t a child’s fancy; it was perception. 

Having immigrated here, the forms of life we found – poverty, nationalism, racial hierarchy, gendered violence, policing – enveloped us with a uniquely American intensity that left the loving adults around me available to abuse. To my pre-pubescent awareness, the specific type of abuse mattered less than the fact that my caretakers were learning to brace for its eventuality or to numb themselves to its consequences. If disrespect was the default, emptying your box of each new violation, staying quiet and alone, felt like the rules of the culture. 

One, the generic singular, holds space in this poem for anyone to step in. Iterate, not sequentially but simultaneously. Intimately, but not personally. The generic singular here tries to reclaim one’s susceptibility to touch, to stay permeable as a counter to isolation. Together, but spared the indignity of self-exposure that verges on self-branding, the poem holds space for an un-American gathering yet to come.

Through the years I worked on this poem, I learned I didn’t want to soften the idea of my childhood sexuality into something seemingly more diffuse, like sensuality. Children are fundamentally innocent, full stop. It’s on us as adults to protect their innocence. But I don’t buy the trajectory from inchoate childhood sensations into intentional adult sexuality. I think sexuality is diffuse for adults and children alike. A new desire, a new kink, a new role, a new fetish is always possible; unless repressed, desire and pleasure risk outpacing adult horizons of intention and identity. 

What's more, sex isn’t limited to sex acts. To honor one’s childhood sexuality is to approach Audre Lorde’s sense of the erotic that folds the political, social, and the embodied into each other. Lorde called it a lifeforce. The poem grounds this force in sexuality because that’s the site of the violations I experienced and because I don’t want to cede desire and pleasure as animating drives that attune us. 

But I understand Lorde’s sense of a lifeforce as fundamentally about staying permeable at the double edge of body and breath. Allow that force to spill out of the forms of life, and we risk creating still newer forms. That’s terrifying, but also generative. Adults and children have radically different degrees of responsibility, but our vulnerability, our susceptibility to stimulus and change, is equal. Equal and powerful. Maybe if we could recognize our kinship with children in this way, adults would be less likely to objectify them and ourselves. 

Hoping to invite distinct minds to sink into their own uniquely susceptible bodies, I worked with a meter from an oral tradition. Old English scops used alliteration, equal numbers of syllables, and equal stress positions on either side of the caesura to compose and recite epic poems. The social conditions for poetry have changed, and English now has Latinate words that tend to bear more syllables than their Germanic counterparts. A more patient poet could achieve a hemistich in contemporary English. I settled for caesuras that hold space between phrases of variable stress and equal numbers of syllables. 

This trace of a form once normative, musical, and practical, readers may now receive as experimental or innovative. Value the awkwardness of this syllabic hemistich for its resistance to contemporary norms of beauty and musicality, or dismiss it as an unnecessary affectation, or take it for an incantation. However it’s received, the language here runs parallel to but never quite syncs with the form. Beauty and ugliness hover, equally viable. A force of life spills out of the forms of life. My writing through a body that’s both assaulted and loved, through a sexuality that’s both unbroken and recovered, levitates these elements, but can’t synchronize them. For me, writing toward one’s honor and being out of phase with one’s voice, being out of phase with one’s horizon for pleasure, being out of phase with one’s story, being out of phase with others’ reactions, nothing could feel more true.