Oct. 31--"Anonymity does not lend itself to community."
Those are the words of Anne K. Ream, whose work gives a voice to sexual violence survivors.
I met Ream in 2011 when I profiled her for a Tribune story about The Voices and Faces Project, a documentary she created to tell the stories of women and men whose faces and names are routinely removed from accounts of what they've endured.
They're granted anonymity but stripped of community.
Ream has spoken with hundreds of survivors around the world. She wrote about 18 of them in "Lived Through This: Listening to the Stories of Sexual Violence Survivors" (Beacon Press), now slated to go into its second printing. It's a heartbreaking book, but it's also hopeful in its belief that people's stories matter.
Ream was kidnapped and raped when she was 25 and living in Washington, D.C. She writes about the experience in the introduction -- the loneliness and horror, learning to live "in the presence of a shadow self ... the person I might have been if I had never known such violence."
Mostly, though, she writes the stories rarely told. She moves past the counsel of her beloved grandmother: "You don't have to tell all that you know."
"Her words were meant to encourage humility, but they carried with them the faintest whiff of a warning," Ream writes. "The world would be kinder to me, and I more appealing to it, if I kept to a minimum the exposure of any uncomfortable truths."
But that's a surface kindness, and it doesn't offer much protection, Ream learned, from the isolation that rides tragedy's coattails.
"I wanted to write a story where I could recede to the background and where I was collecting a body of narratives that were so much bigger than I am," Ream told me as we sat in her Chicago loft in late October. "Many of the survivors call this 'our book' or 'my book,' which I find very moving.
"For every person testifying in this book, there's nothing to be gained but a sense that they've been heard," Ream said. "There's no way to understand this as anything other than people standing up, one by one, and saying, 'I need you to understand this because what's happening to me is happening to other people.' I was very humbled by that level of trust."
Trust in her, to represent their stories. Trust in readers, to let those stories reshape the world.
"Being truly heard will change your life," Ream writes. "Which means that someone has to do the listening."
"It's a hard thing to listen -- truly listen -- to another person. It often means getting so close to their suffering that it breaks our own hearts. But inside our open, broken hearts -- that's where compassion lives."
I think of the people I love and the losses they've suffered. Friends who've lost children. Friends raised in violent homes. Friends who know the distance that grief places between you and the rest of the world. I wonder how often they feel heard.
"This project opened me up to the complexities of loss and grief and sadness around so many issues," Ream said. "So much of what I learned helped guide me toward being willing to acknowledge something horrible and call it horrible. To be able to say, 'I have no words.'"
Ream spent weeks, months, sometimes years, talking to each subject.
"These are human beings (who) were shaped, but in no way defined, by what was done to them," she said. "One of the most interesting truths of any traumatic event is how your complicated history intersects with that event. You don't get at those things by saying to someone, 'Tell me about the day you were assaulted.'"
And I think that speaks to her book's most beautiful virtue. It's not the story of 18 assaults; it's the story of 18 humans. Humans who found the courage to share one part -- one enormous part -- of their history with us, in the hopes we'd hear them.
I hope we find the courage to listen.
Join Steve Edwards, director of the Institute of Politics at University of Chicago, for a conversation with "Lived Through This" author Anne K. Ream and photographer Patricia Evans at 8 p.m. Nov. 15 at Bloomingdale's Nest, 900 N. Michigan Ave. RSVP with an email by Nov. 7 to live@voicesandfaces.org.
hstevens@tribune.com
Twitter @heidistevens13
