Poetry’s superpower is epistemic justice. This, in at least two ways: poetry gives sanctuary, as a zone of justice within a larger domain of injustice, and poetry offers a vehicle, a means by which to advance justice in that larger domain. Said differently: no matter how inequitably a society distributes authority and credibility, in poetry all voices are created equal; and poetry counters silencing, and contests the effects of silencing. Diana Whitney’s Girl Trouble deploys that superpower.
Epistemic injustice — prejudicially-based suppression of speech and withholding of credence — is itself oppressive, and it exacerbates other forms of oppression, including manifestly physically violent ones. It exists and operates in concealment, hiding within societal structurings, so one form of justice work in relation to it is exposition. Dina Nayeri’s Who Gets Believed? exposes epistemic injustice at work against refugees. Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick exposes epistemic injustice at work against Black women. Diana Whitney’s Girl Trouble exposes epistemic injustic at work in relation to girls.
As a complement to exposition, another form of justice work is confrontation. Kate Manne, for example, engages in this work, by arguing in Down Girl that “misogyny should be understood from the perspective of its potential targets and victims — girls and women. Misogyny is then what misogyny does” to girls and women. The work of confrontation that Manne’s Down Girl engages in by argumentation, Whitney’s Girl Trouble engages in by depiction: by showing from the perspective of girls and women what misogyny does, she furthers understanding of what misogyny is.
The depiction takes place poem by poem; in each poem, a depiction is complete in itself. So (to give only one example) in “Let Me Walk You Through It” the speaker invites the reader to imagine “a small bright room / decorated with an ocean motif—posters of whales, a fish mobile / revolving from the particle ceiling.” (I don’t assume that the speaker is Whitney herself, but the poems in the book read like very personal experience.) From vividly establishing the look and feel of the setting, that sterile-in-all-senses-of-the-word room, the poem then vividly depicts the event, an abortion, taking the reader not merely into the room but into the body and the experience of the girl having the abortion, presenting to the reader both what the girl feels (“The doctor will inject Novocain deep into the cervix, making / the entry of the night toothpick feel like the gentle brush / of a cotton swab. This is going to be a little crampy he says.”) and how she feels:
The room
is white hot, the opposite of sea, sweat on your face and palms,
body panting for a slug of anesthesia straight to the vein—
although it has never been offered, maybe as protocol, maybe
as punishment. The bright room blurs, fish spin like dervishes,
doctor says hold on, it won’t be long now but it’s not over yet
and you see red in the tube, slip into a swoon, faces swimming
above you, the mechanical mouth humming and sucking
in steady, indisputable rhythm.
The vividness of the poem’s description combines with its second-person point of view to facilitate the reader’s identification with the girl who is having the abortion. In a society that encourages identification with men but punishes identification with girls, to facilitate such identification is justice work.
Each poem by itself has its own integrity, giving a depiction that, like the one in “Let Me Walk You Through It,” is complete in itself, but the book in its entirety also has an integrity. As a collection, it employs at least two strategies. One is the imagining of alternate histories. Several poems revisit moments from the speaker’s past, but transfer the life in them to their might-have-beens. For example, in one poem, the alternative course of events, indicated by the title, is that “My 18-Year-Old Self Tells Chris Warren to Wear a Condom.” In what actually happened, according to the poem, the girl gave in to the boy’s insistence: “Shirtless, I inquired about protection. It’s like / taking a shower with a wetsuit on he said / and I didn’t question.” In the alternative history, though, the girl delivers the one-liner, and chooses what is best for her: “I whoop and laugh, / shake my head half-ruefully. No glove, no love / I quip, sitting up, zipping my jeans, finding / my sneakers in the dark.”
This strategy of imagining alternate histories does justice work by breaking the silence around a pervasive injustice in the world as it is, and by envisioning a world in which that injustice has less power and scope. Bodily integrity is one of the most basic human rights (as for example Martha Nussbaum articulates by placing it high on her list of “The Central Human Capabilities,” characterizing it as “Being able to move freely from place to place; to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction”). It is a very basic human right, but it is a right routinely denied to girls. In Whitney’s poem, in the actual moment the girl’s bodily integrity was violated, but in the imagined alternative she retains her bodily integrity.
A second strategy in Girl Trouble is corroboration: poems portraying individual personal experience that appears to be Whitney’s own resonate with poems that enter imaginatively experiences of girls and women whose ordeals have been made public. One whole section of the book consists of poems attending to the experiences of survivors of now-high-profile cases of trafficking and exploitation. (I follow here Whitney’s self-imposed rule “never to use the names or words of the perpetrators.”) So for example one poem (one of three entitled “Girls Who Had Nothing”) testifies that
I was trapped from the day
I arrived No one said
anything They knew
they all knew It was like lying
on a surgeon’s table
& someone
doing things to you
The poem, as Whitney’s note about it attests, is “compiled entirely from the voices of survivors who shared their stories” from one of the high-profile cases.
The effect of this strategy of juxtaposing poems derived from “private, personal” experience with poems that draw on the made-public experience of others is to correlate two forms of testimony. Against the societal silencing of each, the juxtaposition shows that they validate one another. One way society silences girls is by isolating them, insisting to them that their own experience is anomalous, unlike others’ experience and therefore unreliable: Girl Trouble gives evidence that it is like others’ experience, and it is reliable.
In a society bent on denying the reality of girls’ experience, Diana Whitney’s Girl Trouble, poem by poem and as a whole collection, attests to that experience and its reality. Girl Trouble does what Lyn Hejinian says poetry can do: it uses language as “a medium for experiencing experience.”