cassandra

so they killed cassandra first - cause she feared the worst - and tried to tell the town

Sep 03, 2024

Cassandra, a princess of Troy, had the blessing of true prophecy and the curse of never being believed. This tragic combination came courtesy of the god Apollo after Cassandra refuses to have sex with him. She foresees the fall of Troy in all its bloody horror, pleading and prophesying about the hidden occupants of the wooden horse to no avail. After Troy is destroyed, she is raped by Ajax in the temple of Athena and taken as a spoil of war by Agamemnon only to be killed alongside him by his wife Clytemnestra.

Cassandra’s story is exceedingly distressing; just imagine receiving visions of unimaginable horrors, some destined for your own loved ones, desperately sharing these nightmares and being shunned, reviled and mocked before you are forced to witness them all come to pass. I hadn’t given much thought to this mythic character before reading A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes where she is memorable in her mania; she is hysterical, unhinged and crazed as she entreats everyone to believe the destruction that awaits them. I was struck by the few glimpses into her excruciating perspective; she seems mad and feels mad yet she only tells the truth. An unimaginable existence.

Cassandra’s shoulders quivered with the effort of not screaming. She shook with the force of her desire to shout that she had told them a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand times. And that none of them had listened, not once, not for a heartbeat. They didn’t hear, they couldn’t see, and yet she could see nothing but the future, all the time, forever. Well, not forever. She could see her own future as clear as she saw everything else. Its brevity was her one consolation.

Cassandra is a symbol; she represents the women who speak the truth only to be doubted or discarded. The word that comes to mind here is ‘hysterical’ from the word meaning ‘uterus’1 as if women feeling intense emotions about unsettling, unpopular information was worthy of dismissal instead of attention. Instead, I want to be on the look out for Cassandra trope literally and emotionally, in fiction and in reality. Perhaps you’ve been Cassandra, or you know one or wonder if you’ve already encountered one. The Cassandra archetype helps us make meaning and sense out of our experiences, our world and ourselves so we must name when we see it and perhaps change the trajectory of tragedy into a different story. A film example is the terrifically dark comedy Promising Young Woman where Carey Mulligan plays Cassandra, a woman who wasn’t believed about a terrible event which results in a life full of prescient actions and hefty consequences for the ‘good guys’ responsible.

Today we’ve got two non-fiction titles and one fiction, though inspired by true events, where I find emotional and literal parallels to the Cassandra myth. Read these titles and let us attempt to believe the Cassandras we encounter and change the narrative.

WOMEN TALKING by Miriam Toews

I originally shared this book in my very first post2 as it was one of my favorites of 2023.

Both brutal and beautiful, this is a fiction inspired by the true story recounted in the article The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia. Set over two days in a Mennonite community, the story really is of women talking. The men of the colony are away to post bail to free the ones who have drugged and raped most of the women and girls in their sleep over the course of years, having finally been revealed to not be ghosts or demons, but their own brothers, uncles, cousins and relatives. These illiterate women are expected to forgive and welcome the men back into the colony and are meeting to discuss whether they will 1) do nothing 2) stay and fight or 3) leave the colony and in essence their entire world. In a particularly sharp narrative choice the women ask August, a man recently allowed back into the colony after decades away, to take their minutes as they are, again, illiterate. So, this story of women talking is still told through a man’s voice which lends yet another intriguing layer to the proceedings. Each character is nuanced, uniquely intelligent, frustrating and fascinating and I gobbled all of it up, eager to be angry alongside them. But, I also found myself inspired by their hope, wisdom, wit and tenacity.

If God is a vengeful God, then He has created us in His image

I see Cassandra in the fictional women and also in their real life parallels from the Vice article. The Manitoba Colony women were waking up groggy, bruised and bloody with remnants of rope on their person continually. When they finally shared their stories, and found they were far from alone in their experiences, they were not believed. It was more convenient for the men in charge not to believe them and as women in this extremely fundamentalist environment, their testimony held no weight. These “demon rapes” continued for years and, by some accounts, continued after the known perpetrators were sentenced.

In the beginning, the family had no idea that they weren’t the only ones being attacked, and so they kept it to themselves. Then Sara started telling her sisters. When rumors spread, “no one believed her,” said Peter Fehr, Sara’s neighbor at the time of the incidents. “We thought she was making it up to hide an affair.” The family’s pleas for help to the council of church ministers, the group of men who govern the 2,500-member colony, were fruitless—even as the tales multiplied. Throughout the community, people were waking to the same telltale morning signs: ripped pajamas, blood and semen on the bed, head-thumping stupor. Some women remembered brief moments of terror: For an instant they would wake to a man or men on top of them but couldn’t summon the strength to yell or fight back. Then, fade to black.

Some called it “wild female imagination.” Others said it was a plague from God. “We only knew that something strange was happening in the night,” Abraham Wall Enns, Manitoba Colony’s civic leader at the time, said. “But we didn’t know who was doing it, so how could we stop it?”

This particular story is so rage inducing to me because of the almost inescapable dungeon of ignorance the women are imprisoned in. They had no rights, no literacy, no respect and no chance for counseling because:

there are no Low German–speaking sexual-trauma recovery experts in Bolivia. All of the women I spoke with were unaware that the greater Mennonite world, particularly progressive groups in Canada and the US, had offered to send Low German counselors to Manitoba. Of course, this meant that they also had no clue that it was the men in the colony who had rejected these offers.

This specific instance is extreme, but I find the Cassandra of it elsewhere3 when women are treated as less and not allowed the same opportunities of learning, leadership and legal standing as men. The violence and damage this does to everyone cannot be overstated.

A local minister explained to me that girls are schooled a year less than boys because females have no need to learn math or bookkeeping, which is taught during the extra boys-only term. Women can neither be ministers nor vote to elect them. They also can’t legally represent themselves, as the rape case made painfully apparent. Even the plaintiffs in the trial were five men—a selected group of victims’ husbands or fathers—rather than the women themselves.

Extra Credit: Don’t miss the impeccable film adaptation4 written and directed by Sarah Polley for which she won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

SHE SAID by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey

Written by the journalists who won Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting on Harvey Weinstein’s5 long sordid history of sexual harassment, this is a behind the scenes look at bringing those stories to life. I found this to be a fascinating and dynamic look into the arduous and emotionally exhaustive work that goes into long form investigative reporting; endless administrative tasks, countless emails and miles traveled, tracking down hunches and encountering countless dead ends, phone call after phone call to earn the trust of sources, fact checking and quote gathering, painstaking detail work to discover connections, interview after interview after interview recounting traumatic events, the actual writing of the articles and a campaign of harassment, intimidation and coercion to prevent or spin the narrative Weinstein’s way. Then, after all that, the historic inundation of personal stories that launched the #metoo movement into the cultural zeitgeist and brought about the revelations of many other prominent sexual harassment cases in a myriad of industries.

What is most striking here is just how long the harassment had been going on; how much of an ‘open secret’ it was and the immense pressure Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey were under before publication. To bring a story with so many “she said’s” to life still had to be absolutely iron clad to stand up to the power and wealth of someone like Harvey Weinstein who went to extremes to prevent its revelations and bully everyone involved, including the writers, the New York Times and the sources. At times it reads almost like a spy thriller.

The spirit of Cassandra is evident in the women who recounted their stories into a decades long void of disbelief, dismissal and, often, degradation of their careers, mental state and emotional health. There were allegations going back decades and after the initial story came out there were many more. This book goes into some of the personal/professional backgrounds of Kantor and Twohey, their motivations and all-encompassing years of work on the Weinstein story and then the resulting events of the years following its release. Reading this I was consistently struck by how common this story is; remember Larry Nassar? How many Cassandras sounded that alarm and how many more could have been avoided had they been believed and him dealt with immediately? Hundreds.

Extra Credit: There is a movie version, starring Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan, but I don’t think this particular story benefitted from a film adaptation. Though these actors are exceptional, the story is mostly just sitting at tables on the phone or typing on a laptop while on the phone or walking while on the phone making the dialogue and action feel lethargic and stilted with one notable exception. Samantha Morton ‘s character delivers a riveting monologue describing her experience that won’t soon leave you.

The United States had a system for muting sexual harassment claims, which often enabled the harassers instead of stopping them. Women routinely signed away the right to talk about their own experiences. Harassers often continued onward, finding fresh ground on which to commit the same offenses.

CASSANDRA SPEAKS by Elizabeth Lesser

Part memoir, part thought exercise and part toolkit this book tackles our enduring male dominated “origin tales, the guiding myths, the religious parables, the literature and films and fairy tales passed down through the centuries about women and men, power and war, sex and love, and the values we live by” which results in a world where “The male perspective is masquerading as the human perspective.”6 Lesser extrapolates on what would happen if equal amounts of these archetypal foundations were told by women and where our culture, society, politics, economics, literature and history would be if ‘Cassandra’ spoke and people actually listened.

Lesser brings up many interesting topics to muse over as she envisions a new way to do power such as: Mary being the first witness to Jesus’ resurrection aka the first missionary and preacher of the gospel,7 the story of Antoinette Tuff who talked down a school shooter and so de-escalated a situation that resulted in no injuries or deaths, how many of the various lists of ‘greatest’ English books8 have female authors9, her disappointment in the Wonder Woman movie because of all the incredible powers WW has instead of just fighting real good10, a truly thrilling email rebuttal to Jordan Petersen, data and statistics on percentages of female told/led stories in media, sports, public speaking etc, the documentary ‘The Basement Talks’ which “follows the crimes, trial, and murder of John Salvi—and the story of six women, all of them leaders in the pro-life and pro-choice movements, who sought to ensure that it would never happen again” in an attempt to “transform stereotypes into genuine mutual understanding and turn conflicts into collaboration. It helps people see one another as whole human beings, which creates possibilities for lasting change that simply were not present before. It breaks the cycle of polarization.” How incredible are those ideas? Communication!? De-escalation!? Care!? Connection?!

The memoir touches were fairly interesting, and I think correct to personally involve the author, while the third part veered into some self-help-ey, trite, Glennon Doyle-esque vibes which I wasn’t into, though there were some challenges, exercises and practices that were intriguing11. Readers of this newsletter have probably picked up that I’m interested in highlighting the women’s side of myths, tales and legends so that portion was of especial interest to me. I enjoyed this thought provoking premise and will continue to look for more of it. Let me know if you’ve got anything up this alley for me to read.

The world would have been different - and better - if women had had an equal say in the development of literature, medicine, chemistry, physics, peace and economics. Better, not because women are better, but because they are more than half of humanity, representing more than half of what it means to be human.