The Pen and the Sword

This is probably going to sound strange in a culture so steeped in fear and misogyny that a woman walking alone at midnight is seen as asking for trouble, but I’m going to say it anyway.

I am a female-bodied person and I feel safer at night than I do during the day.

And this isn’t because I feel unsafe during the daytime. I am quite happy, and feel perfectly secure, when going outside during the daylight hours. So it’s not the product of insecurity–no, this is because I, quite genuinely, feel safe at night. This is, most likely, in part because I have been privileged to have grown up in fairly safe, upper middle class neighbourhoods–overall, there’s no reason for me to be scared at night because there’s nothing to be scared of. But it’s more than that. It is most definitely more.

So here’s the question: why?

To start off, some background. I’m a writer–not a published or a professional writer, but a writer nonetheless–and I have spent a fair amount of my time honing my craft. As such, I am very aware of the power of words. I am easily able to take an innocent thing, something concrete and measurable (the absence of light) and twist it into something abstract, or symbolic–something frightening or horrifying, disgusting or sinful, dangerous or malevolent or just plain bad. It’s easy. It’s all about word choice. I add some suffocating shadows here, some crawling blackness there, a touch of chill night air and a bit of darkness lurking between the street lamps and you’re already dancing to my tune. A few adjectives, and the atmosphere is tangible–it’s a symbol, and it’s something I can manipulate.

So why not manipulate it?

What if I said the shadows were not suffocating, but dancing? What if I told you there was a soft blanket of darkness over everything, and the night air was sweet instead of chill? What if you walked out into the freedom of the night to see the purple shadows and the soaring blackness of the sky? What if the gathering dark smiled at you?

When I reach for descriptions of darkness, these are the ones that spring to mind.

Much of this, I imagine, originated with my love affair of epic fantasy when I was a child. I remember reading The Sword of Shannara at eight or nine and being fascinated with the way the protagonists crept through the dark. I’ve read the Belgariad and the Malloreon series more than once, and it didn’t escape my notice how so often the journeys would start in secrecy, in the dead of the night. And as for my ultimate childhood favourite, The Hobbit, wherein the main character is consistently described as “the burglar” and is sent sneaking off through the darkness more times than I can count–well, I’ve owned my copy of the book since I was six years old and I’ve started to wear out the pages. From a young age, I have associated darkness and night time with adventure, freedom, secrecy, and concealment that I could use to my advantage. Like the protagonists of my old favourites, darkness keeps me safe from the enemies who are hunting me.

It does not escape my notice that a lot of the reasons I cite for loving darkness are the same ones given for why more crimes are carried out at night. The dark is concealment. The dark is safety. In the dark, no one can see you to stop you from doing what you want. And while I don’t intend to become a criminal anytime soon, I cannot deny that the fact that I can fall back on that same security is appealing to me. Because, here’s the thing–in a lot of ways, I can identify with those criminals. Or, to put a better spin on the metaphor, with the protagonists of epic fantasy.

Look at it this way. While the details of the stories I mentioned vary by the tale, the core of the plot is essentially the same: a group of protagonists set out a dangerous quest to obtain something valuable and vanquish their enemies, pursued by villains at every turn, demonized by the governments that surround them, and forced to rely on each other, their wits, and the individual talents and idiosyncrasies of each group member.

Can any feminist or queer rights advocate or anti-racist or anti-ableist or any other activist out there look at that and tell me it doesn’t sound familiar?

In a lot of ways, we’re a lot more like those protagonists than we think we are (even if they are most often male, straight, cis, white, and abled). We’re fighting for something that the dominant culture doesn’t want us to have. We’re attacked at every turn by people who don’t want to upset the status quo, forced to go into hiding and be subversive and adopt guerrilla tactics, told to shut up and to stop “flaunting” our differences. We’re pushed into groups of people we may not get along with, simply because there is no other alternative–these are the people who want the same things as we do, and while our methods may not always be compatible, it’s better than setting up camp with the other side. To be an activist, you have to be clever and crafty and supportive–and yes, sometimes you have to sneak around in the dark where they won’t notice you until you’re already gone.

Or, to go back to that crime metaphor I mentioned earlier, a lot of us are criminals. Maybe not legally, not anymore, at least not in North America–but socially, culturally, we are criminals. We are outcasts. We are unwanted. We are the dregs of society, the undesirables, the people who are erased from the smiling ideal of the thin, fit, attractive, abled, cis, white, straight couple and their two charming, average, normally developed children, middle-class income, suburban house and family dog.

And if the quests of epic fantasy have taught me anything, it’s that night is the safest place for the people who want to upset the current order.

So there you have it. If darkness is a symbol, which it undoubtedly is, I am going to make it my symbol. I am not going to allow it to become a symbol of fear, something I should avoid if I don’t want to be raped, something that is dangerous and unsafe and too horrifying for a frail woman like me. Instead, darkness is my adventure, the siren call of my wanderlust, the start of the journey that my quest will take me on. Darkness is my freedom, the safe blanket that allows me to slink about unnoticed while I fight to upset the villain who has stolen my rights from me. Darkness is the power that allows a small group of revolutionaries to outwit armies, overcome impossible odds, take back what has been taken from them, and become a band of chosen ones. And as an activist, I am committed to this: rather than fear the demon in the darkness, I will be the demon in the darkness.

The only ones who have anything to fear are the ones so powerful that they’d never think to be afraid in the first place.