THE HIDDEN GEMS BEHIND DESPAIR
(Click here to watch the recording from January 31, 2023 in Paris, France)
Hello everyone and thank you for inviting me to be with you today, where the idea is to talk about the hidden gems behind despair. I‘m not really sure how to do that, so what I propose that we do is that I bring a whole lot of gravel, we take it all in together, and see if we can make a pearl, OK?
My name is Thordis Elva but I didn‘t get that name straight away. In my home country of Iceland, after a child is born, the parents wait often a month or two, to see how their child’s personality develops.
After getting to know me, my parents gave me the name Þórdís, which means Thundergoddess.
Dungeons and dragons, much?
My home is a cold, secluded island in the North Atlantic where our colonialisers ensured that we were kept uneducated and practically enslaved until the second world war, sipping death out of sea shells, as we say in Icelandic. That, coupled with active volcanoes, a winter that lasts around nine months per year and land that doesn‘t really sustain any crops that humans can eat, the country didn‘t attract new arrivals for around a thousand years, which made it easy to keep track of everyone. As a result, modern Icelanders can trace their ancestry back eleven centuries, to the first settlers, Hallveig Fróðadóttir and her husband, Ingólfur, who arrived in 873. They had
Þorsteinn
who had
Þórhildur
who had
Þorkell
who had
Ketill
who had
Haukur
who had
Yngveldur
who had
Snorri
who had
Narfi
who had
Snorri
who had
Narfi
who had
Snorri
who had
Ormur
who had
Guðmundur
who had
Þorbjörg
who had
Snælaug
who had
Kristín
who had
Jón
who had
Magnús
who had
Björn
who had
Eggert
who had
Guðrún
who had
Sigríður
who had
Guðmundur
who had
Jón
who had
Guðrún
who had
Jón
who had
Guðrún
who had
Jón
who had
Þorvaldur
who had
me
One of the miraculous reasons why we survived so long in a freezing country where sustaining life is like squeezing blood from an iceberg is because my foremothers were masters at spinning yarn from wool. Spinning and weaving had a mythology of its own, as the threads of people‘s lives were believed to be spun by three magic women whose names translate to Past, Present and Future. They take utmost care spinning our story lines, but when our time is up, they sever it, and that is how we all die.
You see, ever since the beginning, eons ago when time was pristine like new snow that had not yet been blackened by the ages, the legends that have spread far and wide among the people of the earth contain threads spun from a great evil, as well as threads of shining courage and selflessness. People who try to tell you that there are no villains or heroes, that life is not so black and white and it‘s all in the grey zone, that‘s some politically correct bullshit right there. The story we‘re about to spin together has monsters and maidens and acts of unspeakable violence and hard-earned wisdom that can only be spun out of great suffering.
My story line took a sharp twist when I was sixteen and fell in love for the first time. My boyfriend, Tom, was an exchange student from Australia, which is literally as far apart from Iceland as is geographically possible, so together, our love spanned the whole earth, which of course only added to the legendary feeling of first love. *cringe* He was a soft-spoken, well-mannered honor student who charmed my mother and pulled out chairs for me and it all felt very chivalrous and grown up. I had never been seen or treated like a woman before, and I was eager to shed my childhood like old skin. When he took me to the Christmas dance, it felt only natural to try alcohol for the first time too. As a skinny little sixteen year old, the liquor went straight to my head – and from there straight into the toilet bowl, which I hugged for the rest of the evening, drifting in and out of consciousness. I was completely incapacitated to the point where I couldn‘t move a limb or utter a word, and I remember my frustration at my inability to thank Tom as he scooped me off the floor, declined the offer of medical assistance for me, and propped me up in the back of a cab. Nobody but my parents had taken care of me while I was sick before, and I remember how wonderful it felt when he laid me in my bed and pulled off my vomit-stained dress, like a knight in shining armour. But my gratitude soon turned to horror as he proceeded to rape me for the following two hours. The reason why I know how long it lasted is because the way he had positioned me in my bed, my head was turned toward the alarm clock, which glowed in the dark, and all I could do to distract myself from the pain and betrayal was to count seconds, as my tears stained the pillow on each side of my head. Ever since that night, I‘ve known there are 7200 seconds in two hours.
If we set that clock back eleven hundred years, an Icelandic viking called Höskuldur took a trip to an island off the coast of modern Sweden to attend a gathering governed by the king. There, after a drunken night out, he stumbled into the tent of a slave trader, where he honed in on a teenage girl, whom despite her tattered clothes, was priced three times higher than the other slaves due to her beauty. „In the spirit of honesty,“ the slave trader admitted, „I ought to tell you she‘s damaged goods. I believe her to be mute.“
But Höskuldur didn‘t care. He wasn‘t planning on talking to her.
That very night, as her new master, he raped her. Under the illusion that another human being could ever be his to own, he felt entitled.
He took his new property with him to Iceland, where she bore him a son, named Ólafur. When the boy was two years old, Höskuldur was promenading around his land and heard voices. He came upon his slave woman, sitting in the grass, talking to their son. Confronting her with the fact that she wasn‘t mute, he asked her what her name was and where she was from. „I am Melkorka,“ she answered, „and I am the daughter of the King of Ireland, from where I was abducted at the age of 15“.
Her story was later confirmed to be true, and her father the king lived to meet his grandson, Ólafur. But Melkorka herself never returned to Ireland. I suspect she felt too ashamed. Like damaged goods.
Melkorka is my great grandmother 29 generations back, and just like her, I too became mute about the sexual violence I‘d been subjected to. It took me nine years to return the shame I felt to it‘s rightful owner; confronting the boy on the other side of the planet who had plowed into my body, like I was his property. Much to my surprise, Tom took the shame from my tired hands, accepting it along with the burden of responsibility that was never mine to carry. By doing so, he set me free, and as I would later come to learn, it freed him too. Not a day had gone by since that fateful Christmas dance where he hadn‘t been plagued by guilt. He too had silenced himself, isolated himself. He too had abused alcohol, and he too had strung the thread of his life over the blade of a knife just to see if it would snap.
There‘s a common misconception that pearls are the result of a grain of sand accidentally getting inside a shell, where the mollusc starts to coat it. But in reality, almost all pearls are the result of a parasite that weasels its way in, penetrating the shell, forcing the mollusc to make padding around it in order to be able to live with it.
The real parasite in the story we‘re weaving today is the ideology that makes a soft-spoken boy from a home filled with joy carry on the violent legacy of invading women‘s bodies.
When asked why, my perpetrator Tom said:
“My actions that night in were a self-centered taking. I felt deserving of her body. I've had primarily positive social influences, but on that occasion, I chose to draw upon the negative ones. The ones that see women as having less intrinsic worth, and of men having some unspoken claim to their bodies.”
For a long time, I thought Thundergoddess was a silly, over the top, grandiose name. I was ashamed of coming from a isolated rock in the freezing Atlantic with a history that was checkered with violence, despair and life on the humiliating edge of what is humanly possible. I moved far away, asked my new friends to call me T and trained myself to speak English without any trace of my Icelandic origins.
But Melkorka kept haunting my dreams. How strong she was to survive the violence she was subjected to. Her glorious refusal to speak to the men who treated her as property.
And then I learned that her name means red lightning in old Irish.
A fact about thunder is that it always appears after the lightning. In this case one thousand and seventy years later.
I became the first woman in Iceland to publicly break the silence about sexual assault within romantic relationships. And six years ago, I became the first survivor in the world to publicly join forces with my perpetrator as we told our story together in a TED talk and book, with the aim of underlining how nobody has the right to invade another human being‘s body – and subsequently remain protected by their victim‘s silence. That. Legacy. Ends. Here.
In less than a week, we‘d gotten one million views, garnered thousands of comments and hundreds of news items across the global media. Some of the coverage was benign, some of it was malicious but the majority of it didn‘t know how the fuck to portray us. Because yes the villain in this story committed a great evil – but he also embodied the courage to set a historical precedence in stepping up and taking responsibility for the most despised of crimes. And the victim, how dare she break tradition and refuse to carry the burden of shame that has been forced upon women since the beginning of time? Cancel them already!
Although I‘d been prepared for controversy, some of the hostility burrowed its way under my skin like a parasite, the rape fantasies sent to me by strange men, the continued silence by victims worldwide, the frantic chanting of „hang the rapist“ outside of our London book event. The day came where it felt like it had all been in vain, and I could make no more pearls. There were no hidden gems in my gravel, only despair.
That‘s when the weavers of my destiny decided to have my storyline interlace with that of a sixteen year old boy, who sent me the following message:
I live in India, a country where even talking about sex is taboo. It is a country of 1.2 billion ppl and no day passes without an astonishing rape case coming up on news. Till yesterday I used to believe that it is the fault of women that they cannot protect themselves. That they do not feel accountable for their actions. But now I feel I was completely wrong about it.
I saw your TED talk today and it completely changed the way I think about it. I saw the video 3 times because I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I cried after watching it as I feel that I am that part of the society which always create an inhospitable atmosphere for everyone to live in. Your talk has truly inspired me and I pledge today that I will never ever ever think of harming a woman.
That boy made me a pearl. And seven months after I told my story to a global audience, the #metoo revolution took the world by storm, with millions of survivors joining me in breaking our silence.
I‘ve also been gifted an ever-growing necklace of brave boys, who are putting out the torch of violent entitlement handed down to them. Because they‘ve realised that everyone deserves better.
And that is my parting gift to you. Don‘t leave the making of pearls up to survivors alone.
To the perpetrators in this room, because statistically, some of you are, I‘d like to say this: The responsibility for your actions is ultimately yours, and yours alone. Take it, and you will have committed one less evil.
To the survivors in this room, let‘s keep breaking the silence. Speak up, and know that someone out there has a wound in the exact shape of your words.
And to everyone, I wish for the understanding of how our story lines are interwoven, and thus how we‘re all responsible for changing the narrative – together.
Thank you. / Merci
