Sarah Booker

Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence—an indispensable book for thinking through this reality, as understanding it is almost impossible—Adriana Cavarero reminds us that terror manifests when the body trembles and flees in order to survive.1 The terrorized body experiences fear, and upon finding itself within fear’s grasp, attempts to escape it. Meanwhile, horror, taken from the Latin verb horrere, goes far beyond the fear that so frequently alerts us to danger or threatens to transcend it. Confronted with Medusa’s decapitated head, a body destroyed beyond human recognition, the horrified part their lips and, incapable of uttering a single word, incapable of articulating the disarticulation that fills their gaze, mouth wordlessly. Horror is intrinsically linked to repugnance, Cavarero argues

who suffer have faced horror and come back. The language of pain allows those who suffer, those who acknowledge their suffering and share it with others, to articulate an inexpressible experience as an intrinsic criticism against the sources that made it possible in the first place. When everything falls silent, when the gravity of the facts far surpasses our understanding and even our imagination, then there it is—ready, open, stammering, injured, babbling—the language of pain, the pain we share with others

Writing with others. Grieving like someone who takes refuge from the

So much has happened since, but it was right after the paralysis of my first contact with horror that I chose language. I wrote before my sister was mercilessly murdered, but I truly began writing, and writing for her, when my missing her became physically unbearable. I did not write to avoid pain, just the opposite. I wrote, and write, to grieve with others, which is the only secular way I know to keep her alive. I do not want to avoid suffering. I want to think through and with pain, and to painfully embrace it, to give it back its beating heart with which this country—these countries—still palpitates

Confronting Medusa, who is also a head separated from a body; confronting Medusa, who is also a decapitated woman, I avoid the mirror, which is another way of avoiding being turned into stone, and I accept the consequences, all human and all final, of words. These are my sentences.

social historians are to be believed, much of what was written about and by the Mexican state at the end of the nineteenth century was done using the language of medicine

We aren’t going to adopt this place, we’re going to be part of its neglect,”

We aren’t going to adopt this place, we’re going to be part of its neglect,”

“I, on the other hand, have terrible things to say to myself, and I say them,”

“My therapist says when you talk out loud without stopping for a long time, and you really listen to yourself, the mysteries end up coming out of the tangle of your subconscious,