The Events of October | Reading Response

In chapter seven, "Hold Fast," the first chapter after the murder-suicide takes place, Gail enters the story as a character, listening to President Jimmy Jones speak to the campus, choosing to discuss gun-control as a cause of the act, instead of violence against women. Here, Gail's authority wields the story, as she retrospects, and stated "At this moment the struggle began over how this story would be told" (139).  She's speaking of how Neenef would be seen as a murderer, as a loner, a 'foreigner,' as someone who had gone mad—Maggie, his victim. How the media would construe a story that was easier to tell.  How the media—we, journalists—have the opportunity and the obligation to tell a story the way we believe it should be told.

This was a very tough read for me.  For the past four years, I've harbored some shame for not having read 'the book.'  I remember my first year seminar, barely four weeks into the quarter, walking from Trowbridge to Humphrey House for Di Seuss' Spread the Word: Poetry in Community class. I think I accidentally went to the community reflection. Maybe a friend asked me to go or I was just meandering around, wasting time before my 11:50.  But I remember one of my new seminar friends crying in one of the back pews, weeping over the story of Maggie Wardle and Neenef Odah, and I remember feeling selfish for crying for myself.  At that point I had very little knowledge about violence against women, and what I had learned seemed very external, detached from my own experience.

Four years later, this past October, I attended Gail's talk for the third and last time. I missed her second to last talk my junior year when I was abroad during the fall. As a senior, it's frightening, sickening, for me to realize how different my views on violence against women, particularly within the context of our campus have changed, knowing now how my friends, my family and I personally have been affected.

I'm interested to hear how others interpreted this text. I had to take countless reading breaks. My housemates have been worried about me the past couple days as I've churned through the book. I regret not reading it slowly, but the way Gail has crafted the text, I think she meant for it to pile up, for everything to get compounded so that you can't stop until you've finished.

A quote on page 117 stuck with me throughout the reading, that I had to keep referencing back to in order to remind myself of why we're reading such a difficult, grievous text.

"In many ways, the story of this night is about what the mind cannot grasp. Memory is a trickster in any case; in such a case as this, memory shattered by trauma struggles to piece together a logical story and often comes up with conflicting narratives." 

I think reading this text, written by a professor I know, which takes place at my home, with characters who I still interact with and seeing letters from the president, just like the ones we receive weekly from WO today was a strong lesson in place. As I read the book, I realized the magnitude of Gail's investigation, how many people she must have spoken with, how many hours she must have spent reading IM messages, campus emails, talking to grieving parents. Writing our profiles felt like a lot of work. Taking on a project like Gail seemed unfathomable, and I'm sure it took an amazing toll on her as a writer, a professor and a person within the K community, but seeing how she crafted these narratives makes it much clearer to me why this type of writing in necessary and creates a space for movement and change.