Male Survivor Memoirs Corpus

• In vast parts of the world, sexual abuse remains an absolutely taboo subject, even more so than in the Anglophone world. Victims of both sexes are devastatingly stigmatized, more so that an outsider might expect, and their families subjected to enormous shame. Being a survivor seriously compromises marriage prospects for both sexes in cultures where the family has a major say in choice of a partner, and murder of the victim can occur if the shame heaped onto a family is intense enough. Boys are routinely blamed for their own abuse, because they should have been sensible enough or strong enough to prevent it: if abuse occurred, then, it’s the boy whom observers blame, and who knows, perhaps he’s a homosexual – another source of enormous shame. It comes as no surprise, for example, that in the Arab world, including both Muslims and Christians in a population of over 450 million, not a single memoir by a male survivor has been published in Arabic. Public revelations of abuse cases rarely occur, though incidents are frequently mentioned informally or privately. The key factors in the silence are shame and suppression. The same seems also to be true of numerous other cultures.
• In some cases the total number of memoirs published in a certain language reflects the activity of authors who published more than one work. It seems that all of the Japanese works, for example, were authored by one man – the renowned writer Osamu Dazai (1909-48), and the four in Icelandic all come from the pen of Jón Gnarr (1967- ), former mayor of Reykjavik.
• A potentially relevant work may be out of print, or may be available in only in libraries within its country of origin, or may now be entirely unavailable, except in unknown private hands. It is impossible even to estimate how many survivor memoirs remain inaccessible or hidden from view for such reasons. In 2020, for example, a 716-page volume of the complete works of the Argentine poet, essayist, and punk musician and performance artist Josué Marcos Belmonte (“Ioshua,” 1977-2015) was published in Buenos Aires, and included numerous works previously unknown outside Argentina.
• It is not unusual for a survivor to write in a second language, which can obscure the nationality of the author. Hamed Abdel-Samed (1970- ), for example, is Egyptian, but he has lived for many years in Germany and wrote his memoir in German. The reasons for this trend vary:
  • The author is now living in a foreign country, or went to school there, and has learned its language, perhaps to the extent that he feels more comfortable writing in his adopted language.
  • He is multilingual and wishes to write in a language that will make his book available to a broader audience.
  • He is multilingual and wishes to reach out with a memoir, but for personal reasons does not want it to be widely accessible in his country or culture of origin.
  • He wrote in his own language, but the text was published only in translation.
• Use of a certain language does not mean the book originates from the country with which that language is primarily associated. French works in the CMSM include books by French Canadian and Belgian authors and an American Samoan raised in Hawaii and Seattle. Spanish works include books published in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Costa Rica (but not, interestingly enough, Hispanic authors in the United States, who so far have always written in English).

One must also bear in mind that the ongoing research for the CMSM is primarily based on online search resources. Methodologies and classifications differ, despite efforts at standardization, with significant results. A search of the WorldCat for sexual abuse memoirs originally written in Spanish will turn up one memoir; the CMSM holds twenty. Also, online resources are dominated by the input of American institutions and so favor books written in English; it is not unusual to find that an important foreign-language memoir is held in no American library. It may be that a book is simply unknown, often because accessions departments lack the skills and incentive to locate and acquire it. Another factor is the many Anglophone institutions will not acquire non-English books (unless a request for a specific book is submitted and justified), either for budgetary reasons or simply because their students lack the skills to read foreign-language books. Other books, despite their importance, are not acquired because they were self-published and thus have been excluded from the Library of Congress cataloging system.

There is also, unfortunately, an arrogant prejudice against non-English works in some Anglophone (especially American) academic circles, where it is not unusual to hear, for example, that if a German work were worth reading it would have been published in English. This is self-evidently absurd. As the critic in question, a professor of psychology at the University of Delaware, has evidently not read such books (and may not know the language), how can she comment on their merit? And of course the problem begins earlier in life: the vast majority of American students in K-12 education do not study a foreign language.