The Seers — Romanticizing Sexualized Abuse

Xehay came home from work to find me in bed with another man. I asked him to come over. I saw tears in his eyes, though I was sure they were happy tears. He always wanted a child, my darling. And it was going to happen tonight.¹

This is a description of how the mother of Hannah, the main character of The Seers by Sulaiman Addonia, decides to let Hannah be fathered by a new sexual partner and includes her husband into that sexual scenario.

While that in and of itself is entirely fine between consenting adults, this is not what happens here. The context in the book makes it clear that Xehay seems to agree to this after being thrown into the situation, but it is equally clear that he did not agree to this sexual situation before it started.

There are many similar, though less extreme, scenes in the book where Hannah’s mother, Anna, performs sex acts on Xehay without prior consent which are described to be vindicated by his enjoyment or later agreement.

This view of belayed vindication of sexualized abuse is repeated only a few pages after the section at the top of this post. In a state of agitation, Hannah hears her neighbors having sex and, despite being asked to stop, knocks on their door until the man is forced to open the door. She then pulls off the towel he is wearing around his hips and performs oral sex on him without consent.

The book spends not a single word on reflecting that fact. Instead, Mark, the victim, is described to later tell her “I wanted to experience something transcendental.” He goes on “I thought, ah, I thought I’d never get there, but, ah, then, ah, you came… Out of nowhere.”²

I appreciate how this book describes kinky sex acts, in particular in a setting with a woman as the dominant, as a stark contrast to the misogynistic context of colonial Eritrea. Yet, it fails to discuss or even acknowledge that what happens here is abusive. Anna’s and Xehay’s relationship is often portrayed as boundary-breaking in a positive, hope-giving sense, where the boundaries are societal and overcome by the kinky love of the individuals involved.

This revolutionary potential is squandered by the fact that many of the acts are non-consensual. I would even go as far as to say that there is a reasonable reading of the book that celebrates exactly this non-consensuality as the core of what makes this relationship revolutionary. This is supported by the fact that the lack of engagement with the concept of consent is contrasted with an awareness of the larger context “Is it about power for you?”³ Hannah is asked about pegging.

Yes means yes, regardless of gender. And sexual acts without prior consent are abuse, regardless of gender.

This portrayal diminishes efforts by kinky people all around the world to show that their desires are ethical, that they are love, that they are caring. That kinky people cherish and respect each other, even if their sex acts might not suggest that to an outsider. In fact, kinky people have heavily contributed to sketching a world overcoming gender roles. The post-modern understanding of the social construction of gender is tied to both the theoretical approaches and experiences from kink.

Reversing gender-roles in the cycle of abuse in this fiction and romanticizing it hurts all victims of abuse, all victims of the patriarchy. The only answer is the overcoming gender. The book teases this conclusion when Hannah thinks “that imaginations are genderless wombs”⁴, but is never able to use it to reflect upon the abuse detailed within its pages.

It’s sad that this lapse is part of a book that, through Hannah, explores non-conventional love in a breadth of forms.