She watches women, mostly white women, with distrust and suspicion. Vivian, from a working-class family, judges other women harshly. “The camera recorded two selves: a self that was limping and wearing a face of cheerless efficiency, and an identical self, defensively crouched and shaking against the wall, watching the other struggle to walk.” “She had a sensation that she was being filmed,” Johnson writes. It was like there was a listening device inside her head. Written in the third person, the closeness of her character resembles the reader spying and eavesdropping on her every action and word. The unruly duo embraces the painful trauma of their rape with dark humor: “They felt united together against everyone else, and considered themselves The only People Talking About Rape, the Only People Brave Enough to Mention Rape Indiscriminately Whether in a Classroom or at Parties, in a Crowded Café or Your Grandmother’s Living Room While Everyone Else in the World is Completely Useless in this Area.” The women get high and trade tales of their survival from childhood sexual abuse. With all of these facts under her belt, Johnson creates a modern Black woman struggling to fight the toxic effects of rape from warping her consciousness.įollowing the downer that is her job, Vivian tries to shake off the entanglements with her troubled clients, meeting up wither bestie, Jane, an old friend from law school. The National Center on Violence Against Women details four grim statistics, in the Black Community, on this topic: for every Black woman who reports rape, at least 15 Black women do not report one in four Black girls will be sexually abused before the age of 18 one in five Black women are survivors of rape, and thirty-five percent of Black women experienced some form of contact sexual violence during their lifetime. Black women are often the forgotten survivors of rape.

Usually, the tough issue of rape is a staple of crime fiction or memoir, but this is the rare work of fiction that tackles sexual violence in the African American community, beyond the gritty streets of the ghetto. Also, she believes the doctors and nurses want to keep the ill inside the institution and her job is to get them out, to provide expertise for them to avoid the iron grip of the hospital. This confidant, smart attorney, a hip 30-something, believes the state is the enemy of the people, convinced that profit and power are designed to keep patients off-balanced and helpless.

Her main character, Vivian is a lawyer who advocates for those deemed deranged at a New York City psychiatric facility. Chantal Johnson’s debut novel, Post-Traumatic, confronts the emotional toll of sexual assault, a real-life survivor narrative, with the prickly residue of mental demons.

Chantal johnson post traumatic