A Doll In His Arms

Eli Clare’s “Stones in My Pockets, Stones in My Heart” discusses his experiences with childhood sexual abuse and the trauma associated with that. I wanted to explore the intersection between Clare’s story and the experiences of the character Inej Ghafa in Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo. Specifically, I was interested in the similarities between how both Clare and Inej found ways to cope with their experiences, and how those experiences impacted them later in life.

Clare frames his father’s sexual abuse of him as a way that his body was “stolen.” He explains that he “lived by splitting body from mind, body from consciousness, body from physical sensation” (Clare 153). His body was taken from him through his father’s abuse, and yet he also removed himself from his body as a coping mechanism for the trauma. This practice is mirrored in Crooked Kingdom. Inej, one of the main characters of the young adult fantasy novel (the second in a duology), also experienced repeated childhood sexual abuse, though hers was not familial. Inej was kidnapped at age fourteen and sold into slavery. She eventually ended up at a brothel, the Menagerie, where she was raped by strangers every night for one year. As a result, she enacted a similar coping mechanism to Clare: “As the nights at the Menagerie had strung together, she had become better at numbing herself, vanishing so completely that she almost didn’t care what was done to the body she left behind” (Bardugo 274). By separating herself from her physical body, Inej could pretend none of it was happening to her. This was further influenced by the fact that none of her assaulters knew her, which contrasts with Clare, since his experiences included the factor of incest. Inej was able to fade into anonymity, both with her assaulters and with herself. The importance of this is emphasized when Inej describes a particularly excruciating night when she was unable to remove herself from her body because a man recognized her (Bardugo 275).

Another similarity between Clare and Inej is found in the effects of trauma later on in their lives, as they both struggle with physical intimacy. Clare describes feeling a lack of desire or interest in sex. He writes that for him, “Sex meant rape – that simple, that complicated” (Clare 154). This resulted in the fact that, as an adult, Clare had no concept of the feeling of sexual desire. When describing his experiences with sexual partners, he explains that “all too often, sex was a bodiless, mechanical act for me as I repeatedly fled my body” (Clare 156). Though Clare is able to engage in sex, something Inej is nowhere close to, the experience remains completely unexciting and unenjoyable to him. He mentions again the concept of leaving his body, since although this kind of sex was not abusive, his trauma maintained that link. Inej has a similar aversion, though hers may be even more severe. Of course, Inej is still seventeen in the present-day events of the novel, so she hasn’t made it as far as Clare yet. However, she describes feeling uncomfortable with any sort of physical touch. In a scene in which she and her love interest (who has his own share of physical and emotional trauma) launch an attempt at physical intimacy, she explains, “Even now, a boy will smile at me on the street, or Jesper will put his arm around my waist, and I feel like I’m going to vanish” (Bardugo 362). Although Jesper is a close friend of hers, Inej cannot put away the effects of trauma because they are written so deeply into her skin. The word “vanish” is repeated from the passage I quoted earlier, which was part of the coping mechanism she used. Here, it seems the practice of removing herself from her body was both positive and negative, since now she can’t seem to control when it happens.

Overall, the experiences of Clare and Inej fall along similar lines, as they both abandoned their bodies to escape sexual abuse. It is important to note, however, that Inej’s story is fictional, while Clare’s is a real autobiographical account. Still, the similarities and differences between these stories intertwine to illustrate a complicated, multi-faceted representation of the experience and effects of childhood sexual abuse.