"With No Immediate Cause"

With No Immediate Cause was the last article that we had read for this week, although it was more like a poem than an article, and a rather depressing poem at that. I feel like Shange put a very interesting angle on how we view not so much the victims of violence and rape, but more so on who is doing the beatings and rape. Throughout the poem she talks about where ever she goes where she sees a man she thinks about if he has raped someone, if has beaten someone, or if he has molested a young child. She started out by saying that every three minutes a woman is beaten, every five minutes a woman is raped and even ten minutes a little girl is molested. Whenever I hear those kinds of statistics one it makes me extremely angry and upset, and two I think about the victims, I wonder if I know any of them, who they are, did they get help, are they doing fine now, I mostly just wonder about the victim. This poem really got me thinking about the other person, the man, he could be the man that sells me movie tickets, he could be the man that plays saxophone in park, he could be the guy that sits next to me in class, once you start to think about it you get really paranoid. It just gave me a whole new perspective on the situation.

There is a quote from a quote in the poem that says “There is some concern that alleged battered woman might start to murder their husbands & lovers with no immediate cause.” When I first that my reaction was a little like this “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!” Chances are if you are being battered by your husband it isn’t just a one time only thing, you are probably beaten on a semi regular basis, and you probably know that you need to get out of the situation but can’t leave because he will beat you, so of course you have immediate cause to kill your husband, he is beating you, and you are probably killing him out of self defense. As it turns out in the end she is being questioned by authorities to establish an immediate cause for what I can only assume to be the killing of her husband, who probably beat her so she killed him. And that is probably why she looks at all the men she runs across and wonders if they do the same things that her husband did.


Emily Suchyta