Tupa TjipomboBesprekingen
Auteur van I Am Not Your Slave: A Memoir
Besprekingen
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Eventually, however, the subject of sex began to dominate the one-sided conversation. He told us all about his sexual preferences, divulging things that, prior to my time with the Jackal, would have shocked me. As he spoke, it became clear that the apartment was a place that he and several other men rented so they could fulfill their sexual fantasies. It seemed like many women had passed through the place prior to us, undergoing all kinds of sexual ordeals, most of which revolved around bondage, dominance, and various acts of sadism.
And this:
As the women dressed, I could see that their costumes were meant to represent different parts of the world. Each costume was so scant, however, that there was hardly anything to work with; some were little more than strategically placed bits of cloth in the national colors of some mysterious foreign country. [My friend’s] costume consisted of an extremely short and very revealing white skirt—if it could be called that—with a matching top that was not much wider than a belt, which she tied somewhat futilely around her ample breasts. I looked own at myself. Like the other costumes, mine was basically nonexistent and intended to be revealing as possible. My breasts were completely exposed.
This isn’t how women describe their experiences of sexual exploitation, it’s how straight men describe their pulp fiction fantasies of women's sexual exploitation, and it makes one wonder how much of the narrative was dictated by Lockhart’s imagination. Descriptive language isn't the book's only questionable element: Tjipombo, for instance, goes from never having seen a touchscreen phone in her life to defeating its passcode after stealing it from an unnamed high ranking World Food Programme official at an oasis sex party in Dubai and using it to blackmail him—for some reason he is incapable of locating the phone via its GPS function or contacting the provider to cut service, even weeks after Tjipombo takes it—all of which further stretches the book’s credibility. By the time Tjipombo meets the Madame With a Heart of Gold(TM), who, unlike every other pimp whose path she’s crossed, frees her despite her popularity with johns because “You do not belong here my dear. I have known this from the beginning. Africa is your full-time home,” few readers will be able to suspend any disbelief.
Human trafficking is real, but this sort of over the top probable fictionalizing does a disservice to the victims whose cause it’s ostensibly trying to support.