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 After Silence: Rape & My Journey BackNancy Venable Raine (1998) In this remarkable memoir, Nancy Venable Raine attempts to chart the social and political implications of rape and its aftermath. As she responds implicitly to her rapist-who in 1984 assaulted her in her own home and ordered her to "shut up" about it-Raine asks how it is possible to celebrate survival if one is alone and silent. Silence, whether or not it is experienced as shame, produces the perception of shamefulness. Of course the reason some victims of sexual assault are silent is not only because they find it difficult to speak of what they have experienced. Silence is a social phenomenon, and as Raine charts her own silence for a decade, she remembers how others reacted in horrified silence to her rape. Silence, says Raine, makes it harder not only for victims but for everyone - we don't know what to do with the feelings we experience on hearing about and seeing victimization. If "no one wants to hear about such terrible things," as she is devastatingly told when she informs someone she's writing a book about rape, then the raped self cannot exist socially, in relation to others. Raine's writing is thus defiant, resilient, hopeful, and celebratory of herself and her relationships with others. Throughout the memoir she delights in her own voice, crafting a deliberately poetic narrative, recovering rape stories in ancient myth (such as the myth of Persephone and Demeter) and interweaving them with her own story. Raine follows Brownmiller in seeing rape as a crime of violence rather than sex, and she even goes so far as to claim that the emphasis on sexual violation can get in the way of seeing rape for what it is, as a horrific act of interpersonal violence. Ultimately, this book is interested in how we talk about rape as a culture, and in how rape can be more fully talked about by survivors-what voices can adequately convey their brokenness and violation, what's left of them besides fear, or shame, or rage. |