After Silence: Rape and My Journey Back - Hardcover

Raine, Nancy Venable

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0517706830 ISBN 13: 9780517706831

Publisher: Crown, 1998

Synopsis

"Silence has the rusty taste of shame. The words shut up are the most terrible words I know. . . . The man who raped me spat these words out over and over during the hours of my attack--when I screamed, when I tried to talk him out of what he was doing, when I protested. It seemed to me that for seven years--until at last I spoke--these words had sunk into my soul and become prophecy. And it seems to me now that these words, the brutish message of tyrants, preserve the darkness that still covers this pervasive crime. The real shame, as I have learned, is to consent to them."

After Silence is Nancy Venable Raine's eloquent,  profoundly moving response to her rapist's command to "shut up," a command that is so often echoed by society and internalized by rape victims. Beginning with her assault by a stranger in her home in 1985, Raine's riveting narrative of the ten-year aftermath of her rape brings to light the truth that survivors of traumatic experiences know--a trauma does not end when you find yourself alive.
        
Just as devastating as the rape itself was the silence that shrouded it, a silence born of her own feelings of shame as well as the incomprehension of others. Raine gives shape, form, and voice to the "unspeakable" and exposes the misconceptions and cruelties that surround this prevalent though hidden crime. With formidable power and in intimate detail, she probes the long-term psychological and physiological aftereffects of rape, its tangled sexual confusions, the treatment of rape by the media and the legal and medical professions, and contemporary cultural views of victimhood.
        
For anyone, female or male, who has suffered from or witnessed the shattering effects of rape, After Silence inspires and points the way to healing. This landmark book is a stunning literary achievement that is a testimony to the power of language to transform the worst sort of violation and suffering into meaning and into art.

About this title

About the Author

Nancy Venable Raine is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in many national periodicals.  She and her husband live on a farm in southern Virginia.

From the Back Cover

Praise for AFTER SILENCE

"Poet and essayist Raine's fearless and probing work may be among the most eloquent as well as the most intelligent accounts to date....Regardless of whether the reader or a loved one is a rape survivor, there is much to be learned from this excellent work about the nature of rape and survival."
--Booklist

"After Silence is a personal road map of the journey back to wellness after one's body has been violated. How sad it is we need such a book, but since we do, how wonderful it is we have it."        
--The Honorable Pat Schroeder, former U. S. congresswoman and President and CEO of the Association of American Publishers

"Deeply thought-provoking and emotionally powerful, After Silence made me rethink many of my ideas and feelings about rape. Nancy Raine addresses issues that many others have addressed before--but she does it on a much more profound and visceral level than I have yet seen."        
--Mary Gaitskill, author of Bad Behavior and Because They Wanted To

"This is the most important book ever written about rape. It breaks new ground in personalizing and contextualizing the aftershock of trauma. I am deeply grateful that Nancy Venable Raine has chosen to break her silence about this still fraught and dangerous topic."
--Louise DeSalvo, author of Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work

"What Nancy Venable Raine gives us in After Silence is a brilliant and complex vision of evil and redemption. Taking us with her on her journey, she moves us back by inches from the brink of Hell. Like all seminal works, this book will change the way we think. It will change the way we consider the 'we and they' of rape."
--Lynn Freed, author of The Mirror

"This is an inspiring account of how a shattering experience, with its insidious effects long after, can be transcended by literature. The journey back is truly the riveting and original contribution her book makes to the subject."        
--Diane Johnson, author of Le Divorce

"Who could imagine such a calm, wise, beautifully written book on the subject of rape? After Silence is a gift to others who, like Nancy Raine, have triumphed over terror. It's also a gift to the friends, family, spouses, and partners of rape victims. To read this book is to understand."
--Cyra McFadden, author of The Serial

From the Inside Flap

e has the rusty taste of shame. The words shut up are the most terrible words I know. . . . The man who raped me spat these words out over and over during the hours of my attack--when I screamed, when I tried to talk him out of what he was doing, when I protested. It seemed to me that for seven years--until at last I spoke--these words had sunk into my soul and become prophecy. And it seems to me now that these words, the brutish message of tyrants, preserve the darkness that still covers this pervasive crime. The real shame, as I have learned, is to consent to them."

After Silence is Nancy Venable Raine's eloquent, profoundly moving response to her rapist's command to "shut up," a command that is so often echoed by society and internalized by rape victims. Beginning with her assault by a stranger in her home in 1985, Raine's riveting narrative of the ten-year aftermath of her rape brings to light the truth that survivors of traumatic ex

Reviews

On October 11, 1992Athe seventh anniversary of her rapeARaine determined that she would write about her assault and recovery. Six years of reflection and wide-ranging research served this talented writer well, for her account, studded with references to everything from Greek myths to government statistics, is fascinating and surprisingly readable. Raine describes the rape itself with remarkable objectivity. Then she describes the many small steps that she, like so many other rape victims, took to cope with the shame and ruptured faith that were the cruel legacy of her attack. After a period of relative isolation, followed by a stretch of believing she had "gotten over it," Raine was hit with intense depression. But the psychotherapy she underwent at the timeAcombined presumably with the writing of this bookAhelped bring her at last to a place where she can voice the pain of her experience, even if she can't erase it. Skillfully interwoven into this narrative are insightful digressions into, for example, the neurological underpinnings of post-traumatic stress disorder and the psychology behind that powerful emotion, shame. Neither self-pitying nor shrill, Raine has achieved an impressive balance between a starkly candid memoir of personal trauma and an ingenious literary discussion of an all-too-often unspeakable crime.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An exquisitely written account of a personal journey to hell and back. Raine's story of coming to terms with the rape that occurred when she was 39 years old is at once emotionally searing and insightful. A writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and Southern Poetry Review, Raine writes with a rare eloquence even as she describes the most horrible scenes and emotions. As she waits in the hospital for medical help, for instance, after being raped and tortured for three hours, she describes herself as ``the scene of a crime.'' The woman she was before the rape has simply disappeared. ``The rapist had stolen something at the center of what I had known as myself,'' she confides. ``The rapist himself might be caught, but he could never produce the woman who had not been raped.'' This book is Raine's attempt to rediscover that woman. While some memoirs are forthrightly revisionist, Raine courageously leaves no part of her inner soul unbared and no social taboo unquestioned as she seeks to better understand one of America's most unspeakable crimes. Using herself as an example, she explains how rape survivors frequently absorb the self-loathing and hatred that so often propel rapists to commit their crimes. She questions society's discomfort with this so-called ``sexual'' crime and how our unwillingness to acknowledge and discuss rape-- none of her friends ever asked her exactly what happened--helps to perpetuate victims' angst and shame. And Raine meticulously explains how post-traumatic stress syndrome commonly affects rape survivors years after the actual event. This elegiac odyssey toward understanding will speak to anyone who has undergone a similar disaster and brings lightt o a subject generally cloaked in darkness. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In the years since long-kept silences were broken by the women's movement of the '70s, numerous accounts of rape survival have illuminated the profound impact of rape on all members of society. Poet and essayist Raine's fearless and probing work may be the most eloquent as well as one of the most intelligent accounts to date, informed both by her own experience as a woman who was brutally raped and by current research on the effects of trauma (including studies pointing to a biological basis of post-traumatic stress syndrome). Incorporating the work of traditional and contemporary theorists into a narrative spanning more than a decade of her own recovery, Raine reiterates the idea that rape is about power and control, not sex, and explores the emotional fallout experienced by rape victims, such as loss of identity, self-blame, anger, and isolation. Regardless of whether the reader or a loved one is a rape survivor (and statistics suggest this would be a huge audience), there is much to be learned from this excellent work about the nature of rape and survival. Grace Fill

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0517706830
• ISBN 13: 9780517706831
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 278