After Silence: Rape & My Journey Back - Softcover

Raine, Nancy Venable

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0609804197 ISBN 13: 9780609804193

Publisher: Crown, 1999

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 writer whose work has appeared in many national publications. She and her husband live on a farm in Virginia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

After Silence

Rape & My Journey BackBy Nancy Venable Raine

Three Rivers Press (CA)

Copyright © 1999 Nancy Venable Raine
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0609804197

Chapter One

THE BIRD

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
--Wallace Stevens, "Of Mere Being"

Some people believe that a bird appears when someone dies to carry the soulaway. Perhaps it is true. A few minutes before I was raped, a bird I had neverheard before flew into the branches of the cherry tree outside my kitchen windowand began to sing. I couldn't see it through the small window over the sink andthe filament of buttery leaves. I saw only jigsaw puzzle-shaped quiverings oflapis sky. It was autumn, a season I thought of as a time of beginnings. I stillmoved to the rhythms of my school years, the year beginning with my walk in newsaddle shoes through the showy woods to catch the school bus, collectingbutternut hickory, oak, and maple leaves to press in my books.

The city trees were at their peak of color when I moved back to Boston after ayear in Maine, where I had taken an extended consulting contract. I felt I wasbeginning again in Boston, although I'd lived there before for nearly a decade.The day I was raped I was settling into a new apartment in a familiarneighborhood, and enjoying the feeling of putting my world in order, leafingthrough books before placing them on the shelves, polishing candlesticks andwashing dishes.

The bird that sang from the cherry tree felt welcoming. I wanted to identify it,but my field guide was hopelessly inaccessible, still packed up in the jumble ofboxes stacked in the living room. So I closed my eyes and listened. I rememberstill that the notes were tumbling down one after the other. They seemed tocarry a singular joy, as if the light of the Indian summer day were becomingsound.

I remember, too, that the song brought to mind something I had read a few daysbefore in Henry Beston's The Outermost House and made note of in myjournal, about animals having senses we have lost or never had, about themliving by voices we shall never hear. I had grown up in the country, andunderstood exactly what Beston meant. The creature that miraculously producedthis sweetness was beyond my measure, a mysterious gift. Listening to the songwas a prayer, a sudden and effortless motion of my being outward. Even in thecity, nature went about her own affairs--birds sang, the leaves on the citytrees blazed, and the weeds in vacant lots turned their flowers into stiff wombsfull of seeds. In those last minutes before my terror began, I felt blessed.

As suddenly as it had appeared, the bird--a migrant, perhaps, on its waysouth--flew away and the mutterings of the city returned--traffic on the busyavenue a block away, a distant siren, the shouts of children playing baseball. Ireturned with renewed concentration to my tasks. I unpacked my kitchen utensilsand put them in a drawer. I sharpened my kitchen knives and laid them on thecounter. Then I filled a plastic bag with packing paper and dragged it out ofthe back door to the metal garbage cans at the side of the house. The air was asummery dream, sweeter still because a New England winter paced impatiently inthe wings. As I stuffed the trash bag into a can, my back to the kitchen door, Ilistened for the bird, but it was gone. When I returned to the kitchen, I lockedthe back door behind me.

There is nothing more reassuring than a locked door--unless you've locked thedevil in with you.

I am standing at the sink, washing a pan. I see my kitchen knives on the counter. I am always seeing my kitchen knives. I am still standing at the sink, washing a pan.

A storm from behind, and impact. It sucks away the air around me in a great rush. I cannot breathe. Rage is turning the air to pumice. I cannot hear. Something in my eyes. The pain is in my eyes. I am closing my eyelids but they do not meet. Something is in my eyes, something is coiling around my neck, something alive. Something furious and terrible. Words, but I cannot hear them. I am thrashing in the air. There is a foul odor. My body is on fire from inside. My blood is rushing as if trying to escape. I hear only it. There is no air. It is all going out of me. Who is screaming? I do not know who is screaming. I cannot breathe.

Now I hear the words. These are the words I hear: Shut up shut the fuck up you bitch you dirty bitch you fucking cunt shut up do you hear me you fucking dirty bitch I'm going to kill you if you don't shut up you bitch Im going to kill you.

Now I am sucking air into my lungs. I am prey, grasping for air.

Now I have a thought: So this is Death.

Now I have a feeling: Anything to live.

Now I feel something hard pressing against my back. I know what it is. It is a penis.

Later I wondered, Did the man who raped me hear the birds song? And if so, whatdid the notes sound like in his ear? How could he have heard what I heard andstill be what he was? Was the bird a warning that I should have heeded? Howcould I have felt so alive and not have sensed his shambling darkness drawingnear? Had I not been awake at all, but asleep? I could not trust even my mostfundamental perceptions. The feelings of wholeness evoked by my connection withnature, feelings that had been a glimpse of heaven since my childhood, weretransformed in an instant into feelings of foreboding.

In a single moment, I was robbed of what had always soothed me. A bird's songbecame a harbinger of evil, the prelude to a season in the underworld.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

The rapist was wearing slippers. This, the police said, suggested he had plannedhis attack. The slippers were enormous and my description of them was all thepolice had to go on. It wasn't enough. He attacked from behind and from thefirst instant had the advantage--stealth and surprise. His right arm held myneck in a stranglehold and I could not extricate myself. The fingers of hisother hand dug into my eyes. After he had me immobilized, only my feet kickingout wildly, he hesitated for an instant. It came to me then that my mouth wasstill free. Words. I still had words. I spoke words as he began to push metoward the bedroom. Words that tried to reason where there was no reason. I wasstruggling against the movement forward with all my strength and speaking thewords. His fingers slipped from my eyes briefly and I saw his foot, a dirty,worn slipper. To this day the sight of a dirty slipper makes me gag.

He threw me on the bed facedown, his knee in the middle of my back. He presseddown with his full and great weight so that I thought he might snap my spine intwo, like a twig. At this point I became intensely focused on him and a strangecalmness suddenly displaced my terror. He grabbed my arms and bound themtogether behind me with duct tape. Then he jerked my head up by grabbing ahandful of hair and spun the tape around my head, over my eyes. "Don't do this,"I said. "Shut up, you bitch, or Ill break your arms." He pulled my bound handsupward toward my head to demonstrate, but I felt no pain. Then he threw me overon my back, and sitting on my hips, tore open my shirt, jerked my bra up aroundmy neck, unzipped my jeans, and pulled them down as far as he could withoutshifting his position. He then had to stand beside the bed to get them all theway off, fighting against my shoes, flats that fit snugly. Then he yanked off myunderpants. At that moment, time disappeared into a continuous present.

Over the next three hours he raped me and tormented me with descriptions of howhe would kill me with a knife, telling me exactly where he would cut me. Ormaybe, he said, he would smother me with my pillow. He seemed undecided aboutthe method. Many times he did cover my face with the pillow and press it down sothat I could not draw a breath. Each time I expected to die, but he alwaysrelented just before I lost consciousness. He slapped my head with open palmsafter these episodes, the way you swat a fly.

Continues...

Excerpted from After Silenceby Nancy Venable Raine Copyright © 1999 by Nancy Venable Raine. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0609804197
• ISBN 13: 9780609804193
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 278