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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created: September 30 2002
Latest Update: September 30, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Rape: Recovery and Recreating a Life
Reviews and Commentary on
After Silence: Rape and My Journey Back
by Nancy Venable Raine

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, September 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This is an incredible book. Nancy Venable Raine speaks softly, speaks openly of her pain, but balances the pain with cognitive and aesthetic discourse that soften the pain enough that we can bear to read it. I haven't finished the book yet. I'm only about halfway through. I had to put it down to summarize it for the site so you would all have access to it. I did that pretty well. I created a rape recovery index to which we'll add our own comments and those of others over time. But I wasn't comfortable. Images kept invading my workspace - images from the goddess book we shared earlier, and images for Ruether's Sexism and God-Talk.

So I took a brief moment out to draw some of those images. I figured I could paint them and still have enough time to put up site material. Hah! I have almost no sense of time. But something strange happened. That little Corel Photo House program, the one that came with my computer, just stopped working. Right in the middle of the drawing. I couldn't get it to draw. I couldn't get it to paint. I couldn't get it to erase. I didn't have time to upload an art program and figure out how to play with it. I just had a few minutes. Then I took a deep breath and looked at the drawing.

Drawing by jeanne.

Rape Unfinished:
Feeling my way along with Nancy Venable Raine
through After Silence

Just the way it is, right where the program stopped working, seems to capture what I was feeling. I am only halfway through the book. But I couldn't wait for the end to tell the whole story. I needed to share now, for I, too was raped. I was about three at the time. That makes it about 64 years ago. We didn't have post traumatic stress syndrome. We didn't have counseling or rape crisis centers. I was just a little tyke who had to manage to take care of herself because she knew that if she told her parents her father would kill the man. Oh, and the man was there. He lived nearby.

My daddy sounded just like her Daddy:

"One morning . . . my father said out of the blue, "If I ever got my hands on that sick bastard, I'd kill him, slowly. First, I'll castrate him." The taste of my father's rage was bitter and unwelcome. My rage, too, was monstrous. But when its back broke the surface, its hidden vastness terrified me; the wake it left swamped me, sent me tumbling into frigid water with nothing to cling to. I could not bear to look upon its barnacled head, fearing it would swallow me whole. It would surface much later and in disguised forms that did not seem to resemble it but were its spawn nonetheless. It had gone down to the bottom with fish --- to metamorphose. I knew my father needed to torment his invisible enemy, needed the words. But I already knew they would not bring release. They would snare him and make him feel more helpless."
At p. 50.

So that's why I didn't tell my parents. I was more afraid of that barnacled head than I was of the "man." How could I have known that at less than three years of age? The same way we know many things. Emotional responses we could never articulate, for they are not reasoned, they just "are;" they are our authentic reactions to the world in which we live. The words may also be authentic. But they are filtered through a language that includes all that we've learned, and all the baggage we carry.

Thank you Nancy, for the words. You were in your thirties when "it" happened. I was not yet three. But sixty-four years later I had still never formulated those words that might have comforted. I just experienced loneliness, rather thoroughly. And that has never really gone away.

In the drawing interruptus I started with jigsaw pieces in which I planned to put small pieces of life before "it" happened. Then in a deep reddish brown (red for hell, and brown for earth) I began to draw woman recreating herself, borrowing some of the pieces from the old jigsaw puzzle, but also discovering they did not fit. Note her right leg akimbo. But I stopped to draw "I am woman - a tiny triumphant dream of wholeness down in the right corner. Her heart and breast became icons for the sacred triangle. Remember the sacred triangle?

And with the sacred triangle returned memories of the Indian Goddesses, for my central figure already had multiple arms. I only intended one breast, not sure why, just that's how I saw her. But then from somewhere came the Egyptian eye. And I tried that out in the place of a breast. But it balanced the other breast too well. My heroine here was never that balanced after "it" happened. So I tried to move the eye down, which is where the little rectangle came from as I tried to pull it lower and the program refused to work.(Sorry, the little rectangle only shows in the program that won't work.) I had already put a larger eye in the left lower corner with the flailing leg. Maybe I would have gotten to cubism, but then the program crashed.

At some point I had started a pedestal I meant to decorate in a manner worthy of a queen. But the program crashed. Maybe our thrones are a little like that. They crash.

Writing a Woman's Life (Carolyn Heilbruner) was hard enough. Reconstructing a Woman's Life is really tough. But "I am woman. And I reconstruct."

And now the little Corel program is working again, well, sort of . . .

Woman Reconstructing Herself
Feeling my way along with Nancy Venable Raine
through After Silence