"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.
