On the day she was moving in to her new apartment in Boston, October 11th, 1985, 39-year-old poet Nancy Venable Raine was raped by a man who slipped in the kitchen door, which she had momentarily left open to put out some bins. She never saw her assailant because he attacked her from behind then blindfolded her with duct tape before raping and torturing her for three hours.
Afterwards, the police told her that it was a miracle she was alive. Raine wished she were dead. The rape was only the preface to a descent into hell that, by 1991, had convinced Raine that she was going insane. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Raine regularly experienced anxiety attacks during which all the dread of her rapist's fierce rage returned. What the rapist did to her was "worse than death", she felt because she had lost all emotional memory of who she was before the rape.
The day of the rape became the day her former self was murdered, and her fragile, disturbed self was born. October 11th was a grim anniversary which only got darker as she pursued the long, torturous road to an eventual re-birth. If only, she thought in her isolation, rape survivors could celebrate their anniversaries together and show the world what it meant to be murdered in soul, but not in body.
"Trussed up like a chicken" was how a female police detective described Raine's predicament as she lay tied to her bed, blindfolded and bound, her body naked from the waist down, as she was forced to "moan" with "pleasure" by her knife-wielding torturer. At first, the policewoman's metaphor of being tied up like a chicken about to go in the oven was, to Raine, yet another "disgusting image of insult" she would have to assimilate. Years later, in psychotherapy, she realised the metaphor had, perhaps unintentionally, cut to the heart of her rape experience. As she was raped, Raine spontaneously fled her body to "watch" from above, as is common in rape survivors. What she had seen was a "powerless, ugly, worthless object", an image that would haunt her for a decade. The "before the rape" part of her self which hovered over the rape scene was not reunited with her "after the rape" self until she completed the last chapter of her book, After Silence: Rape and My Journey Back (Virago, £18.99 in the UK).
Part unflinching memoir, part spiritual search, part psychological investigation and part sociological document, After Silence is a compelling story which must be read by everyone if we are to have any chance of altering the rape culture we live in.
If you are a rape victim, you may be terrified to read this book for fear that it will renew anguish and trigger nightmares, but After Silence is a healing book in which Raine charts a path through the confusion, isolation and alienation which many rape victims feel. The alienation from self which occurs during rape can last for decades - turning normal, feeling men and women into robots on auto-pilot who feel compelled to behave in ways over which they have no conscious control. This disturbing experience of disassociation is eloquently and fearlessly described by Raine, a poet with the magical, transformative power of language at her disposal.
Most extraordinary, however, is the fact that she dared to write the book at all. First-person accounts by rape survivors are few and far between, and Raine was often discouraged by family and friends who wanted her to "get over it" and "try to forget". But you cannot forget, Raine eloquently explains, a trauma which - some Post Traumatic Stress Disorder experts believe - actually changes the neural patterns of the brain. You cannot forget an experience which is stored in your body, ready to cause a panic attack at any time. And when your rapist has told you over and over again to "shut up", you begin to wonder if it is healthy to obey the order for the rest of your life.
When Raine broke the taboo and talked about the rape, the response she got from family, friends and acquaintances was usually silence, which made it even harder to cope with feeling like a "wooden" woman who knew only how to behave "as if" she was a warm, capable wife and stepmother. But a few responded with empathy because they too had secretly been through the nightmare of rape. A niece who had been raped began to send Raine flowers on her rape "anniversary"; a colleague confided that she had been raped following the death of her husband; a childhood friend revealed that all during her teenage years, her father had been raping her. As she stumbled about the business of recreating a life, Raine began to realise that the violation of rape is not so much the physical assault, which Raine could not even feel because she was in such a state of shock. The violation is the soul murder; the way one human being can tear another from the world of light - from meaning, memory, nature, mother, from Earth and fecundity itself - and plunge the person into darkness.
Two years after the rape, Raine fell in love and married and deceived herself into believing that all was well, but after a honeymoon period she began to project her rapist's motivations onto her husband - as rape survivors often do. Her husband bravely fought back and insisted on playing his part in saving the marriage, even when that meant putting up with a wife who was so self-involved that intimacy was impossible.
Nearly all rape victims feel they are losing their minds because they have lost the ability to trust, both themselves and others, observes Dr Deborah Rose, a psychiatrist specialising in treating rape survivors, and author of "Worse than Death: Psycho-dynamics of Rape Victims and the Need for Psychotherapy", published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1986. This distress is the same in victims assaulted by knife-wielding strangers as it is in those raped by husbands, boyfriends, fathers and acquaintances. Raine was fortunate to have Dr Rose as her psychiatrist beginning in January 1991, five years after the rape, until 1994. Without Rose we would probably not have Raine's desperately needed book.
Despite the pervasive evil of rape, we do not understand it, either from the perspective of the rapist or the victim. Deeply implanted and sublimated in the collective psyche is the notion that women resist "sex" because it is in their nature, while what they really want is to be forced. Our doubts about the veracity of rape victims stem from the mistaken belief that rape is a sexual act. Rape, Raine argues, is an act of violence no more "sexual" than being mugged. "To regard rape as an act of sexual desire is not only an inaccurate notion but also an insidious assumption, for it results in the shifting of the responsibility for the offence in large part from the offender to the victim," she writes.
"I didn't feel I had sex with the rapist. I simply felt my body, including my sex organs, had been attacked. But my failure to die - proof of some kind of `consent' - seemed to slowly and inexorably poison me. When someone implied that my rape was a `sexual thing', I could taste, but not identify, the bitterness of this poison," Raine writes.
Her slow healing began through dreams, in which she began to meet the child self that she needed to reclaim. "Over the course of years of therapy, I internalised my relationship with Dr Rose, just as I had originally done with my family as a child. Only this time I was an adult with an adult's capacity for understanding. I learned to trust her and thus to trust myself. This was how the shattered self had been constructed in the first place, how it had to be constructed again. My relationship with Dr Rose became a model for my relationship to the various aspects of myself - for my consciousness itself." Raine's husband, Steve, re-emerged, recognisable as the man she had fallen in love with, and her rage was transformed, "as stones are smoothed by drops of water of centuries of footsteps". But it was the writing itself which rescued her. "For many nights, I had slipped out of bed in the dark hours before dawn, leaving its warmth and the comfort of Steve's slow, even breathing, to find a woman waiting at the desk where I wrote. I turned on the lamp and sat down. I worked until I could just make out the branches of the elderberry outside my window as the blackness turned to grey. Then I slipped back into bed as the birds began to wake. Turning toward me in his sleep, but not waking, Steve gathered me back in his arms.
"And then one dawn, more than two years later, when I had finally finished this book, I saw that the woman at the desk and the woman in his arms were the same woman again. And there was a gift I hadn't expected. The years of remembering with words had given me back my birthday.
"I was born on July 26th, 1946."