to seek my own revenge

an interview with rape survivor and
collage artist rhonda chittenden

Sexing the Political interviewed Rhonda Chittenden about her provocative collage, "C’est fini!"

View a larger version of the collage.
(It takes a few moments to download.)  d

STP: Although your collage can stand on its own as a testament of one woman’s rage towards the man who raped her, I wonder if you’d be willing to create some context for our readers as to the circumstances of the rapes and your subsequent eleven-year silence regarding the rapes.

RC: In the spring of my junior year, I was 20 years old. I was attending a rural Midwestern university, located in one of the four corners of Missouri. In addition to my academic studies, I was enthusiastically devoted to learning about sex. I reveled in sexual pursuit and sexual pleasure. Much of this learning took place "across the color line," that historically-forbidden boundary reinforced by my family, my peers, and the rural culture within which I was living. During that spring semester, I, a young white woman, was repeatedly stalked and raped by a black male student with whom I had been previously involved.

I didn’t report the rapes or seek any support in coping with the violations. I felt shame not only for being raped, but also for being raped by a person who others, through their taboos and prejudices, had warned me to keep away from.

STP: Tell us how you came to create the collage, "C’est fini!"

RC: While engaged in the therapeutic process, I became incredibly angry about the rapes and the circumstances that silenced me away from seeking justice. At the point in which I decided to create the collage, my anger at F., the rapist, was intense. Had he not lived a long 8-hour drive away, I likely would’ve skipped the collage and attempted to kill him instead. However, saved by geographic circumstances, I set out to create a collage that would symbolize the murder of F. for his crimes of rape. It was to seek my own revenge, if only through art.

STP: The image is very violent.

RC: Yes, it is extremely violent. In it, the symbolic image of F. is karate kicked in the face, hunted down by three women with rifles, and ultimately beheaded. His flesh is torn apart by an eagle, with particular focus on ripping out his heart and tearing off the powerful arm that pinned my hands above my head in one of the rapes. Because it is a very violent representation, it is important to understand that the degree of violence depicted in the collage directly corresponds to the degree of rage that I felt. Not only had I been raped repeatedly by an absolute predator who used fear, manipulation, and massive physical strength to commit his crimes; I was silenced by fear of what a racist and sexist campus and justice system would do me—and what they might do to F.

STP: What did you fear would happen to you if you reported the rapes?

RC: I feared no one would believe me, including my friends. On our small campus, everyone knew that I had been previously consensually involved with F. And it wasn’t like I was a "good girl" who was still a virgin or who only had sex with her boyfriend of three years or who stayed on her side of the color line. I was definitely not, by patriarchal standards of sexuality, a "good girl"! Certainly, there were people who, if they believed that F. raped me, would say I got what I deserved for getting involved with a black man in the first place. I had repeatedly violated white sensibilities and had interracial sex. To some patriarchal bigots—and, rest assured, that part of the country is thick with them—that was likely a greater crime than the rapes! I did not trust the campus community or the local law enforcement to support me in my attempt to seek legal justice against this rapist. And, because of my father’s previous admonishments to me to "stay away from the black guys" on campus, I feared I would not receive support from my family either. Under such isolating circumstances, I couldn’t bear to report the rapes. Instead, and with disastrous emotional consequences, I allowed others’ racist and sexist ideas about who should have sex with whom to shame me into silence.

STP: What did you fear might happen to F. had you reported the rapes?

RC: Despite my lack of feminist consciousness at that age, I did have some race consciousness. I knew of the bloody history of black men falsely accused of raping white women. I was aware of the "strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees"* of the south. And, in Missouri, with the colloquial Mason-Dixon Line a part of its history, the south is, at most, a stone’s throw away. I couldn’t bear to publicly accuse a black man of rape and have the bigots say, "Yep! You know those niggers want to fuck our white women!" I couldn’t bear confirming their stereotype. So, I took to bear instead the sexually and racially charged history of our nation and decided I couldn’t give the bigots, including my father who I loved dearly, any more fodder. I kept my mouth closed. Now I see that this burden not only cost me my pursuit of justice, it likely cost other women their physical safety, as I’m sure F. raped again.

[*A line from the Lewis Allan song, "Strange Fruit," which became a signature song of the late jazz vocalist Billie Holiday.]

STP: If one looks closely at the collage, you can see in the background the face of a white man peaking out from behind F.’s ear. Who is this man?

RC: What you can’t see in the finished collage is that the complete magazine photo of this white man shows him gathering a rope in his hands. If we peeled away the layers of paper in the collage, he’d be standing there ready to tie a noose around F.’s neck and hang him in a tree. This man represents the cultural history behind my story. It is a history that continues to play itself out in the fears and the choices, in the taboos and the fantasies of our nation’s populous. If it weren’t for this sexually and racially charged history, would I have received justice? Would F. have even raped me? Some would ask, would I have been involved with him in the first place? These are some tricky questions that have no easy answers.

STP: What do you say to those who would say that your collage is racist? After all, it depicts the violent murder of a black man.

RC: As evidenced in this interview, there is more to the story told by the collage than meets the eye. This collage does not represent a random act of violence against a man motivated by my hatred of his skin. It is not a labeling of all black men as rapists. It is a response to a particular set of circumstances that have caused me great suffering and pain. It is an honest expression of anger at being violently oppressed by the choice of one black man to rape me, one white woman. It is not an indictment of all black men; in fact, it is a testament to my resistance of such an indictment.

STP: What do you intend by sharing this collage in a public venue?

RC: Most deliciously, sharing this collage is about reclaiming my sexuality from the racist friends, campus, community, and family members whose judgments, verbalized or otherwise communicated, shamed me into silence and kept me from pursuing justice against the man who raped me. I was a bold young white woman who dared to define her sexuality according to her own moral code. I apologize to no one for the early sexual choices I made. They form the foundation on which I now stand as any bisexual feminist woman who is able to love—sexually and more importantly otherwise—across lines of color, nationality, gender, and class. Just because I dared to cross the color line does not mean that I invited or deserved to be raped!

Moreover, I hope that by sharing this collage, I might affirm the experiences of other young white women shamed into silence by the racial implications of being raped by a black man. Theirs is a story rarely addressed by the feminist press, and, when not ignored by the patriarchy, is often sensationalized or perversely depicted as fetish in porn. By going public with this collage—and my story—I hope to convey compassion and encouragement to those who have been brutalized in this way.

Collage and interview © Rhonda Chittenden, 2001
All rights reserved

 site map   |  volume 1 number 2, June 2001