Savage Sisterhood: Why Rape Survivors Suffer in Silence

I tried to change. Closed my mouth more, tried to be softer, prettier, less awake. ~Beyonce, Lemonade

When I first saw Beyonce's Lemonade, the above words brought sobs to the surface for me. Because I could relate, as a survivor of male sexual terrorism and its evil sibling, The Savage Sisterhood. I have experienced such gross brutality, along my healing journey. A fate many of us, who have survived sexual terrorism, seem doomed to experience.  ~Deva Fiyah

​The past few days I've been proud of myself and my sisters. Watching those disloyal women abuse me, call me crazy, tell people I was mentally unstable years ago... Yet not mention I was raped and that RAPE is what caused the PTSD I still suffer, was triggering. It makes you not want to connect to people, at all, while you are healing. I know. I understand and I am sorry you all, we all, had to witness and experience that. It takes a while for us to heal. Some of us never recover, I am thankful for the gift of healing. I am one of the lucky ones. These women wanted to use my formerly unhealed spaces, to destroy me. Why?

All too often, in the black community; when a black girl is sexually abused she is disbelieved. Black girls never get to be girls, we come into the world with the cultural, and now global, expectation that we have the cognitive skills and abilities of full grown, never traumatized, adults. We are expected to shoulder tremendous amounts of emotional, financial, and spiritual burdens. To even dare to say you are hurting, as a black woman, to other black women; is seen as some sort of competition and definitely deemed weakness. In our communities, the females are demanded to be "strong" (read: long-suffering) yet are vulnerable because we have no protection from the males of our race. Moreover, the males of our race are our primary attacker/rapist, and are encouraged to be weak and predatory of our femaleness and femininity. To be soft, vulnerable, open, to need support and understanding often makes bw a target for brutality from bw and bm alike.

Many bw have experienced their own mothers not only invalidating the molestation/rape that occurred, but blaming the girl for it. My own mother, at age 7, was molested during a slumber party, by her friends 14 year old brother. When she told, they convinced her she was having a bad dream. They attacked her psyche, and tried to convince her, she'd made it up. Made her question her sanity, gas-lighting it is called, so they did not have to deal with the discomfort of a male, sexually molesting a 7 year old baby girl.  Unfortunately, she grew up to become a woman who continued this sadistic tradition with me, when I was molested as a baby girl. We are called fast in the ass, hot tailed and easy; to dismiss the sexually predatory behavior of black boys and men. Being able to articulate ourselves is tough. Our voices are primarily stomped out, when we have survived sexual terrorism. First by the sexual abuse, and next by the response and reaction of the women in our families and our communities, at large.

Recovering from Sexual Assault is difficult enough on its own. To know that our global climate demands that women "get healing" yet not many are invested in being supportive of women as we achieve that healing, compounds this issue. And too many have a false notion of what that healing should look like. Rape is a curse, do not be deceived, it is a curse against the Divine Feminine. When we have been cursed and we forgive our rapist, we essentially lay down in that energy. We wear it, it steals our life and vitality. We deny ourselves the right to be restored, healed, set free, delivered from the curse of male sexual terrorism. 

The Yoni and the Womb are so delicate, such Divine Intimate spaces in our being. When a man has assaulted your yoni, or a woman for that matter, we store it. We hold it. It turns into dis-ease, into physical manifestations that we did not intend and that do not bode well for us. (cancers, high blood pressure, heart disease, dementia, alzheimers and others.)

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