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Interview With Shani Mootoo

Shani Mootoo is a Vancouver artist and a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. In 1989, after participating in both individual and group counselling, Shani made the courageous decision to confront sex offenders with her personal story at the Stave Lake Correctional Centre. I interviewed Shani in her home on May 13 and asked her to relate the steps in her healing process.

Q: What prompted you to begin to explore your childhood sexual abuse?

A: The abuse went on from the time I was 2 years old until I was about 13, by different people in different situations. It was something that I learned very young not to talk about, not to ever mention, and I never realized that it affected me deeply. When I was at university I had a very difficult time and I never linked it to sexual abuse. It never occurred to me that it was a problem at all until I was married for a year, and the reason that I left my husband was, there were a lot of reasons that led up to it, but the night that I left him he attacked me. That night suddenly a dam broke inside of me, and I realized that I actually really hated what was done to me when I was a child. I had no feelings about it; all I knew is that I should not speak about it, and when he attacked me it was like suddenly this light went on and the horror of what happened to me as a child came alive.

That was in about 1982 and I started to actually deal with the abuse in therapy in 1988/89. Between that time I was in a few different relationships and I noticed a pattern; that I was getting involved with people who were really abusive towards me in one way or the other. Then I fell in love with someone who wouldn't abuse me and I tried to provoke different instances of abuse because otherwise it was really uncomfortable. It was as if I really don't deserve this love, or to be treated well.

My partner at the time was the only person I had spoken with about the abuse. She said to me, "You have to start dealing with your abuse. It's really affecting the way you sort of give me all the power." I would set up situations where she ended up being the bad person and I ended up being the victim. It was like this dreadful little dance that we kept getting into and it was meant to hold us together, but with her age and wisdom she was able to see what was going on and say, "I'm not playing this game, you'd better do something." At that time she was actually studying to be a therapist.

Also around this time, Jack Shadbolt, the painter, would come by to critique my artwork. One day he looked at some of my paintings and said, "Look, you are not going to be able to paint anymore unless you go and check out what is eating you up inside." I was blown away, because I didn't have any kind of personal relationship with him and he didn't know anything about me. He said, "These paintings are so angry, so aggressive, so dark", and I was thinking, but they are just fruit and flowers and they've got lots of colours in them. And he said, "Yes, but even though they are all the colours of the rainbow, they are so heavy and dark." When he left I just started to cry and I thought, "God, it's coming through in my work as well."

Sometime at the end of 1988 my partner heard through her course that Shirley Turcotte's film, "To a Safer Place" was being shown downtown, and she asked me to go. She said, "Look, this is what it's going to be about." When we went to it, I didn't really expect the frankness, and at the end of it I wanted to run. It was as if I wanted to run away from myself, leave my body behind and just escape. That was a real turning point for me because finally I saw that there was a big problem here. So it marked sort of a separation from dependency on her and the beginning of my own journey. I decided I had to go to a service.

I started to see a therapist named Sarah, a student at UBC, and she would tape our sessions and then go back to her professor. They would go through it and he would critique her. Well, she was the best thing that ever happened to me, other than my Buddhist practice, this therapist. Sarah was just an amazing woman. She asked the right questions. Also, it was probably the right time for me. So much stuff started coming up and I began to read a lot of books like "Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families" and "Courage to Heal." At the same time, I got a phone call from VISAC saying that I could begin a group that week. It was really quite incredible, because I was able to go to group therapy and, at the same time see Sarah. That was the beginning of 1989. The combination of the two was really fantastic because what happened in the group could be so volatile, and I needed to go and deal with it privately, and with Sarah I could do that. Between the group time and the private time so much happened for me in terms of realizing things. For the first time I could feel anger.

Q: And you were continuing with your painting at the time?

A: When I started dealing with the abuse, I kept on painting because this was my job which I had a responsibility towards. I started to try to find ways to deal with the abuse as subject matter in the paintings. There was no way that I could actually come out and say in the paintings that I was abused, so I had to create a story or metaphor and this is where these (paintings) came in.

In fact, because of my position as an artist, I cannot really allow my work to simply be art therapy for me; the work has to stand on its own as well. I let the therapy happen in the therapist's office and in group, and then in my Buddhist practice; but my art work was my job and I felt that I had to give integrity to that. I had to be responsible in the sense that I had to make paintings that, first and foremost, were paintings. In other words, they had all the formal considerations of what makes a good painting and they pushed certain boundaries. Subject matter would be about the abuse. But I could not work that out on the canvas. The therapy happened elsewhere and then I brought the fruit of that to the painting, and whenever I didn't, the painting would be dark and muddy and so confused. I would have to stop and go work things out, and then I could come back and make a painting that was clear, much clearer, that was more like a synthesis of everything that had been going on.

Q: Now, from the initial point of trying out different therapies and working through these issues, what was the length of time before you went to the Stave Lake Correctional Centre and actually talked to offenders?

A: What happened was that the woman I had been seeing was working with a psychiatrist. I don't know if he was ever working with offenders, but she was doing two days a week out at Stave Lake or something like that and then back at Riverside. I was having a sale of paintings in my apartment and he was looking to buy art work and came by to see my work. There was no way that I was going to show anybody the sex abuse paintings at that time. But he was poking around the studio and he saw them and said, "What's all this stuff here?" He kept saying, "You know, those guys out there would really benefit from seeing this" and then he saw some of my poetry and he said, "You should really, if you ever could, go out there and read the stuff to them, they need to see this. This is what would make a difference to them, because all the theory and all the words, for some reason they are not as powerful as seeing art work."

There's a resonance between what's going on deep inside of them and what was happening deep inside of me that was reflected in the art work. That's what he was talking about when he suggested taking it out there. When he mentioned this, I didn't think that it was necessarily something that I wanted to do, but him mentioning it, the way it came across to me, was, "Oh, there's a hope. If one day I could ever do that, I would be pretty strong!" And that was that.

Q: You had some goal to work for, some kind of measurable thing. . .

A: When I was really small and all this stuff was happening to me, I would have died if I didn't find ways and I think everybody finds ways. I think survivors is a much better word than victims for us. I think offenders must look at us as "victims," but I think the mere fact that we stayed alive through all of this, we must have been darn resourceful, no matter how badly we might feel about ourselves. I think we just have to congratulate ourselves for finding ways, even if it means escaping our bodies or whatever. To ourselves we are "survivors." When I was a child there were a few things that I did. I started reading everything that I could, all kinds of books, and I disappeared in them. I got myself lost in the words. You know, how the words strung up together. Didn't understand the meaning or anything. And I lost myself in the garden. The garden was the safest place, the best place for me. So, you will see a lot of garden stuff in my pictures and so on. It was much safer than inside the house, because there were repercussions from me being abused in the house, but my parents did not know that that's what it was. I don't know if they knew or not, but that's what part of the problem was. Anyway, my escape was the garden and the other thing was always wishing on the stars at night. My grandfather used to take us outside and say, "Make a wish on the brightest star." I can remember, at 9, 10 years old, looking up and saying, "One day this is going to have been worth it. One day something is going to come out of this, and this experience, bad as it is, will be valuable, because I'll use it in some way." So, it was just a way that I found to live the whole time. When the art-buying psychiatrist said this to me, I was thinking, "OK, if I could ever do that, it will mean that I've moved a lot." It was just a hope inside of me that I could get strong enough that I might be able to do that, whether I did it or not.

I decided, "OK, I'll work towards it." There came a point where I said, Could you arrange something?" My partner set up an appointment and she said, "I think that you should go out first with me. Let's just go and see the grounds."

In order to prepare herself to give a presentation to the sex offenders at Stave Lake Shani first simply went for a drive around the facility. The experience of seeing the offenders left her shaken by the intensity of her feelings. She recalls:

I think I really wanted my parents to acknowledge that it had happened and to be supportive, but they weren't able to be, for whatever reason. There was so much anger because of other people's denial. I could go there and say to the offenders, "Look, you did this to me." In a way they were substitutes for the people whoactually abused me. I decided that I really had to go back, and if I wanted to do this effectively I must not be scared. I had to do something that would temper my fear. I told my partner that next visit to the corrections centre I needed to make some kind of contact with at least one of the men. The next time that we went back there was a recreation time for them and some of them were playing pool, and I grew up playing pool with my father. She and I teamed up against two of the guys. I just kept my head down and played when it was my turn.

I knew that I had to make this happen, otherwise there was no way I would be able to come back and tell these guys, show the paintings, and tell my poems, and say logically and level-headedly, so that they could hear me without breaking down and screaming and becoming a basket-case. At lunch that day Les Boon, who [was] the director, and a couple of other staff people came and sat at the table with us, but I never even heard anything that the people at my table were saying. I don't remember who was at the table other than Les, but I was so aware of these horrid bodies around me. There were moments when I felt like I was about 5 years old and had to literally pick myself up and become an adult again. That was quite difficult, but I was really glad that I did it.

A few weeks later we took the paintings out and there wasn't enough room for all the men, so it was divided up into two groups and only one group of 18 men could get in. It was sort of like a theatre space that they have there. Some of the men helped bring the paintings in. That was hard for me, to have their hands touch my paintings. There was a funny thing that happened, because they would say to me, "Where should I put it?" and I told them where to put it and it was an amazing sort of power, because I was slipping back into being a 5-year-old child so much, then to suddenly have the authority to say, "I want it there, no, I'm sorry move it there." Lights were set up. That day a few other people came out to support me and they were not people that I knew, they were therapists and social workers and so on. They just knew that this was the first time that something like that had happened at Stave Lake. I asked the guards to come in; there was no need to have them there, except that I just needed some kind of real strong authority figure in the room as well, so they were there in their uniforms.

I showed the paintings and I read my poems and I told the story of being a little child. I went into detail about what happened as a little child and how as an adult I felt about that, and how much I hated that it happened to me and how powerless I was as a child. I wasn't kind, I wasn't kind at all. Some of the men started to cry.

I don't remember looking people in the eyes until at the end when they asked questions, and then I looked directly at them. Before I went I really did a lot of chanting, my Buddhist practice, to have the courage; it's not chanting to anything or anybody out there, but it is like centering myself. It was kind of like, "Look, this is a mission that has so little to do with me. It's something that has to be done, so I can't let my own emotions prevent me from doing the thing that needs to be done."

Q: Was your purpose to confront them and make them see your pain, or were you also going to try to understand them better?

A: I have no interest in understanding them better whatsoever. I used to hear that this person will be leaving soon or whatever and I would say, "Well, you know, a sex offender: Is it really possible that they would not offend again?" It was quite a horrible thing for me to know that they were leaving that place and there was a part of me that, yes, was angry and wanted them to know how angry I was. I wanted them to know how horribly it affected me and screwed up my life for so many years, that it wasn't something that happened when I was a child that stayed back there, but it was something that was locked away in every fibre of me and really screwed up every aspect of my life until I had all the circumstances to deal with this. So, I wanted them to know that when they do that to a child, it doesn't just stay there.

I really told them how the incidents happened, because I wanted them to recognize themselves doing stuff, and I told them what was done to me, how I felt, and what I would like to do to my abusers right now. I said if it were legal and possible, I would like to kill them. I wanted them to know the extent of how angry I was, and I went through each painting and I said, "This one is about so and so," and so they were totally confronted with each step of how it felt and all of that. Then they were asked if they wanted to ask me any questions.

One guy asked me if I ever felt like killing myself or something, and what I heard when he asked me that was, "I feel like killing myself, do you know that feeling?" There were things like that that started happening and suddenly they started becoming human beings, several of them started crying and revealing that they had been abused and they had never ever talked about it before. So that was quite a powerful thing, but I was really able to separate them being human beings from excusing them from what they did. I could see that, OK, these people really have horrible stories and I could understand why they would act out. It's just that women act out mostly on themselves and men seem to aggress on other people that are less powerful than themselves. I could see that horrible things had been done to them, lots of things like men are supposed to be so big and masculine, so it is hard for them to say that they've been abused, but that didn't make me say, "Well, you poor things or anything like that."

A: And then the other group afterwards, the other 18 that weren't involved, they asked that I come back so I did. I did the whole thing again, and then the guys themselves invited me back to sit in on a group with them, but they wanted to talk to me. They didn't want me to talk anymore necessarily unless I had questions, but they wanted to talk to me and I found out a lot. After, one came up to me at the car very quietly, and I could take what he said because of the way he did it, it was not a public gesture. He was really embarrassed. He could hardly look at me, but he came and said, it's kind of hard for me to say this, but he said that when I was talking, he was able to face his daughter for the first time. He said that it did something for him that he has not ever been able to face before. I guess I feel a bit emotional now. It is not about him or about what I did. [It's] like the importance of doing stuff, like forgetting yourself or something and then having [someone] recognize that they've done something really wrong to somebody else. I'm really glad that he could.

Q: It must have been a powerful moment.

A: It was.

Q: How do you feel about your experience of being abused today? I mean, I imagine you'll always have the anger about the silence. Have you had any contact since 1989 with either the Stave Lake offenders or with those who had abused you?

A: No, nobody. I have no interest really. There is one person from my childhood whom I might well run into if I go back to see my parents. If that were to happen, I feel quite confident that I would tell him how I feel about it. I only wish my parents would be there with me then.

I stopped seeing my therapist, Sarah, about the end of 1990 (I've met her on the street recently!) 1989-90 was such a great time, because it's not just the sexual abuse stuff that got looked after, but it was all the other stuff that that had brought on, and there was so much growth for me. I felt, "Wow, if I could carry on with us it would be great." I can recognize now even before I do an unhealthy action, I can zero right inside of myself and say where it's coming from and what it is that I really want, or am trying to get through being manipulative. If I begin to feel very tired, I start thinking to myself, " Am I depressed?", because I know the signs now and I begin to start looking at things. And I realize now that I could face anything without worrying that it might kill me, or kill anybody else. So, nothing's really too dangerous to look at. I won't die and in the end the "facing" of it would be well worth it.

I think going back to Sarah now would be a luxury. There are times when things come up and, yes, I feel I should go back to see her, but generally I don't want to rely on her. The other part of it is, I'm not tortured by the abuse anymore. It doesn't have control over me. It's not that I've become apathetic or blase about abuse. I'm extremely angry still that it ever happened. I understand more now....

Treatment and rehabilitation programs at the Stave Lake Correctional Centre are in the process of review, including the Victim-Offender Reconciliation Program. However Rene Gobillot, the Director, is positive about the effectiveness of direct presentations such as that made by Shani Mootoo in 1989, and is hopeful they can be continued.

Interviewed by Barbara J. Sherman
B.C. Institute on Family Violence