Penn professor and 1996 College graduate Salamishah Tillet was raped twice as an undergraduate at Penn.
She only told a few friends at the time, but finally shared the experience with her sister, Scheherazade, after graduation.
The sisters were recently nominated for the Glamour Magazine Women of the Year Reader’s Choice Award, for sharing the story of Tillet’s rape in a multimedia performance, Story Of A Rape Survivor.
Scheherazade began SOARS as a series of photographs documenting her sister’s recovery. This soon transformed into a two-hour performance that combines poetry, music, photographs and dance to educate thousands about sexual assault.
“It’s such an intimate experience for someone to photograph you during therapy. I was shy,” Tillet said. “In that way only my sister could have done it. It was difficult and awkward, but I trusted her and that was part of the healing process.”
According to Tillet, SOARS is unique because it reaches a diverse audience. In the 2009-10 season, 30 percent of SOARS audience was male and more than half were people of color. This is highly unusual for a sexual assault education and prevention program.
Together, the sisters founded A Long Walk Home in 2003 — a Chicago-based non-profit that uses visual and performing arts to educate the community about sexual violence.
Their summer program, Girl/Friends, is designed specifically to train adolescent girls to become social justice leaders in their community.
“There’s a whole movement toward arts as education and arts as therapy,” Tillet said. “Our program brings the two together and adds a third aspect — art as advocacy.”
Last spring, Tillet was invited to be the keynote speaker at Take Back The Night, an annual rally and march against sexual violence at Penn, which she described as “a phenomenal experience.”
“I always want students to know that it is possible to survive sexual violence,” she said. “But I also wanted to impart to them that they can change the world and help end it.”
According to 2010 College graduate Joshua Bennett — a spoken-word poet who took classes with Tillet — SOARS challenges audiences to examine the way they see the world by making them feel uncomfortable.
“I think we need to be uncomfortable more,” he said. “I think people are really just too comfortable, they come to theatre to be entertained not to be moved. That’s what performance is for, to get out there and rattle people’s ideas.”
He added that Tillet’s courage to share her story is a reflection of her character.
“She knows who she is and is unafraid of it. That’s what she taught me as well — to be unafraid of and unashamed of who I was,” Bennett added.
Being taught by Tillet also helped him realize that rape survivors are not distant figures. “Your Ivy League, Harvard Ph.D. professor is a rape survivor,” he said.
