Reflections on the Clothesline Project

Reflections on the Clothesline Project
Sexual Assault Awareness Week at Smith College, April 2006
Jennifer L. Walters, Dean of Religious Life


From a distance the t-shirts are beautiful. Colorful, graceful, and affixed to clotheslines along the walkways, the shirts of all sizes and shapes flutter and billow like Tibetan prayer flags like wind horses carrying prayers from earth heavenward. Up close it is more disturbing, the beauty more elusive. People walk more slowly than usual. It is quieter, more solemn and reverent. Because we stop to read, to contemplate, everyone slows down.

I read some of the messages recorded on fabric with paint, and try to sit with the anger, confusion, rage expressed on the shirts. There are messages to grandfathers and babysitters who raped them as children, institutions that ignore their needs, parents and friends who did not believe them, and those that did.

There is also beauty and hope:

In spite of you, I AM.
I am alive.
I am beautiful.
I am the right not to be ashamed.
A lifetime to reclaim my body.
I am not alone.

Now I understand.
I am so sorry.
I forgive you and I reclaim myself.
I am angry that I cannot protect the women I love from pain.

May you always know your gifts
your strength.

You are so strong to tell your story.
We believe you.

Thank you for believing me.

A fierce embrace of mighty love.


Most women and children who survive sexual assault spend a lifetime recovering and most of us never know who in our life, who of our co-workers, teachers, parents, friends, clergy-people have been victims of sexual abuse or assault.

The anger and hurt, the forgiveness and the hope hanging on a clothesline, takes my breath away. These shirts --these stories -- belong to people I love. I want the wind to carry their anger, their pain and hurt away. I want the wind to carry mine, too.

But the wind does not carry it away. The pain comes and goes. But the wound remains because sexual abuse and assault cause injury to the soul not just the body or the mind. A traumatic injury takes a lifetime to heal. And it takes telling our stories as well – lots of stories, many times -- because the stories heal.

I am not a truly optimistic sort of person. I don’t believe that every dark cloud has a silver lining, or that some good thing is just around the corner, or that wishing makes something so.

Sometimes we live with dark clouds our whole lives; that’s just the way it is. Some of us don’t get what we need. So I am not a sunny optimist; but I am a faithful pragmatist. I believe that life is best lived as a temporary experiment trusting that in each moment we are somewhere we’ve never been before and God is in a new place, too. This is not a cause for anxiety but for hope.

See, I am doing a new thing! . . .
I will give them a new heart,
And I will put a new spirit within them.
I will remove their heart of stone
And will give them a heart of flesh. (Ezekiel 11:19)

The Clothesline Project is very painful for some of us – and more difficult to cope with for some than others. The reminders of violation are difficult to bear, impossible maybe to bear alone. As the project hurts, it also helps. It helps because it cultivates a community who can help us bear the healing process and the open wounds. The project creates a community of witnesses who can handle truths that are impossible to bear alone. People who will listen to the stories and believe, reminding us that none of us is alone.

"Don't turn your head.
Keep looking at the bandaged place.
That's where the light enters you.
And don't believe for a moment that you're healing yourself!" (Rumi)