National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women

On December 6th, 1989, fourteen female engineering students attending École Polytechnique in Montréal were singled out and murdered in a brutal act of gender violence by Marc Lépine, a profoundly disturbed yet articulate young man intent on revenge against “The Feminists”. At the time Lépine was regarded as psychotic yet his very specific killing programme and his enaction of it was not judged to be a hate crime – which it very much was.  But in 1991, this date – December 6th – was officially recognized by the Parliament of Canada as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women – to honour those women whose lives were ended due to gender-based violence.
Sadly, violence against women remains very much the reality it was when the “Montreal Massacre” took place twenty-five years ago.
Gender-based discrimination and violence are too common in Canadian workplaces and communities, with Aboriginal women and girls suffering at rates three times higher than for other female groups in our society. And a recent example – the August murder of 15-year-old foster-care child Tina Fontaine, whose body was found in a garbage bag in the Red River in Winnipeg – highlights the ugly intersection of racism and colonialism with anti-woman violence.
As well, new federal legislation – Bill C-36 – puts the lives of sex workers (prostitutes) at risk by reproducing and legitimizing the negative anti-sex-work laws that had been declared earlier by the Supreme Court of Canada as unconstitutional; Bill C-36 is most definitely a step backwards. Nothing but the full de-criminalization of sex work must be sought in order to put decision-making power in women’s hands, where it belongs; the Criminal Code does not protect the rights (labour/human/legal) of such women.
.     .     .

The following three poems, each in their own tangential or direct way, address the theme of violence in women’s lives:

Margaret Atwood (born 1939)
The Rest
.
The rest of us watch from beyond the fence
as the woman moves with her jagged stride
into her pain as if into a slow race.

We see her body in motion
but hear no sounds, or we hear
sounds but no language; or we know
it is not a language we know
yet.
We can see her clearly
but for her it is running in black smoke.

The cluster of cells in her swelling
like porridge boiling, and bursting,
like grapes, we think.
Or we think of
explosions in mud; but we know nothing.

All around us the trees
and the grasses light up with forgiveness,
so green and at this time
of the year healthy.

We would like to call something
out to her.
Some form of cheering.

There is pain but no arrival at anything.

. . .

Pat Lowther (1935-1975)
Random Interview
.
1, the fear

.

the fear is of everything
staying the way it is
and only i changing

the fear is
of everything changing
and i staying the same

the world expanding
branch tunnel cell
more and more
precious and terrible

while i grow only more
fragile and confused

the fear is my own
hands beating
like moths

my eyelids stuttering
light breaking into
meaningless phrases

the fear is of you
patiently elsewhere growing
a blood shape
of all my wishes

.

2, i am tired

.

i am tired of pain
i am tired of my own pain
i am tired of
the pain of others

i am tired of lives
unwinding like a roll
of bloody bandage
i shall roll up
the sky, pinch the sun

i go out to the cliff pours
of stars, the tall
volumes of stars

i go down
to the grains of soil
to bacteria
to viruses
to the neat mechanics of molecules

to escape the pain
to escape the pain

.

3, what i want

.

what i want is to be blessed
what i want is a cloak of air

the light entering my lungs
my love entering my body
the blessing descending
like the sky
sliding down the spectrum

what i want is to be
aware of the spaces between stars, to breathe
continuously the sources of sky,
a veined sail moving,
my love never setting
foot to the dark
anvil of earth.

. . .

Elizabeth Bachinsky (born 1976)
Wolf Lake
.
It was down that road he brought me, still
in the trunk of his car. I won’t say it felt right,
but it did feel expected. The way you know
your blood can spring like a hydrant.
That September, the horseflies were murder
in the valley. I’d come home to visit the family,
get in a couple of weeks of free food, hooked up
with a guy I’d known when I was a kid and things
went bad. When he cut me, I remember
looking down, my blood surprising as paper
snakes leaping from a tin. He danced me
around his basement apartment, dumped me
on the chesterfield, sat down beside me, and lit
a smoke. He seemed a black bear in the gloam,
shoulders rounded under his clothes,
so I tried to remember everything I knew
about black bears: whistle while you walk… carry bells…
if you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you…
play dead. Everything slowed. I’ll tell you a secret.
It’s hard to kill a girl. You’ve got to cut her bad
and you’ve got to cut her right, and the boy had done neither,
Pain rose along the side of my body, like light.
I lay very still while he smoked beside me: this boy
I’d camped with every summer since we were twelve,
the lake so quiet you could hear the sound
of a heron skim the water at dusk, or the sound
of a boy’s breathing. I came-to in the trunk of his car,
gravel kicking up against the frame, dust coming in
through the cracks. It was dark. I was thirsty.
I couldn’t move my hands or legs,
The pain was still around. I think I was tied.
We drove that way for a long time before
the Chrysler finally slowed, then stopped. Sound
of gravel crunching under tires. I could smell the lake,
a place where, as kids, we’d come to swim
and know we’d never be seen. Logs grew
up from that lakebed. All those black bones
rising from black water. I remember,
we’d always smelled of lake water and of sex
by the end of the day, and there was a tape of Patsy
Cline we always liked to sing to on our way out —
which is what I thought we’d be doing that September
afternoon. That, or smoking up in his garage.
.
You know, you hear about the Body
all the time: They found the Body…
the Body was found… and then you are one.
Someone once told me the place had been
a valley, before the dam, before the town.
But that was a long time ago. When the engine stopped,
I heard the silver sound of keys in the lock
and then I was up on his shoulders, tasting blood.
I think he said my name. I think he walked
toward the woods.

. . . . .