"It Is Usually Too Late"

The first time I heard a rape joke, I laughed.

Pertinent coordinates: Summer, when I was 12, most likely. A red Toyota Corolla, bumping westbound on highway 40, likely in traffic between the Quebec border and Kingston, Ontario. Leaving Montreal that morning with my mother and twin sister, my grandmother gave each of us a perfumed kiss; my grandpa, a sturdy hug; and my uncle passed us two CDs of Michael Flanders and Donald Swann's "At the Drop of a Hat" and its sequel, fittingly titled "At the Drop of Another Hat." These were Cold War era British comedic sketches in song, and a staple of my mother's and uncles' adolescences.

At the point in our car trip where the radio had crackled into rural oblivion and my mother vetoed any suggestion of pre-teen Broadway singalong entertainment, we rigged up our archaic adapter to connect the first Flanders and Swann CD to our tape deck. Amidst zoological gems such as "The Gnu Song" and "The Hippopotamus Song" was "Songs for Our Time," introduced and followed by commentary too middle-aged-academic for my middle-school tastes. One of these short ditties recounts an image - not the only one I now find a problematic colonial representation - of a young man's dream to travel to "Tonga," where "Oh-le-ma-kitty-looka-chee-chee-cheeee" apparently meant "no." Flanders and Swann sing, with appropriate dramatic pauses, that by the time a Tongan maiden says this on a date, "it is usually too late." Cue laughter from the live studio audience, echoed by that of my sister and me, trying to look like we got the joke. Luckily, the Hippopotamus Song entered our musical world a few tracks later, with its "mud, mud, glorious mud" better appealing to my not-quite-adolescent humour.

A decade and a half later, I gleefully sing along to the Gnu and the Hippopotamus, but fast-forward through the Tongan maiden. The soundtrack in my head has filled in the blanks, leaving her just as shadowy, but far less neutral, just one in a chain of exploited women whose pain is the butt of male comedians' jokes. In their day, to speak of the rape of a white woman was unseemly, but that of a Tongan? perfectly normal, really, and the fault of her culture, at that. Cue further studio-audience laughter, now a mockery I can still hear. I've stopped laughing.

A generation later, we have come far and yet gone nowhere: "no" is a joke on even privileged women's bodies (ignoring, of course, the interplay of race and class on the bodies for whom this joke is a reality). Rape culture today is discussed on university campuses and in mass media as a new phenomenon, catalyzed by Facebook and the interplay of sexualities, not as an insidious and slippery element of history that shifts out of grasp. "Songs for Our Time" built a time that was then, that is now. By the time the audience stops chortling, for a woman around the corner or across town, around the world or across the hall, reflected in a mirror or captured in a photograph, whether "no" is a staccato whisper or a siren-like scream, it is usually too late.

Too many metaphors in a single poem

If I were critiquing my own writing, I know I'd object to it being stuffed with mixed metaphors. But fuck it, this is my own blog.

"I'm going to change in a stall.
She looks like a dyke."
A necklace of words, twirling barbs
around the maypole
thrust into the very centre
of the nesting dolls I have tucked
onto my bookshelves
Voodoo finds the smallest,
youngest doll
not hollow
but full, like a cyst
of rotting words
radiating outward
- if the streaks stretch
toward your heart
or feel warm, return to the doctor -
outward through layers
of years, of clouds of words
matted into a blanket.
The largest doll squeaks gratingly
when opened.

"sex for nikkum?"

We used to intentionally mis-hear the lyrics to Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov: "sex for nikkum" probably means something else, said properly in Russian. But it was a rape scene, villagers raping the priests. The children's chorus in the wings could either laugh, or be horrified.

There were fleeting seconds when I thought I knew how those priests in Boris Godunov felt, and in my memory I heard echoes of the children's chorus laughing
as timpani pounded, trumpets screamed, violins ached
bells, bells, bells in my heart, lungs, body, heart,
reverberating orchestrally.

Triangulation: not only where the stories coincide
but where the music, the violence, and my body collide.

Ready or not

I have not been posting about the Dylan Farrow case, because it hits closer to home than I want to admit. But "admit" implies a need to hide, and a guilt, so here goes. Writing as a creative narrative is the easiest way to spit out what is, I think, likely real.

One
I remember being very young, maybe four or five, playing hide and seek. I was in the basement of a very large house, not my own.
Two
All the adults - lots of them - were upstairs, being serious.
Three
A man I didn't know came from a bedroom and saw me looking for a hiding place. He said he would help me find one, and led me into a room - a bedroom, or perhaps a den.
Four
I don't remember quite what he did but I remember it hurting and wanting to run away. I don't remember what he looked like, or his voice.
Five
I don't remember.
Six
I don't remember.
Sev-en
I do remember a touch I lacked words for, and a shame that had no precedent.
Eight
Do I remember?
Nine
But I don't remember enough to be sure it wasn't a dream, if perhaps I fell asleep while waiting to be found.
Ten
At a school assembly a couple of years later they talked about good and bad touch and I felt like I should tell, but didn't know who to tell on.

Ready or not, here I come.

Dayenu

If I only had that shiver
rushing down my spine
as we kissed in the early drizzle
of a late London evening,
oblivious to that departing bus,
Dayenu.
If I only had the catch in my throat
as I spilled oceans of words
and you caught them
and held them safe,
Dayenu.
If I only had the parting of my chest,
dividing to let you in,
Dayenu.
If I only had the heat,
a brushfire tinting
my joyous cheeks,
Dayenu.
Dayenu.

"Dayenu" means "it would have been enough" and is part of the passover seder commemorating the exodus. 

Impostor Syndrome

If there is one thing bullies teach, it is that reality is never enough. Truths - of triumph, or of pain - aren't powerful enough to be real. Disbelief is a weapon that dissected my soul until I could scarcely believe each thought that fell from my brain into my lap, had to second-guess the synapses that felt so real. Bullies say you don't deserve to be real. And those are the voice that echo in the cave where I try to shelter from fears that my work, love, smile, my very being is not good enough, that I am an impostor going through motions, merely pretending to live this life.
They talk about impostor syndrome in graduate school. But when a cup is full to the brim, it overflows more with every pebble.

Single, with a couple of poems

1

I want to pick up those fragments
of final words
Sweep them away
as you swept me away
so they cannot pollute
all the words that
loved me.


2

With one match
I can set
your Valentine's Day gift on fire
Feel the warmth in my hands
And imagine
you're holding me
Watch the dancing flame
cast shadows
Kissing the walls
Hold onto this dream
as it falls

Reflecting

My dictionary sits on my chest
a choking brick
friction against my breasts
and still
in that weight
there are too few words,
Scrabble tiles spilled
beyond rearrangement,
with too few letters left
to spell out how I miss you.


Breaking up is the only part of a relationship where mutual consent seems no longer to hold a central place. Perhaps that is why, after so much honesty, caring, checking in and double-checking, the silence when this dissolves feels like such a betrayal even though she did nothing wrong. Sudden, and unilateral, and two weeks later I am left digging out the splinters left behind.

Long nights

There are nights, sometimes,
when your toothbrush
feels too familiar,
alive and serpentine,
dangerously caressing your gums.
The years fold up
like an acordion
exhaling, no breath left
to bellow in rage
at the origami map,
smoothing present over past,
past over present,
taste over taste,
over sound, smell, breath,
breathing in the crumbling aftershocks,
the choking synapses.

That damn reading response...

For months now, I have been trying to write a reading response to a selection of history books dealing with gendered violence. It's a stop-start-write-delete sort of process, and thus far my writing has been sniffing in apprehensive circles around the violence itself that is contained in what I have read.

Social location, I would posit, can be boiled down to one's proximity to concentric circles of violence that interlink from the past into the present.

Years ago, a poem I wrote had the line, "I'm just another paper doll; a carbon copy in a line" as I was thinking about the prevalence of violence, rape, specifically, and how it ties us together in such powerful ways. But some of the women I read about are anonymous and reduced to the violence they experience so much that I don't know if they are even a faceless paper doll. They are linked circles of statistics, the slash and hole of a percent sign. Reading about the violence experienced by women in the past is triggering on a personal level, but also disturbing academically. Court testimonies of long-dead women are quoted from at length. We get a fleeting glimpse into the pain and shame of people who cannot consent to us reading their words, or worse yet, reading what was written about them.

Is it an act of justice to expose this violence, or an act of injustice to re-expose victims and survivors of violence to the scrutiny of the present, after they have already been trampled down by the past?