Kwe: Standing With Our Sisters

by Joseph Boyden

  “They know we’re talking about them. They have eyes everywhere.”

  “Bullshit,” Benny said.

  “Look,” Lester said and pointed with his lips to the shelf. On top of it was a scrap of fabric tacked to a piece of wood. It was the eyes of a wolf that could have been on someone’s T-shirt once. “They’re watching right now.”

  “They’re watching right now?” Torchy said. He gave the eyes the finger.

  Lester started to mumble and whisper something. Was he praying?

  “Let them watch,” Benny said. “Let them see the sinnery of what we’re about to do to you. Flinch?” Benny called.

  I start to unfold. It starts like this and it’s like a dogfight when I roar and hit and rip and snap, but I stop. Benny’s eyes. He’s scared. This is bigger than anything we’ve done before. Darker. Maybe there’s a darkness none of us will ever leave. Maybe—

  Lester looked at all of us. “May your worst enemies raise your sons. And may your sons know the truth about all of you.”

  I look at Lester and feel nothing. His heart would stop halfway through my first hammer. Maybe before I even hit.

  “Okay,” Benny said calmly. “I’ll ask again …”

  NIGHT COMES SOMETIMES

  ~ Lee Maracle ~

  Night comes sometimes—bruised and sorry

  Dark swallows light in bits and pieces

  Unwilling dark hesitates—dances along the edge of light

  Rolls back and forth before day

  As though

  As though it new before hand

  Dark was a cover

  A harbor of protection

  For those whose actions in the day

  Can not be forgiven

  As though

  As though Dark thought somehow seeing was the thing

  That was unforgivable

  As though

  As though somehow the doing under thick quilts

  Of black forgave

  While in daylight

  In daylight the sight of the doing rendered it horrific

  As though

  As though it knew

  The night’s gulping back vision would be blamed

  Would be mad the hated thing.

  As though

  As though she knew deed and doer would come back to life Unscathed,

  And return to innocent black

  In silence

  Free

  Free to reconvene the horror, the act committed not to dark

  As though

  As though night knew that its very blackness was the pre-judged thing. Its innocence stolen

  Stripped of her dreamscape

  Bruised under its own dark vision

  Beat up and sorrowed

  She retreats

  Bent under the weight of her innocent grief

  NIGHT SKIES

  ~ Lee Maracle ~

  Night skies drift over Turtle Island

  Dripping dark mournful tones

  Waiting for sun to return to kiss the earth

  To bathe her in soft frosted yellow light

  Night skies fill the space between earth’s

  Warm body and star nations wondering world

  Come night sky, love the way I lay here

  Paint warm dreams onto my open skin

  Night skies come to me bringing memories

  Of the world’s murdered women facing east,

  facing west, north and south, anticipating

  the blow, the gun shot that shortened their time here.

  Night skies come holding breath, crunching

  Words of trapped souls stuck here in the pale

  Between earth’s body and the edge of her breath

  trapped souls waiting for their last ride home

  Come to me night skies, wrap me in black

  Loving midnight blue moon paled light

  Whisper sweet words soothe the screams

  of women perishing in homes, on roads, at school

  Night skies come sharing the breath of bodies

  Bodies bleeding, screaming, their blood everywhere

  Their spirits recant stories of encounters of

  the first kind. Hush night, let me rest, hush night

  Bayonets, guns and knives and fists glisten in my dark.

  Sharp cold weapons wielded by men

  Spirits spent these men dip steel sticks into the

  fragile bodies of women come to greet them.

  Night sky come to me, come to love me

  Wrap yourself around me bring me to the place

  Where my heart can find the breath to speak

  To the women whose blood still paints the soil?

  Night sky come to me, come love me that I might

  Lay tobacco out – face all women

  Hear them tell me the ceremony they need

  To call Star Nations to take them home.

  Night sky come to me, reach for my breath’s origin

  Fill me with the voice I need to sing the song

  That will conjure the star trail these women need

  To make that long journey home – come night sky.

  Night skies velvet touch dances across

  my dreaming beauty, awakens ceremony

  frees my spirit, settles the quandary

  of the entrapped spirit women dancers

  Night sky comes, grabs moonbeams

  Layers them between star nation and earth

  Night whispers come home child – come home

  Leave this island with its thirst for women’s blood,

  Night skies return breathing dreams

  Of love, of life, of future, remove the

  Spiritual residue of women’s blood and

  awaken men to sun, wind-song and love.

  LEAVES AND THICKETS

  ~ Lisa Moore ~

  I was taking care of a cat for my daughter who had moved to Alberta for three months, an engineering placement.

  Don’t let the cat out, she said.

  I woke that first night with the big white cat, a male, sitting on my chest. He was quite a weight. I could feel his whiskers on my cheek.

  My husband and I had seen a rat in the backyard the week before. It was an overcast day, but bright enough. The rat was moving along a lattice fence of pressure-treated wood that enclosed the back deck of a new building, a rental property with three luxury apartments.

  The owner had torn down the previous house that had, in its last days, black garbage bags over the windows in the back because all the glass had been smashed. I used to hear the plastic ripple and snap in the wind. The old landlord would arrive in a Jaguar, the first of every month, to collect the rent. A young Inuit man from Labrador, who had only been there a couple of weeks, had hanged himself on the third floor.

  The new apartments had been empty for almost a year. The owner left all the lights blazing, day and night.

  What that must be costing, I said to my husband. The owner was hoping for oil executives who would take the apartments for three months at a time, but the price of oil had dropped.

  The rat was large and grey-brown. It was not a blur. Not something I saw out of the corner of my eye. I did not doubt what I was seeing. We watched it slither through one of diamonds in the lattice. The rat got through the small hole as if it had no bones in its body.

  A week after we had the cat, it got out. I put up notices on the site Find Your Pet. After four days, a stranger wrote to say she’d seen a white cat that had been killed by a car down by the old train station.

  I decided not to tell my daughter. I went to bed that night and dreamt the cat was like a stream of fluorescent light, spilling through the leaves and thickets behind the old train station, on the hunt. It was the middle of the night. Someone was fighting on the street. A woman had been screaming. A car door slammed.

  I got up and went down to the kitchen for a glass of water. The back door of our house is glass. There was a white cat at the door. I opened it and the cat meowed and stepped b
ack into the darkness of the garden and I stepped back into the kitchen, away from the door. I waited, shivering, in my bare feet. It was very cold. Then the cat leapt in, and flew past me and I closed the door and leaned against it, keeping everything else outside.

  RIVERED

  ~ Warren Cariou ~

  Winnipeg, confluence of harm.

  Along the streets, across the generations

  hurt selves eddy and seep

  reaching out for company, holding on,

  rafts of damaged lives compiling like ice—jams.

  Some call this history. Others say a city.

  Maybe it’s only a floating congregation

  held together by fingertips and fear.

  Even the graves are half underwater

  and everything eventually is river

  yet nothing that matters ever flows away.

  Hurt persists like mercury

  and those hands reach out toward forever.

  “Be with me here,” they say. “Be here with me.”

  A TRUE STORY

  ~ Kyo Maclear ~

  At one school the librarian was busy fundraising for proper team jerseys because the children were tired of competing against other schools in their own shirts and being told that they came from the “ghetto.” It was a school without nice things. Many children skipped breakfast because their families couldn’t afford enough food and knew their kids would get a healthy snack through the nutrition program.

  One school was so tiny it only had ninety students. There were limited friendship options so instead of sitting in little cliques, children of all grades sat together on the floor like a giant squirmy amoeba.

  At another school, two girls in the seventh grade had started having sex for money. A boy in fifth grade had lost an older brother in a gun shooting. The librarian told me the students were hungry for relevant books.

  Across the city, a willowy girl with a crystal pendant and long loosely braided hair told me she wanted to be a writer but that her father wanted her to go into High Finance.

  At the next school, there was a large group of kids who had come from a particular war-torn country. The librarian didn’t think very highly of the students, had drilled them on how to greet me, had prepared even the questions they were to ask. The students knew they were being limited and accounted nothing. They spoke in wooden voices: What is your favorite genre? Could you name some of your influences? When I looked over at the librarian she gave me a sheepish smile.

  Back at the tiny school, a little girl with a gaze that was slightly askew said to me with utter directness: What’s your superpower? I said: What superpower would I like to have? She shook her head and said: No. What superpower do you already have? What is your superhero name? I was taken aback because, coming from her, it was a genuine question.

  In many of the schools I visited there were Aboriginal students. Sometimes just one or a few, rarely self-identifying, mostly “hidden in plain view.” Professor Susan Dion has called these students the “invisible kids; the marginalized of the marginalized.”

  Where were they? How do these children figure into our stories?

  I have withheld racial information above but perhaps it was inferred. What baggage and what silences do we bring to the stories we tell and are told?

  Here is what I can tell you. The girl who asked me about my superpower was Mohawk on her mother’s side. At the end of the morning, she gave me a rainbow loom necklace in exchange for a promise that I would write a story that was “a little bit creepy, not too creepy, just a bit.” She said, I don’t mind being a little scared but I like a true story.

  KINDNESS FLOWED THROUGH THE GENERATIONS

  ~ Taiaiake Alfred ~

  Our ancestors said that as long as the earth exists

  as long as grasses, trees, and plants grow wild

  as long as springs emerge from the earth and rivers flow

  as long as our elder brother the sun makes his journey across the sky

  from east to west and our grandmother turns in her phases

  and there are stars in the sky to guide us through the night

  as long as the winds stir the land

  the earthly world and the heavenly world will be in harmony.

  They gathered together and sat in circles

  and as they spoke the river ran past them

  from the lake to the shallow shore

  to the rapids and beyond to the deep waters

  kindness flowed through the generations.

  They told us to never forget that we are a family

  with one body, one heart, and one mind.

  These were their words

  this was their prayer

  as they poked sticks into the embers

  and stirred the flames of fading fires.

  INTERFERENCE

  ~ Lola Tostevin ~

  Judging, Hannah Arendt writes in Responsibility and Judgment, arises from a contemplative pleasure called “taste,” which is inherently sociable. Identifying with people who have similar “tastes” is the loom of friendship that extends to a social communicative experience, a sharing of power that no person can undergo alone.

  Interference: On December 17, 2012, a twenty-three-year-old woman, a paramedical student from Delhi, boarded a bus with a male friend on their way home from a movie. When the bus deviated from its route and the woman’s friend objected, the six men on board started to taunt the couple, especially the young woman. When the friend tried to interfere he was beaten, gagged, and knocked unconscious with an iron rod. The men then brutally assaulted and gang-raped the young woman with the same iron rod, a rusted, L-shaped implement used as a wheel jack handle.

  The young woman and her friend were then dumped near an expressway. Authorities did not release the name of the rape victim as it is considered shameful to have been raped in India. Several pseudonyms were used by various media outlets but most protesters referred to her as “Damini,” from a 1993 Bollywood film whose lead female character fights for a victim of sexual assault.

  The more I read about Damini, the more I feel suffocated by the brutality of the event. I want to respond but I don’t know how. It is as if I had been misplaced within someone else’s order.

  Following Damini’s death on December 29, thousands of women and men gather to protest against India’s rape laws, but the police respond with water cannons, tear gas, and sticks. The son of President Pranab Mukherjee refers to the protesters as “women who are heavily made up and have little connection with ground realities.” A famous spiritual guru blames the victim because she did not chant God’s name or fall at the feet of her attackers. The driver of the bus openly boasts that he tortured and raped the woman to teach her a lesson after she bit one of her attackers in self-defense.

  On one hand, an academic initiative by the Arab Studies Institute is highly critical of these reports for fear they are being exploited by “Orientalists” to promote racist stereotypes. On the other hand, many activists are proud that India is leading the way in efforts to address violence against women regardless of the country they come from.

  Badri Singh Pandey, Damini’s father, restores her true name: He wants the world to bear witness to what was once considered unrepresentable. He asks the world to judge. Her name is Jyoti Singh Pandrey.

  Loretta Saunders.

  Rehtaeh Parsons.

  Tina Fontaine.

  Rinelle Harper.

  Their names must not be removed from our judging consideration or from human history, like the twelve hundred Canadian aboriginal women who have disappeared.

  WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL

  ~ Reneltta Arluk ~

  When I was a little girl my grandmother braided my hair so tight that my eyes changed shape.

  When I was a little girl the path home from school was a forest not a field.

  When I was a little girl grasshoppers were my pets.

  When I was a little girl I believed that everything had a soul and needed my pro
tection.

  When I was a little girl I understood the language of leaves using wind as its breath.

  When I was a little girl I whispered my secrets into tree circles.

  When I was a little girl.

  When I was a little girl I sang old country songs on the radio even if I didn’t know the words.

  When I was a little girl my grandma told me rabbit eyeballs tasted like candy.

  They didn’t, but I ate them anyway.

  When I was a little girl I’d catch horseflies buzzing against the screen door and eat them too.

  I was a little girl who loved eating Jell-O with Carnation milk, just like her grandpa.

  I was a little girl who used big words, like furious and challenge and tenacity, then pronounced ten-a-city.

  I was the little girl who read books under the covers with a flashlight.

  I was the little girl who slipped her uneaten supper into the bathroom garbage.

  I was the little girl who got caught.

  I was the little girl who did really well in school but never felt like she ever fit in.

  I was the little girl who cried all the way to school because she didn’t want to wear her parka.

  I was the little girl who told stories to her teachers that sometimes got her in trouble at home.

  I was the little girl who talked to herself but never felt alone.

  I was that little girl.

  When I was not such a little girl I went to school in places far from my grandparents.

  When I was not such a little girl I made new friends wherever I went.

  I was the not so little girl who found herself in spaces that were darker than some.

  I was always a curious girl.

  When I was not such a little girl I made love a lot without knowing what it meant.

  I was the not so little girl who wandered and floundered looking for direction.

  I was the not so little girl who never found it.

  I was the not so little girl who found herself at a late-night downtown bus stop waiting for the one bus to sneak her home.

  I was the not so little girl who males looked at.

  I was the not so little girl who got offered rides home.

  I was the not so little girl who still looked so little.

  Somewhere between the little girl and the not so little girl this girl got lost.