Every year December 6th rolls around and I am overwhelmed at the passage of time. It has been 21 years since the massacre at Poly in 1989. I can’t believe an entire generation has gone by since then, but I am reminded of that fact every year when I see notices going up around the U of T campus for ‘memorial services’ for the fourteen women who lost their lives that day, and realize that most of the students walking by were not even born at that time.
Fourteen women whose lives were cut short and whose loss is still felt:
Geneviève Bergeron
Hélène Colgan
Nathalie Croteau
Barbara Daigneault
Anne-Marie Edward
Maud Haviernick
Maryse Laganière
Maryse Leclair
Anne-Marie Lemay
Sonia Pelletier
Michèle Richard
Annie St-Arneault
Annie Turcotte
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz
I was university student at McGill the year they were killed. Most of my friends were engineers, and although I didn’t know any of these women personally, I knew several people who did. In the years since I have found that there were few degrees of separation between people my age in Montreal at that time and these women. It was never hard to find someone who knew one of them. In some ways the massacre was the most important event in the life of my hometown to have occurred in my lifetime.
Which is why I find I cannot attend ‘memorial’ services here in Toronto for these women. There are very few, if any, people in attendance who were even born when these women were killed. Fewer were living in Montreal at the time. Fewer who had any personal experience with the loss of these fourteen women. Instead, people of good intention have taken their deaths and made memorializing them into something more – with a very broad brush, their deaths have now become symbols of man’s violence against all women.
I don’t disagree with the need to shine a spotlight on violence against women, and the role men have played and continue to play in fostering an environment that allows this violence to take place. My problem -- and it is my problem, no one else’s – is that in using a memorial for these women to shine that much needed light, the organizers have often forgotten the fact that these were fourteen living breathing women who had incredible lives in front of them. At most of the memorials I have attended here in Toronto, these fourteen women are grouped with many other victims of violence, and become almost anonymous. There is nothing to distinguish them from all the other victims of violence. Maybe that's the point the organizers are trying to make. But that's not what I think a memorial for them should be about.
I didn’t know Genevieve or Barbara or Michèle. But their deaths had a specific impact on me and my life. I can’t go to a memorial that forgets their lives in a quest to make everyone aware of ALL of the bad things that men do to women everyday.
So, I spent a part of this December 6th remembering that day in 1989 when I heard the news of what one crazy man could do, and I hope that the people these women left behind have somehow been able to mourn and accept the loss that was forced on them.
21 years… Please remember them.
