Writer and committed citizen, the author has taught literature at college, is president of the governing board of an elementary school and member of the editorial board of Quebec letters. She co-directed and co-wrote the collective Shock treatments and tarts. Critical assessment of the management of COVID-19 in Quebec.
“We’re still going to talk to someone who said my cousin deserves to be dead. The voice of actor Jean-Marc Dalphond breaks. We are the heart of the podcast Polytechnique project: copingand he and his co-host, Marie-Joanne Boucher, prepare to meet an admirer of Marc Lépine.
Jean-Marc’s cousin is Anne-Marie Edward. Like 13 other of her colleagues, she was killed on December 6, 1989 because she was a woman. At the time, we didn’t immediately want to name the unnameable: a man fired on women, feminists, simply because they were women. The podcast even reminds us that the media spoke of “students killed”, in the masculine. Marc Lépine’s letter, which claimed that he was of sound mind and spoke of a logical act, was kept secret for a time.
But the massacre had already imprinted itself on the bodies of women and girls. The day of the drama, the poet Véronique Cyr is eleven years old. She is already writing. With a friend, she is looking for a memorable, unexpected Hitchcockian ending for their suspense, she says in The girl of the negatives. Then the horror appears, on all the channels.
“The Fall of the Script […], neither of us could have fixed it. The stretchers that paraded before our eyes, the unbearable softness of this December snow deposited on the corpses of girls, all that settled in our hearts, our heads, our nerves. For weeks, months, years, we heard this story everywhere, we learned that we could die of being a woman, we tried to understand with our child’s head the rotten heart of this man. »
Control questions
What wounds feed the desire for domination, possession, ascendancy of these men? The worshiper of Poly’s perpetrator interviewed in the podcast talks briefly about the women he’s dated. “There was my German, my mechanic, my Muslim who gave me an 810 twice”: the avalanche of possessives seizes, highlighting the thirst for control. For the incel, women are objects to be possessed; born to wait for them with a simmered dish every evening, in a well-kept house, always ready to open their legs for them to pour out their scornful enjoyment.
Disturbing. But the incels exist by the thousands, stand together in line, rail against women, celebrate Lépine who took action in the real world, to put an end, in the words of the letter, to “this life of film of horror governed by these feminist viragos who had to be sent ad patres as quickly as possible “.
This year, December 6 becomes even more intertwined with the firearms debate with Bill C-21. The “Poly” discount code offered by the Canadian Coalition for Gun Rights adds oil to the pot. If we are claiming the right to access certain weapons for sport hunting, why the hell bring Poly and violence against women back into all this?
To All one morning, a survivor of Poly who campaigns to limit access to assault weapons, Nathalie Provost, is shocked by the instrumentalization of the tragedy: “Wanting to publicize the right to arms in a context like this is almost perverse, that has no sense. »
So what do we do ?
Another podcast tries to answer the question. In Mama, stop dyingled in a very sensitive way by Monic Néron, we meet the families of 4 of the 17 women murdered in a conjugal context in Quebec in 2021. With the difference that the victims accumulate gradually, it is almost the equivalent of a Polytechnic …
The “810”, mentioned above, is the prohibition of contact; one of the only tools that victims of domestic violence have to protect themselves. Sometimes this measure is not enough. Fortunately (and ironically), the large number of feminicides this disastrous year had the effect of an electric shock: everyone agrees that we can do better in terms of domestic violence, by adopting a response adapted to reality. the victims. This goes through the anti-reconciliation bracelet, currently being deployed as a pilot project in Quebec, but also through the formation of crisis cells and the improvement of communications between the various authorities (shelters, police, justice system, etc.).
More broadly, members of civil society and the media also have a role to play. Calling a spade a spade — and femicide, femicide. Relegate the expression “family drama” to oblivion (it’s progressing). Sign the “Stop cyberviolence” petition. Speak out against hate speech and anti-feminism. Educate our boys and girls. Stop using the expression “crazy shooter” all over the place: only 5% of crimes are attributable to mental disorders, recalls psychiatrist Marie-Frédérique Allard.
And, for Geneviève, Hélène, Nathalie, Barbara, Anne-Marie, Maud, Barbara, Maryse, Maryse, Anne-Marie, Sonia, Michèle, Annie, Annie, but also Rébekah, Myriam, Sylvie, Caroline… continue to write, create, reflect, remember and stand together, upright — so that our bodies finally calm down.