This is my body, which is given up for you; do this in remembrance of me.
1 Corinthians 11:24
"A special team investigating the cases," reported the New York Times on Saturday, November 23, 2002, "arrived and found body parts in a freezer, as well as purses and other personal effects later linked to the missing.
Not one body has been found intact, and a wood chipper and Mr. Pickton's pigs are believed to have devoured much of the evidence."*
"The prosecution played a videotape in court of a conversation Mr. Pickton had with his cellmate after he was arrested on Feb. 22, 2002. Mr. Pickton did not know his cellmate was an undercover police officer. Mr. Pickton's cellmate, who said he is in jail on an attempted-murder charge, tells Mr. Pickton the best way to dispose of something is to take it to the ocean.
"I did better than that," Mr. Pickton says. "A rendering plant." * *
Lipstick, soap, animal feed, meat.
"It wasn't just the guests of Piggy's Palace who consumed Pickton's pigs. The unusable remains of the pigs Robert slaughtered and served to his friends and neighbors--pig entrails, brains, bones, nerve tissue, and gore--were taken by truck to a rendering plant near the DES called West Coast Reduction Ltd. Many are certain that the partial remains of the murdered sex workers were also trucked to West Coast Reduction Ltd." *
“[He said] that thousands of people had been to the place [“Piggy Palace”], and, though he had enjoyed some roasted pork, was certain it did not come from 953 Dominion Avenue, that is, from pigs that had been eating the women murdered on the Pickton farm.” *
"As well as beauty products, rendering plants also make food for farm animals that humans consume."
"[P]olice raided the farm in 2002, the property had become a horrific graveyard. Police testified they found Mr. Pickton's trailer strewn with women's clothing, makeup, sex toys, syringes and duct tape. "* *
Crack Whore Confessions in-depth review:
"The page is laid out just like the tour so you know exactly what you’ll be seeing. There is a row of links on top and then the thumbnailed pictures of all the crack heads that he has interviewed and banged . . . There are 73 current crack whores in Crack Whore Confessions. Cracker Jack updates weekly so there is always a new slut to see and hear . . . The videos are amazing. They are so in your face real that you’ll be sitting on the edge of your seat listening to these sluts discuss openly the horrible past that they have lived though . . . every one of these crack whore’s has a story to tell and each is more shocking then the next. It is no wonder these sluts turned to crack as an outlet . . . The videos are all in .wmv format. You can also save the ones you liked the best on your harddrive for watching later. The clarity is good and so is the sound. You almost feel like you are Cracker Jack."
In this brothel called America
She is on the blue path walks against the dawn
White powder her cursed solace
Thievery and lies her language
Needle her core
No judgment in this lake of fire
She is far away as stars
Her eyes small winters of death
Pray for her
She can’t keep warm without this spoon
Takes us on a journey of defeat
Her arms black with scars
Path which comes to silence and stays
Split in the lightning of red and white
Pierced with love for women
She falls to her knees hoarsely cries
I cannot live without oblivion
Pray for her
Let our voices lead her to another way
Pray with all our spirits
Lead her stumbling bruised ashamed
Away from this dark drowning in white
Stars give her strength
Sun turn her eyes
Moon guide her feet
Earth turning hold her
We pray for her
We sing for her
We drum for her
We pray
—Chrystos, 1988
Pickton convicted on six counts of second degree murder.
Bing Crosby - Adeste Fideles (O Come All Ye Faithful) (Visualizer)
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This isn't the same Bing Crosby rendition of *Adeste Fideles *my parents
had on a Christmas album of his from the early 1950s, but it's close enough
to ev...
18 hours ago
5 comments:
Another Chrystos poem:
No More Metaphors
To be a prostitute is to walk cold wet streets
in a dangerous night dependent
on the hunger of strangers vulnerable to their hatred
fists perverse desires diseases
To use one's face and body literally
to pay the rent the pimp utilities nylons lipstick
to wear a bruise where the heart beats
to be a tunnel for the spit of men
to be a hole for the hatred of women
to sell one's body nightly
you could say it's
the only honest work a woman ever gets
To be a murderer of prostitutes
is to be free
to do it
as many times as you want
or to be warm fed regularly
in a cell for which one pays no rent
to have free tobacco library arts & crafts sports programs
To live to an old age
secure in tight walls
radio playing with wet dreams at night
of their bodies
breasts slashed open
there faces no longer flowers
memories of the way
it really is
Interesting poem. But I think what intrigues me the most is what strikes me as an almost subaudible yearning for a more dire punishment for the killers. I suppose that I think I hear a call to make the killers suffer more (A plea for the death penalty, perhaps?), which is something that I'm unaccustomed to in poetry.
And perhaps it's just me, but it does seem to paint an overly rosy picture of life in prison.
(P.S.: Dawn, did you copy and paste this, or transcribe it? I think that last "there" should be "their," instead. Maybe it's the old software tester in me, but the perceived error jars.)
“I tried to go home again. I stood at the door to my childhood, but it was closed to the public.” Lisel Mueller
This is such a powerful, and sad, post. Thanks for writing it - there's something about the lurid nature of most of the coverage that seems to lack the humanity you've so poignantly expressed here.
There's a cyclic process to shame that's difficult to describe - that when we’re compromised (as we all are, sometimes), we forget who we are, and instead get caught up in who we're afraid we might be. When there are people around us who care about us - not even just the people who love us, but people of common decency - it's their obligation to remind us of who we are. That’s an obligation we all share.
These women had all forgotten who they were, and the people around them, rather than living up to this human obligation, selectively attended to the shameful aspects of their situation - their desperation and willingness to actively participate in their own degradation. Had they remembered who they were - that they had been loved once, or had they been taught to treat their innocence with reverence, they might have remembered that they also have an obligation to at least the children they used to be, if not the adults they'd become.
I think most people in this situation lack the vicarious experience of the imperative felt by their parents, to shelter the innocence of their child, and lacking this they feel no imperative of their own (what feels natural is what we experienced, as children, or occasionally it’s opposite). For others, the imperative to protect themselves is simply eroded away, as they’re consistently dreamed up by the people around them, and they learn to selectively attend to those shameful parts of themselves, believing them to have primacy, and perhaps even taking pride in their victimization. Drugs, of course, play their role, as the mechanisms by which satisfaction, comfort, or love are subverted, and rough-knuckled despair comes around to collect payment, with compound interest.
The press exploits the ravenous public desire for the morbid and salacious, but by participating in this, we are also participating indirectly in the manner in which these women were dreamed up. So thanks for interrupting that process for me, and reminding me of how terribly sad this all is.
Aaron,
I don't read it the way you do. I read her as saying that the killer is intact, warm, comfortable, secure and the women he killed never were intact, warm, comfortable and secure. Even now they suffer in his fantasies. I don't read it as wishing for greater vengeance, but perhaps that's because I have no such wish. Chrystos very well might. She's a Native American activist who survived many years as an incest victim, prostitute and addict. Even so, she talks about the uncle who abused her in another poem, and how she hurt herself to purge him.
The error with "there" is mine. Sorry.
TK: I was caught by the interweaving of the figurative and the real: the women are painted faces/they are paint, we consume them/they are meat.
The news coverage was a sad testament to the position of these women in society. Willie Pickton is famous. The newspapers write stories of the crime scene, of his depravity. They elevate him to the status of Monster. The women are fragments ground into the mud. No one will tell their story.
"Oh," say the journalists, "the Vancouver Police failed these women." No one looks at how and why, or notes that the VPD failure is merely the culmination of our failure as a society, even as we cut funding for women's shelters, as we fail to provide childcare for women who need drug and alcohol treatment.
Reporters go to the Downtown Eastside on the day of the verdict looking for reactions, and they come back and say, "the VPD failed these women!" After five fucking years, one would hope for a better analysis than that, but the women are fragments of bone, they are mud.
That we ask for nothing more for them is how we failed them long ago.
Hmm... I suppose that I perceive Chrystos begrudging the killers their intactness, warmth, comfort and security, since, as you so rightly point out, the women they killed had none, even in death.
Perhaps it's because it's common for survivors to understand convicts as intact, warm, comfortable and secure in prison, which is the exact opposite of what I would suspect prison is like. (I suppose that one isn't supposed to think of life in prison as intact, warm, comfortable and secure - otherwise one suspects it would lose some of its deterrent value.) And I often see the survivors of crimes wishing that they could force perpetrators into certain feelings - precisely as a way of disrupting the convict's "cozy" little world.
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