The Montreal Massacre

Andrea Levan is Co-ordinator of Women’s Studies at Laurentian
University.

This is a difficult book to read. It begins with a list of the 14
murdered women, and a few brief facts about each one—age, engineering
speciality, perhaps a scholarship or plans for the future. What follows
is a collection of letters and poems; for the most part, these were
published in the Montreal or student newspapers in the days immediately
following the massacre.

The book is a document of a search for meaning. The meaning of the
Montreal massacre is at once starkly obvious and darkly layered. Grief
for the victims, a threat to the hopes and aspirations of women
everywhere, a symbol of the violence against women occurring every day
in our culture: all these thoughts are expressed. But what emerges as
the book’s dominant theme is the confusion, despair, and anger
experienced by feminists, who felt denied their right to name their
experience. Letter after letter struggles with the reluctance of the
press to acknowledge the killer’s reasons for the massacre, or the
wish to characterize it as a meaningless act, unrelated to any larger
experience of misogyny or antifeminism. The tendency to find excuses for
Marc Lepine in his painful childhood, and even to blame “extreme”
feminists for provoking the rage he felt, was experienced as a further
assault.

Like the tower that survived at the centre of the Hiroshima explosion,
the Montreal massacre stands as a symbol of an unspeakable human
capacity for destructiveness, but its devastation spreads in widening
circles far beyond this centre. Though many of the individual letters
are incisive and powerful, the book’s overall impact is raw and
overwhelming. Perhaps it speaks from a perspective too close to the
event to provide a real understanding. Nevertheless, it is a valuable
document of what was experienced, and a painful reminder of how we all
struggled to understand.