Required Reading: A Witness in Words and Drawings to the Reena Virk Trials, 1998-2000

Thomas M.F. Gerry is a professor of English at Laurentian University and
the editor of Arachne, Laurentian University’s bilingual
interdisciplinary journal of language and literature.

Since the trials of the young people who beat and murdered 14-year-old
Reena Virk in Victoria in 1997, there has been a good deal of
journalistic and artistic response, the latter including plays, stories,
and visual art. Required Reading combines a selection of the drawings
Heather Spears did in her role as court reporter at the trials with
poems she wrote to “resolve” the drawings.

Typical of a court artist’s work, the drawings are dispassionate
renditions of the people who carry out the legal process. In the poems,
Spears reflects on her artistic processes in relation to the events of
the trials. “I have also done this kind of thing,” she writes in
reference to the “required reading” of the murdered child’s body
when the “cool pathologist” documents the various wounds “at a
distance and without involvement.” The court artist’s professional
stance serves to heighten the disjunction between rationality and the
horrors being laid bare. Ultimately, Required Reading is a vivid
crystallization of society’s failure to respond adequately to deadly
violence.