Remembering the Montreal Massacre of Women Engineering Students at École Polytechnique
December 6, 2019, is the 30th anniversary of the massacre and mass shooting leading to the deaths of 14 young women, mainly engineering students, at the Montréal École Polytechnique in 1989. Ten other women students were wounded, along with four men. It is the deadliest shooting in Canadian history. The killer Marc Lapine, a 25-year-old, also killed himself. He targeted the victims specifically as women, but also as engineering students, and said he hated feminists. It's also The National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women.
30 years ago, I was with my Mom celebrating her birthday when the news came across the TV. It still fills me with a great sadness and in the intervening years we continue to see large scale violence against women (and often perceived indifference and incompetence by authorities) in the serial killer Robert Picton or the literally hundreds of missing or murdered Indigenous women across Canada. This also doesn't take into account domestic violence or the verbal harassment and abuse or sexual and physical violence many women face on a daily basis in their everyday lives.
Below is a selection of books and other material touching on this disturbing subject.
December 6: From the Montreal Massacre to Gun Control: the Inside Story
"On December 6, 1989, Marc Lépine walked into the École Polytechnique at the Université de Montral, ordered the men out, and then started shooting at the remaining women with a semi-automatic rifle. He killed fourteen women and wounded thirteen more.The slaughter, motivated by his rage against feminists, shocked the world. Heidi Rathjen was a student in the building at the time, and for forty-five long minutes she listened to the shots as the killer roamed the building. In the hours and days that followed, as a member of the former student council, she played a leading role in dealing with the media, helping with the funerals, and in organizing the memorial event. She did not know then that her life had been changed. Rather than continuing to grieve, she decided to do something to help prevent similar tragedies in the future. With the help of Wendy Cukier she organized the national Coalition for Gun Control. This book describes their fight to raise public awareness, gain public support, and then force not just one, but two gun-control bills through Parliament, against the workings of the million-dollar gun lobby. It was an extraordinary campaign, and a political eye-opener for a young woman." See also the DVD Heidi Rathjen: From Tragedy to Triumph.
CBC Archives: The Montreal Massacre, 1989
"I Hate Feminists!": December 6, 1989, and Its Aftermath
"On December 6, 1989, a man walked into the engineering school École Polytechnique de Montreal, armed with a semi-automatic rifle and, declaring "I hate feminists," killed fourteen young women. "I Hate Feminists", originally published in French in 2009, examines the collective memory that emerged in the immediate aftermath and years following the massacre as Canadians struggled to make sense of this tragic event and understand the motivations of the killer. Exploring stories and editorials in Montreal and Toronto newspapers, texts distributed within anti-feminist "masculinist" networks, discourses about memorials in major Canadian cities and the film Polytechnique, which was released on the twentieth anniversary of the massacre, Mélissa Blais argues that feminist analyses and the killer's own statements have been set aside in favour of interpretations that absolve the killer of responsibility or even shift that blame onto women and feminists. In the end, Blais contends, the collective memory that has been constructed through various media has functioned not as a testament to violence against women but as a catalyst for anti-feminist discourse."
Flowers We Will Never Know the Names of: Long Poem
"This is a stunning new long poem by an important Canadian poet. It is a poem of love against violence and loss. Written in the language of flowers, and reimagining the alphabet stunned by this history-changing event, it marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the murders of fourteen female students in Montreal on December 6, 1989. It is an incantation, a chant, a protest, a memento, an invocation, a prayer organized in fourteen sections. It is a bouquet of flowers. It challenges syntax, liberates lyric and the spellchecker. Many new words have been created, or old ones rewritten, especially using enjambment, a passionate and strikingly female device."
The December Man = L'homme de décembre
"Using humour and the humdrum of everyday life, Murphy intuitively moves backwards in time to the fateful day when Jean, the only ray of hope in this working-class family, escaped the massacre… or thought he did. This searing drama on courage, heroism, and despair explores the long private shadow that public violence casts.Winner of the 2007 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama and the 2008 CAA Carol Bolt Award."
"Based on the events that occurred on December 6, 1989, at Montreal's Polytechnique School, the movie tells us about that specific day through the eyes of two students, Valérie and Jean-François, whose lives have been changed forever, when a young man entered the school with one idea in mind: kill himself and take with him as many women as possible." See also the National Film Board DVD After the Montreal Massacre.
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Thanks for posting this.