Missing women, missing questions

This morning I went for a walk with my dad's dogs, a gangly Golden Retriever named Buster, after Buster Keaton, and a three-legged mutt named Roxy, like Alexander's wife. It was early in the morning, dawn was still a ways off and it was pleasantly quiet, the only thing to disturb the suburban tranquility was the droning sound of garages opening and closing to let their cars out. As the dogs took me on their familiar route, smelling what needed to be smelled, peeing on what needed to be peed on, we came across a tightly bundled old woman, shoveling the side walks which had received a few centimeters of snow during the night.

"What beautiful dogs," she said, and stopped laboring to look at them and perhaps coax one of them closer to scratch a furry forehead. "I love animals, they have no malicious intentions." Ha! my mind exclaimed silently, and my eyes burst forth from their sockets, anxious to spy this diminutive aged philosopher more closely before the apparition (for what could she be but a figment of some kind?) disappeared completely. Morning walks in a boomtown during a booming recession usually don't include matter-of-fact commentary about the essential nature of, at least mammals, and there was something in her radiant old face which suggested to me that she could probably empathize with a moth or spider if not as easily, then with at least as much homely conviction once the truth of their innocence had occurred to her.

"People need to do more for each other," was what she said next, and at this point I felt compelled to fell a tree and fashion out of it an old-fashioned desk and chair at which I planned to sit and takes notes. But I had to rush to work so our meeting was brief; like heart beats, one could have counted the deep inhalations of both dogs who accepted the temporary pause in their morning grounds keeping without drama, preferring instead to whiff at whispering odors buried under the small covering of snow. An awkward but friendly hug with the old woman, who needed to finish shoveling "before the children come out," and we were off again, the dogs calmly but with great diligence and workmanlike efficiency smelling as much of the earth as their leashes would allow.


As I gradually awoke thinking about the old woman's proverbial observations, my head filled with images from the extraordinary and epic novel 2666 by Roberto Bolano, which is about many things but most generally the brutal unsolved murders of hundreds of women in an industrial border town in Mexico. I thought about the hundreds of dead or disappeared women here in Canada whose fates are equally as mysterious as the characters in Bolano's monumental fiction. Innumerable women have "gone missing" in recent years, the great majority of them are native. These silent sisters have been quietly erased from their communities and the world with barely a murmur of protest by the majority of Canadians. As the horrors of the subhuman Robert Pickton became known a few years ago, there was a general acknowledgment that more women than one could count had disappeared, but really weren't they in situations where such barbarity should be expected? Most of us have dealt with these missing women, if the knowledge of their missingness occurs to us at all, with a sad shrug and a vague sense that it's just the way it is. Men, at least a tiny (hopefully) portion of them, have always been violent with women, treated them worse than dogs, why should our day and age be any different?

It should be different because we want it to be different. It should be unacceptable that women can go missing and nothing be known or discovered about them. The truth of their dismal lives should kick our tongue-twisting, media-savvy/anxious politicians to race back to parliament as fast as they can. They should pull the muscles in their legs due to the speed with which they scramble to pass legislation which protects these women, which demands more from our police forces and judicial systems. Something towards this end has been demanded of Canada by the UN in recent weeks. As party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women Canada has dedicated itself to such vigilance in any case, so in a way it's all about the timeless and ubiquitous problem of putting words into action. Last month, a UN monitoring body requested (available here) Canada look into 511 missing aboriginal women and report back in one year's time. Similar committees and studies have trickled in over the years, as a patient and dogged few have not let the issue die. It remains to be seen whether Canada and its politicians are able to remove its collective head from its collective arse.

Bolano's story is a fictional story about a true tragedy in the miserable city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. For the last several decades the remains of hundreds of women have turned up outside the city and only in the rarest cases has anyone been brought to anything approximating "justice." His novel is a landmark piece of modern literature which reflects the vital truth that words have moral implications. While Canada may not have a Roberto Bolano in its mist to pester our consciences through the power of his vivid tragedy, we need to wake up to our own complacent barbarity as best we can.