Withheld
Belfast, 2013
WHAT I recognized about her right away was that she had been raped. In her life, she had been raped. I don’t know if everybody who’s been raped has this ability, but when I’ve talked it over with others who are living through the aftermath, the aftermath which is your whole life, it’s been something we felt we could notice. Obviously I don’t spot every single person and sometimes I’m wrong. So I never walk up and announce it to the person. I just wait and am not surprised if they tell me about it after a while.
You might doubt yourself when you think you see it, but deep down you know when you see somebody else who’s living through it. Call it rapedar. Ha. I know I shouldn’t laugh but you’ve caught me on a difficult day … should I go on? You seem a bit uncomfortable.
Right, so, my rapedar spotted her. ’Cause here’s how it is, like, when someone is doing that to you. Your mind is shrieking, “no, no, no,” and you’re looking for some kind of escape, and you realize that there is no escape. You are in a nightmare. And the man who is raping you, or the men who are raping you, as in my case, are laughing at your pathetic search for an escape, because you are seen as an amusement toy, and you are thinking, “Why doesn’t somebody help me? Why is there nobody here to help me?” But there is no one to help you. You have been selected to have this experience of complete and utter powerlessness, of men laughing in your face while you are powerless.
Perhaps if it happens when you’re a small child, then it’s a different matter. Perhaps then, the world of rape is the only world you’ve ever known. I don’t say that I speak for anyone except myself, but I suppose I must have been raised with some expectation of safety, or perhaps not safety but autonomy, because afterward, well, I began to see the world very differently than before. You begin to see the people around you very differently.
Because you’re looking around yourself, and you’re thinking, That person didn’t help me. That person didn’t help me. In particular, you see people in authority, people like teachers and headmasters and headmistresses and police and priests and nuns and parents and you think to yourself, She couldn’t protect me. He couldn’t (or wouldn’t) protect me, as you look at all these people who are in your world who are supposed to have your best interests in mind, to keep you safe, to do things for your own good and you think, What an unbelievable load of shite that is.
And you find yourself surprised, caught off guard, by how very, very angry you are indeed.
Because while the rape is happening, it’s like the world has been turned on its head. You’ve entered a new world of betrayal where people are getting real enjoyment out of doing you harm. You think, This can’t be happening. It’s like the world has been turned upside down.
But then you look around you, and you start to see the world, and you begin to think, no, the world didn’t just turn upside down. This is the world. The people who are supposedly there to protect you and others, they don’t, in reality, do that. Many of them are part of it, part of the people who think it’s funny when they can make others feel as if there’s nothing they can do but have harm done to them.
And so when I say that I spotted DD, when I connected with her that afternoon at the pub, that’s what I mean, what I saw. I saw the anger. My sort of anger. Not boiling beneath the surface, but right there in plain view. If you have it yourself, you can see it in others — the way she held herself, the way she held something back behind her smiling eyes. It’s the anger of knowing that the world is not simply imperfect, not simply needing a few nice alterations so it can be just grand, just peachy — the anger of knowing that the world is completely upside down.
Amy Williams
Her Kitchen, Fernwood Neighbourhood, Victoria, 2014
Our band loved Rosalyn Knight. We loooved her. Why did we love her? Oh, come on. You’ve toured with her. You know. All right, all right. Let me count the ways.
She was quick. She still is. Always ready with a snappy remark for any occasion. I remember sneaking backstage at Roots Fest mainly just to see her in action. We had just made it in back there. We saw some hippy volunteer come up to her and say, “Do you know there’s no smoking here?” and, like a shot, Rosalyn replied, “No, but if you hum a few bars I can play along.” Later, in the beer garden, some hipster CBC guy shouted, “Hey, Rosalyn, Minnie Pearl called, she wants her outfit back!” and she just shot back, “Hey, Grant, Don Rickles called, he wants his jokes back.” The chick from the Cowboy Junkies had snubbed her, and that was a big mistake because Rosalyn was the MC. They were taking a long time to set up before their show. She leans into the mic and broadcasts, “Boy, for a band that made its best record fifteen years ago with a single microphone, they sure have a lot of gear to set up!” Saw her come off the stage when she opened for k.d. lang at the big theatre. “Thanks very much! It’s been a pressure!” Somebody asked her what she had in her setlist one night before she went on at Tuesday’s — “Gonna play a medley of my hit.”
Yeah, we worshipped her. She was cool. She dressed in awesome thrift-store cowgirl clothes. She always had a smoke and a glass of red wine going. She was the only woman we knew who was making a living playing music. She was doing it. And we could see her. She was at the bar. She was at the Market on Yates buying spinach. She was riding her bike past the bakery. You know? And she wrote fucking amazing songs. “I’ll Make You Pay For It,” “Column A and Column B,” “Duchess of Esquimalt.” Holy shit. We would buy her albums and take them home and try to learn the songs. They seemed pretty simple and hummable, but when you took them apart, this shit was complicated. DD would have a little notebook and she’d just scratch out a mark every time we came to a new part of the song, and it’d be like, “Oh, shit, she didn’t go back to the A section, and she cut the bar in half before that — how many sections has she done? Six? This is the F section of this song. Jesus, what a woman.” That was how we felt about Rosalyn. She was our hero.
She didn’t really know us. We were just little punk kids to her. One time after we’d learned a bunch of them, we got shit-faced for courage on Golden Wedding and showed up on her doorstep at 3:00 a.m., and played five of her songs in a row. By song three she came out in her pyjamas, glass of red wine in her hand, and just smoked and drank and listened. Brody, her guitar player, came out and she just said, “Look what the sexy children are doing on our porch!” When we were done she invited us in for snacks. She gave us wine and made bruschetta. We got so drunk she let us crash on the floor of her living room. As we lay down she said, “John Carroll spilled a bottle of Talisker Special Cask on that floor last night, so if you get thirsty there’s probably seventy dollars worth of whiskey you could suck out of the carpet.”
I told her that, to us, she was like a mix of Nelson Mandela, Beethoven, and Simone de Beauvoir or something. I said if there was ever anything we could do for her, we would crawl over broken glass for her, we’d do anything for her. Without skipping a beat, she exhaled her smoke and said, “Got a place I could park my van for three months?”
She needed somewhere to park her Plush Monster, an ’82 Ford Econoline that used to be some kind of BC Hydro service vehicle and then got “customized” by some dude who clearly dressed it up to lure high-school girls. It was a beautifully creepy thing. She was going to Europe with Mykola I think, some trip out to Scandinavia or something. It was the kind of awesome glamorous thing that she did. Of course she could park her van with us! It was an honour.
So later when we realized that if we were gonna be real musicians, we had to go on the road, and we realized we were gonna need a vehicle, we just looked out the window at the driveway, and DD said, “Yep.”
When Rosalyn got back, I approached her at the Hullabaloo Open Mic at Tuesday’s
