This Is Not a Hoax by Heather Jessup

Author:Heather Jessup
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Published: 2020-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

UNSETTLING ACTS OF REMEMBRANCE: REBECCA BELMORE’S WILD AND VIGIL

For five days in the master bedroom of the historic house museum of the Grange in Toronto, an Anishinaabe woman reclines in the master’s bed. Her shoulders are bare. Her black hair spreads its tendrils across the white map of pillows beneath her head. Before inserting herself beneath the bedclothes, she redecorated. The Georgian four-poster bed had a new canopy made of beaver pelts. The bedspread glistened with red sateen fabric and swaths of black hair that undulated with the breath and movements of the woman in the bed.

Across the country, six months later, this same woman, with bucket and scrub brush, washed the sidewalk near the intersection of Gore and Cordova in Vancouver, then, once she had implored a passerby in the neighbourhood to light votive candles, she screamed out women’s names she had written on the skin of her body, and, for each name, stripped a rose of its leaves, petals, and thorns by running the flowers through her clenched teeth and closed lips. She then donned a red dress and repeatedly nailed the dress to the wood of an electrical pole, and to a nearby fence of plywood, and struggled—nailing, thrashing, nailing, thrashing—to tear herself free, until her dress hung in shreds and the woman remained: sweating, out of breath, standing on the street corner in her underwear.

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