 Felipe de la Espada, Santa Rita de Casia (Public domain image via Smithsonian American Art Museum) Today: Myriam Gurba, founding editor of Tasteful Rude, and author of Creep (2023) and Mean (2017); and Trevor Alixopulos, comics artist and author of The Hot Breath of War.
Issue No. 164How I Celebrate Day of the Dead
Myriam Gurba If Memory Serves
Trevor Alixopulos
How I Celebrate Day of the Deadby Myriam GurbaAutumn is approaching and with it comes the Day of the Dead. I use this holiday to honor women taken by femicide. A gender-based form of lethal violence, femicide is always motivated by the same thing: misogyny. While misogyny is popularly defined as an irrational hatred of women, it’s not. Instead, misogyny is the mechanism through which women are punished for violating traditional gender roles. Every day in the U.S., “romantic” misogynists execute three or more women. These perpetrators murder former wives and girlfriends for daring to escape from them, for asserting agency and rejecting submission. The nonzero possibility of femicide makes leaving an abuser dangerous. Urging a survivor to “just leave” heightens her vulnerability to post-separation violence and premature death. When escaping, survivors need a safety plan. These are not ordinary “breakups.” Fleeing an abuser is more like fleeing a prison. I learned how dangerous it is for a girl to leave an abuser when I was nineteen. After I graduated high school, my brother and sister began their high school experience. During her freshman year, my sister heard rumors that a friend of hers, a ballerina, was being physically abused by her boyfriend. Kids witnessed him hit her after school, by her locker. When the ballerina ended the relationship, she told people that she feared her ex-boyfriend. She had very good reason to. One Friday the 13th he snuck into her home with a rifle and ended her life. She was fifteen years old. At school, a priest told the ballerina’s classmates not to judge her killer. I honor the ballerina and others lost to misogyny by constructing an altar for them in my garden. First, I stack five whitewashed wooden crates. Then, I place a print of Saint Rita of Cascia in a central niche. Rita is the patron saint of abused women, and witches have been known to appeal to her for assistance when doing justice work on behalf of rape and domestic violence survivors. Rita was freed from her rapist after an assailant stabbed her husband to death. Many of the women who pray to Rita ask her to end their suffering by similar means. I festoon my garden altar with marigold garlands and arrange several marigold bouquets in glass vases and clay jars. I place photographs of my female ancestors in the crates. A photograph of Sophia, a femicide victim with whom I’m intimately connected, is also placed among them. On the top crate, I lean a funerary crucifix that I inherited from my great-grandmother. Next, I ensure that the spirits will be hydrated and nourished. There’s a cup of water. Some salt. Bananas. Grapes. Guavas. Papayas. Sugar-encrusted pan de muerto that I’ve spent the day baking. A shot of tequila. A cup of chocolate milk. Apples. More flowers. To attract the spirits, I burn copal resin. It’s pleasing to them. One soul I’ll be honoring this year is Kim Porter. Born in Georgia in 1970, Kimberley “Kim” Antwinette Porter worked as a model and entrepreneur. She became involved in a romantic relationship with rapper Sean Combs that lasted for thirteen years. Porter died shortly before her forty-seventh birthday. A coroner attributed her death to pneumonia, but now that the extent of Combs’ abusiveness has been exposed, it’s safe to say that domestic violence likely played a part in shortening her life. In May, a video of Combs kicking, stomping, and dragging ex-girlfriend Cassandra “Cassie” Ventura went viral. This video evidence forced Combs to issue a public apology for battering. It also substantiated Ventura’s statements that she had suffered sublethal domestic violence for years. Police arrested Combs on September 16th and have charged him with racketeering and sex trafficking. According to his indictment, Combs had many accomplices. Some of them helped him to plan and orchestrate his violent activities. Others helped him to hide them. The indictment describes gang rapes that lasted for days. After these ordeals, Combs’s victims required medical treatment. They received IV fluids, only to be raped again once they had healed.
When the Ventura video went viral, reporters spoke with Jake Porter, Kim Porter’s father. He told Rolling Stone that he was disgusted with the video. “I was in Vietnam,” he added, “and I wouldn’t do that to my enemies.” Mr. Porter is onto something. Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman has worked extensively with diverse trauma survivors, including combat veterans. What she found is that domestic violence regimes reproduce the dynamics of prisoner of war camps, noting the significant difference that medals and memorial ceremonies are given only to survivors of war; “There is no public monument for rape survivors,” she wrote. Sociologist Alan Biderman studied methods of torture used on prisoners taken during the Korean War and then developed theories on torture and coercion. Sociologists studying battered women found Biderman’s theories useful for explaining how women become trapped by romantic misogynists. Ultimately, the operator of a prison camp and the patriarchal head of a misogynist household rely on identical strategies. Both figures conjure an atmosphere of dread to control their victims. That atmosphere is established through violence or threats of violence; the threat is always there, an invisible axe dangling over the survivor’s head always. There’s no such thing as domestic abuse without violence. The afterlife of domestic violence is brutal. It brings a host of long-term health consequences. DV-induced asthma, heart disease, cancer and stroke shorten many survivors’ lives. Because abusers are most likely to attack their victim’s neck and head, 75% of DV survivors experience cumulative traumatic brain injuries. Eventually, these injuries may lead to dementia and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a condition that may develop decades after attack. I love building altars, but I hate that there is no altar capable of accommodating the millions of female souls taken by femicide. I’ll honor the ballerina by playing some Tchaikovsky. I’ll honor Kim Porter with roses, tobacco, and velvet, and by asking Saint Rita to pay Mr. Combs a “visit.”
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If Memory Servesby Trevor Alixopulos
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