The Montreal Massacre

Anne-Marie Edward
was a John Abbott College student
who got into a prestigious engineering school:

Université de Montréal’s École Polytechnique.
Though I was just fifteen,
I’ll never forget

the day
she was murdered:
December 6, 1989.

My enthusiasm for Pentecostalism was fading,
Susan and I were getting serious,
and I was already in trouble at Argyle Academy.

I had a black eye and two broken fingers
from an LD dance fistfight,
which I won.

I was lying on my bed when I got the news,
listening to U2’s “Drowning Man”
in my Galt Street bedroom.

After letting the men go,
he told the women who remained:
“You’re all a bunch of feminists.

I hate feminists.”
Fourteen young women died that day
—and, although it wasn’t immediately apparent,

something youthful
and beautiful
died in us too:

an innocence, a naïveté, a sweet faith
in the inherent goodness of the world.
We became feminists on that day.

Misandry and misogyny
may be equally evil in theory,
but their real world consequences

are anything but equal:
woman-hating men murder women
with some regularity,

whilst man-hating women
are merely annoying
dinner party guests.

—John Faithful Hamer, From Here: A Love Letter to Montreal (2020)