Sarah de Leeuw, Where It Hurts
"Canadian literature" is such a strange landscape. One writer who ought to feature prominently is Sarah de Leeuw, the author of numerous books and all-around luminary: nominee for a Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction, nominee for a BC Book Prize in nonfiction, winner of a BC Book Prize for poetry, winner of a CBC Literary Prize in nonfiction, since 2024 an Honorary Lifetime Member of the League of Canadian Poets, and so on.
In the past I've loved both Unmarked: Landscapes Along Highway 16 and Skeena, and frankly her 2017 essay collection Where It Hurts has hit me even harder than those did.
Because of my readerly interests, the two previous books (the first nonfiction, the second poetry) are closer to my heart. They line up more closely with other books that I can't help returning to, such as Rita Wong and Fred Wah's beholden: a poem as long as the river or Adrienne Fitzpatrick's Instructions for a Flood or Harold Rhenisch's Tom Thomson's Shack.
Really, I don't have a frame of reference within which fully to come to terms with the explicit articulation of pain, specifically the pain experienced mostly by women, both the physical pains and the emotional ones that come from living in a misogynist world. When Theresa Kishkan wrote so compellingly about these kinds of themes in The Art of Looking Back, I'm able to frame it within the ten or so other Kishkan books that I've read and reread, so I can see shadows of Kishkan's experiences in Rose from A Man in a Distant Field, in Margaret Stuart from Sisters of Grass, and in Izzy from Weight of the Heart. When de Leeuw writes about it, so very powerfully that Where It Hurts really did deserve its nominations for the BC Book Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award, I don't have the ready armour of literary cross-references, but also I don't have the lived experience from the same side of misogyny that these essays speak from.
The essay "What Fills Our Lungs," for example: it's a stunning, stunning reflection on the disappearance of a 15-year-old friend in 1989. It blends working near the Cassiar asbestos mine with nostalgia for what it was to be 15 and female in northern BC the summer of 1989 (when I was 18), the subsequent destruction of Cassiar by the company that built the town with the crushing risk that came from being 15 and female in northern BC the summer of 1989. It shouldn't have this effect, I mean to be sensitive, but as has happened before, this essay blows up my own sense of those years in my own life, and this makes my reading experience more about me than I want it to be.
I mean, come on: "Your body, had it been found, was worthy of wrapping in silky white strands thin as whispers.... And there are things we survive, we teenage girls of northern British Columbia, while we watch the girls beside us drown" (p.53, p.62). Devastating, and the book's stuffed with such moments.
Still, I do want to say that Where It Hurts strikes me as redemptive. After all, this is about the sharing of pain, the speaking into ongoing existence of lost women, the assertion of community through the collective awareness of de Leeuw's subjects. "Tell me where it hurts" both assumes an engaged audience and gives agency to someone who's suffering, both of which are essential components toward change. This book isn't depicting pain for its own sake (although lordy, there's enough reason to demand that we bear witness to the ways in which women are made to suffer so that we grow unable to tolerate such a world), but sharing stories of pain that insist on its memorialization. What can't easily be seen can't be easily fought, and these essays bring to life a world that needs its fragments to be remembered, and certain of its underpinnings to be destroyed.
Give this book to someone strong enough to face directly up to these stories, these histories, these lives, and they'll treasure it.
Comments