Anne-Marie Edward was a John Abbott College student
who got into UdM’s prestigious engineering school,
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 tropical 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
—not in a showy-but-harmless,
politically-correct sense,
but in a quiet, dangerous, deeply-religious,
once-I-was-blind
-but-now-I-see sense,
the sense intended by the Psalmist
when he angrily declares:
“Ye that love the LORD, hate evil.”
—John Faithful Hamer, The Book of the Dead (2017)