Fourteen Remembered by Fourteen Remembered

On December 6th, 1989, a gunman entered L’Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal and evacuated the men from the room. He shouted to the women who remained, “You are all feminists! I hate feminists!” and opened fire. Fourteen women were killed and nine were injured. Initial reactions to the massacre were of shock and bewilderment, the prevalent questions “Why?”and “Why women?” a resistance to implications of the wider social significance. Time, however, has rightly come to hold the Montreal Massacre as a symbol of how far we have yet to go in the struggle for equity and the elimination of misogyny and violence against women. Each year its anniversary sets the stage for rituals of remembrance and activism all across the country.

In a creative process spearheaded by Ahmed Hassan, 14 Remembered came together as a collaborative work, and was premiered at Massey Hall in Toronto in 2000. Blending our individual voices and personal responses to the Montreal Massacre with the funeral traditions of the many world cultures represented by the artists involved, it endeavours to memorialize this tragedy, the fourteen women, and the meaning implicit in their death.

14 Remembered is a contemplative journey through shock, anger, sorrow and grief, to a call for change, healing, and, ultimately, to a celebration of the women’s lives and their ability to teach us all. Toward the end of 14 Remembered (“Pour Annie St. Arneault”), a woman dances to a Zaar rhythm in a ritual of exorcism, shaking off the toxicity and trauma of the massacre. This is followed by a meditative spinning song. Circularity denoting eternity, spinning is a Sufi ritual in remembrance of the Divine — in this case, the divinity of the fourteen women.

We hear the individual women’s names several times: in a funereal annunciation and invocation, in prayer, and sung to the melody of the 13th century Agnus Dei heard throughout. Finally, after calling out to them as though still amongst the living, their names are spoken through the didgeridoo, the sound which frames the work as a whole. In Indigenous Australian tradition, the didgeridoo serves as a vehicle through which to carry the souls of cherished ones into the next world.

Kathleen Kajioka