‘RELUCTANT ACTIVIST’ FEELS A RESPONSIBILITY
I’d much rather be living my life,’ Benaway says
In one of the final poems of Gwen Benaway’s fourth collection, day/ break, she writes: “I have no monument big enough to hold my dead. Every day, a new name blossoms. This one shot outside a bar. This one strangled in her bed. This one stabbed 40 times by her lover. This one beaten by a pack of men.”
Given that one of the intentions of Benaway’s collection is to simply ask “what it means to be a trans woman,” it certainly suggests that marginalization, fear and violence continue to be an everyday reality for transgenders. In fact, when asked about this and similar passages in day/break, it’s disturbing how quickly and matter-of-factly Benaway can offer her own example of violence.
“One day I was just walking down the street in my neighbourhood and someone walked behind me, hit me in the back in the head, started physically assaulting me, broke my glasses, gave me a concussion,” says Benaway, in an interview with Postmedia from her home in Toronto. “I got away by running into a building. You never know what’s going to happen to you when you’re a trans woman in the world and you always have to be prepared for it.”
A trans woman of Anishinaabe and Métis descent, Benaway’s previous collection of poetry, Holy Wild, won the Governor General’s Literacy Award last October, which makes her one of the few transgender artists honoured with the prize. But when asked about it by The Canadian Press at the time, she said it was a “double-edged sword” that filled her with “intense fear and panic” for the sort of attention in might attract.
Four months later, she says her fears were warranted.
“The announcement and the press and publicity attracted a lot of negative attention,” she says. “There were a lot of attacks on social media, attacks in private. As much as it was a beautiful thing to win it and life-changing in a way, it was also really scary and negative. It caused a lot of harm in my life and it still causes a lot of harm in my life.”
It’s depressing insight into the reality of an artist who has been hailed as a “rising star” in the literary world. On Friday, Benaway will join Lee Maracle and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson at the University of Calgary’s Macewan Hall for its annual Distinguished Visiting Writer event, which has previously featured such authors as Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, Art Spiegelman and Michael Ondaatje. The evening is described as “three generations of acclaimed, groundbreaking Indigenous women” and all three will be participating in a panel discussion and community class for Indigenous writers and writers of colour. But Benaway admits she is a little wary seeing herself as a mentor, just as she is also leery about labelling herself an activist even if she clearly fits the description.
Benaway says the poems in day/ break, while certainly intimate, were designed to look outward and explore the realities of a community and “how gender, sexuality, and love intersect with the violence and transmisogyny of the nation state.”
“I think sometimes when you’re a poet, especially if you’re a female poet and you write about your personal life, there’s a tendency for people to think that it’s diary writing and you’re just sharing all these thoughts or feelings that you’re having,” she says. “But even when I’m talking about very intimate, private things or personal experiences, I’m always thinking about those larger themes and the larger challenges that are happening in society. I’m very deliberate about what I’m willing to share. If it’s a diary, it’s a very curated diary.”
Benaway set out to write a bigger-picture account of the patterns of violence against trans women, including Indigenous and racialized trans women, and linking it to her own experiences in her daily life.
“I’ve experienced a lot of sexual violence and just physical violence,” she says. “I’ve been assaulted on the street, I’ve been assaulted in private. For me, it’s sort of normalized.”
So while Benaway struggles with being called an activist — “People always call trans women activists whenever we are just (saying): ‘Hey, don’t murder us ...’” — she often feels like she has been put in situations where she doesn’t have a choice. Not long after winning the Governor General’s Literary prize, she was in the spotlight for protesting an event at the Toronto Public Library featuring Meghan Murphy, a Vancouver-based, self-described feminist writer who argues that transgender women endanger women and undermine women’s rights. Her involvement in the protests brought another barrage of hostile reactions on social media.
“I guess I’m a reluctant activist,” she says. “I’d much rather be living my life, whatever that looks like. But I think there’s a responsibility for myself as someone who has a public platform to do something with it and do something that meets the need of the more vulnerable members of my community who need things like access to shelters and access to rape-crisis services. As much as I don’t like being on the front lines, I think it’s a responsibility that I have.”