Nancy Viva Davis Halifax

OPEN SEASON –Writing Tracy Latimer as a something-to-be-done

You were not always called by your whole name
Tracy Lynn Latimer
			 It rings country and western

		I think they also called you	 			Trace


That's what you are		a suggestion


Sitting on the combine Robert thought of guns	drugs		    fire 
On Sunday morning he brought you to the shed 
The front seat of the truck
Closed the doors 			      propped you up with rags
Fed the green hose from the exhaust to the cab

Afterwards he took you to your bed
Arranged you there as if asleep
Your mom and brothers at church

I wonder if he turned on the truck's windshield wipers 
Because they made you laugh

He says his life is better now he's put you out of your misery
He's happy 			your mom is happy 
That 	should be 	enough


I don't see you at the mall			 	you'd be 31	 

I see you in the front seat of every truck I pass
      Wondering what lie your father told you as he closed the door

I
Tracy Lynn Latimer is writ large on the Canadian disability landscape. She was born November 23, 1980 and died October 24, 1993. 4718 days. She lived with siblings Brian, Lee and Lindsay, her mother Laura and her father Robert, the man who became her murderer.

      I became familiar with the media accounts and the disability community response to the murder, but during the summer of 2009 my connection to Tracy was effected by a visceral wrenching. Perhaps it was because I found myself preoccupied with writing and how to represent the immediacy of embodied subjective responses. Perhaps it was because I was thinking about the multiple forms of abandonment, which exist at the edges of our social institutions. Or perhaps it was because I was in Lumsden, Saskatchewan about a five-hour drive south of Wilkie, where the Latimer family live: Wilkie, once home to the World's Largest Grasshopper. If you visit now you will not find the grasshopper but you will find a prairie town surrounded by fields and farms. The Latimer family lives on one of the farms. Robert is now on release from prison, where he served seven years of a life sentence.

      I had been seized by the disqualified space of Tracy's death, a space threatened with the rapid overgrowth of culturally credible narratives, a genre to which her telling did not belong. I searched the landscape for her contour &emdash; as scrub, as thicket, as mound &emdash gazing with hope and with memory of a child I had never met, yet who had somehow collapsed time, laid a claim upon me.

      I read and reread the transcripts from which open season was written. These brought forward the facts, as flat as the prairies of this province. It was when I was gazing into the sky or walking along the dirt roads that Tracy and I found each other and where we continued to reach toward each other.

      At night my search for Tracy Latimer continued through my browser as I crawled through the data on the World Wide Web. The first page returned is her father's, Robert Latimer, the man convicted of her murder. His presence, primary, continued to mediate any relationships between Tracy and me, Tracy and the world. Tracy is ever of her father - secondary - No matter how many times I ran the search history it forever created this hierarchy, this inarticulable contradiction, this jagged verge of language from which an alternative to his obstruction has not yet been born.

II
Beside me is Avery Gordon's Ghostly Matters. Her lexicon of haunting allows me to recognize the ways in which I am "tied to historical and social effects" (190) through "profane illumination" (204). This illumination renders "repressed or unresolved social violence making itself known, sometimes very directly, sometimes more obliquely" (xvi). Tracy was no longer concealed, but had erupted into my present quite directly. Much of Canada understood her murder through her father's perspective: for the greater good and to the end of what he called her suffering. This injustice coiled like a snake on the side of a hot road in the landscape calls for "something-to-be-done"(xvii). Perhaps it is while in the prairie landscape that the "something-to-be-done" folds Tracy and me within its imagination and the form of open season is produced and a poem becomes a something-to-be-done.

III
The present is a palimpsest through which the past moves. I arrange the words over and over again, change and remove, replace punctuation, scar the page. On the digital page I insert tabs knowing that the body of the poem, its breath is yours, was hers. It matters how she is read. The line He says his life is better now he's put you out of your misery gives too much to Robert. But I leave it. I look for Tracy in the swale of the prairie.

      Language twists Tracy and me together in a hurried movement. A trace can be the rope on a bell pull and ringing plaits us together. Plaiting and braiding are other ways of finding traces. Trace, etymologically, can be a length of cord or gimp - useful for anglers but not prairie girls. If I follow gimp one crippled step to the side I find her again as lame. Or as in a decorative edging: the truck was beautifully gimped. It formed the outline of his design.

IV
My writing is a drawing together as I gesture toward Tracy with hands that grasp and turn touch air sketching words that are and are not and which shape an affective series of movements across past and present. I am trying to make her present.

      As I write I recline on a couch in a record-breaking heat wave. My cat sprawls on her back under the fan. Pillows are under my legs and arms to support my writing limbs. I move between Tracy and the idea of assisted suicide and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and Tracy on a school bus and Tracy clapping her hands and mercy killing and the love of a father. I read the poem aloud and change a word. Again I read it. My cat does not move. The fan continues its circling. A fly buzzes too close. I catch it with glass and paper release it through the door back into the heat. Repeat. Tracy gazes at me from the corner. She likes that I do not kill the flies and instead return them to their larger home. I look toward the page - the line breaks lean resonant with memory of prairie landscape. Lines that break and start like sedge, lines that whistle with the hoofprints of deer moons.

Lines that break            that   break         life

References

Enns, R. (1999). A voice unheard: The Latimer case and people with disabilities. Halifax,            NS: Fernwood.

gimp, v.1. Second edition, 1989; online version June 2012. http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/view/Entry/78353; accessed 30 July 2012. Earlier version first published in New English Dictionary, 1899.

Gordon, A. (1997/2008). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minnesota, MN: Minnesota Press.

R. vs. Latimer. Supreme Court of Canada. (1997)

R. vs. Latimer. Supreme Court of Canada. (2001)

Richardson, L. (1992). The consequences of poetic representation. In C. Ellis & M. G. Flaherty (Eds.), Investigating subjectivity: Research on lived experience (pp. 125-137). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Richardson, L. (1994a). Nine poems: Marriage and the family. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 23 1: 3-13.

Richardson, L.(1994b).Writing: A method of inquiry. In N.Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative researc h (pp. 516-529). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Wilkie. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilkie,_Saskatchewan#Area_statistics.

Nancy Viva Davis Halifax teaches at York University and lives in Toronto. She was trained as a conceptual artist at NSCAD many years ago. She has published one academic book. Her performative writing explores life within community.