{"id":4499,"date":"2017-08-29T11:01:01","date_gmt":"2017-08-29T11:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/i-was-a-witch-because-people-hated-me-no-one-knew-why\/"},"modified":"2019-03-25T13:03:42","modified_gmt":"2019-03-25T17:03:42","slug":"i-was-a-witch-because-people-hated-me-no-one-knew-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/i-was-a-witch-because-people-hated-me-no-one-knew-why\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I Was a Witch Because People Hated Me & No One Knew Why\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIf you\u2019re a girl & you want to be heard \/ Then maybe have a demon flap your gap,\u201d suggests James Gendron in his book of narrative poetry, Weirde Sister<\/em><\/a>. In a seven-chapter story in verse, Gendron assumes the voice of a woman who was accused of, and ultimately executed for, witchcraft during the witch trials of the early modern period. As history is narrated by those who survive it, and the powerless rarely get to dictate their legacy, Weirde Sister <\/em>is a crucial act of bearing\u00a0witness.<\/p>\n

The book grapples with \u201cthe arbitrary \/ Network of intersectional oppression \/ Known as Early Modern Europe,\u201d rendering an historic atrocity with universal urgency. Serving as testimony submitted over three centuries after the trials, it <\/em>is both excavation and exoneration. And while fascination with witch hunts may have timeless appeal, Weirde Sister<\/em> is also a timely appraisal of the present moment. Gendron injects a politics of eternity into the dark heart of the story, which pulses with the abiding truth that \u201chumans are capable of such \/ Inhumanity it doesn\u2019t really seem inhuman.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Gendron injects a politics of eternity into the dark heart of the\u00a0story.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As expressed in his acknowledgements, Gendron conceived of Weirde Sister <\/em>\u201cin solidarity with every person whose mere existence terrifies the powerful.\u201d Indeed, the book is driven by imaginative leaps of empathy. Gendron\u2019s narrator speaks from the margins with sensitivity and sincerity, claiming: \u201cI was a witch because \/ People hated me & no one knew why.\u201d When she first signs a contract with Satan, she is merely grateful for the attention and care the deity pays her. Her observations are inflected with a sense of bewilderment at the evils of the world, even as she acknowledges that her own precarious position within it is interpellated by state and social systems of power. She defends Satan as misunderstood, blameless in the ordering of the world as we know\u00a0it:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cSee this world is what is evil
Here where they push the kid
With the lice down the stairs
Where torture is not confined
To the realm of genre fiction
But undergirds the apparatus of state\u00a0power\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s this same world order that allows the tourist economy of Salem to thrive on spooky sensationalism, willful amnesia glossing over histories of genocide and state violence. Gendron is clear about his own complicated interest in the Salem Witch Trials, explaining in the book\u2019s preface that as a child he \u201cfelt normal in Salem because [he] was weird everywhere else.\u201d The solace the place can provide is due in part to the town\u2019s hokey Halloween infrastructure\u200a\u2014\u200awhat Gendron calls the \u201cspooky-industrial complex\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200awhich has of course arisen from a real\u00a0tragedy.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/figure>\n

Yet Gendron wonders if perhaps it is still better to be mocked than to be forgotten, pointing to countless other atrocities never commemorated. To this day, no one knows what was done with the accused witches\u2019 corpses. The exact location of their deaths was only confirmed in 2016, and almost too perfectly, the site now abuts a Walgreen\u2019s. These are the kinds of juxtapositions Gendron highlights and plays inside, creating fresh absurdities by confounding the old world with the new. Exhuming the witches\u2019 memories in a sort of modern drag, he recontextualizes the trials in order to restore the human suffering at the story\u2019s\u00a0core.<\/p>\n

\n

Perhaps it is still better to be mocked than to be forgotten.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Gendron is at his most searingly lucid when exposing the arbitrariness of power and the pain it inflicts, though he is careful that Weirde Sister<\/em> does not read like a treatise. Amid gruesome descriptions of bodily and emotional trauma appear aphoristic snatches of truth such as \u201cThe law too nakedly \/ scaffolds the halls of power\u201d and \u201cMen always think their feelings are your fault.\u201d Such sharp observations are buttressed by a wry, winking sense of humor. The witches sleep on \u201ccattresses\u201d while ale becomes \u201cthe beverage of choicessity\u201d and Satan \u201cjots down new ideas for\u00a0STDs.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/figure>\n

Satanism itself is treated as a sort of liberation theology, solace from the omnipresent threat of Puritanical violence. It seems the natural choice to take delight in the perversity of Satan over that of persecution. And Gendron\u2019s delight is contagious, as when he writes, \u201cRoll every tattoo in history into a ball \/ And light it on fire: \/ That\u2019s just one grain of sand \/ On Hell Beach, baby \/ A beach where suffering is \/ Considered totally worth\u00a0it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gendron sometimes approaches this suffering slant, with a smile. Other moments of the book ring out with the intensity of their contemporaneity. Is it possible to think of witch hunts in 2017 without also conjuring the image of an American president who targets his country\u2019s most vulnerable populations, even as he cries that any basic scrutiny is a \u201ctotal witch hunt\u201d? There is intrinsic value in reexamining the systems of power that allowed for three centuries of witch hunts, which \u201cclaimed an estimated 50,000 lives\u200a\u2014\u200aa world-historical tragedy of which the Salem Witch Trials are but a late and geographically remote aftershock.\u201d Perhaps the aftershocks are ongoing. Gendron\u2019s consideration of a past tragedy is also a dark mirror for the modern\u00a0world:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWomen can now be tried & even executed
For a host of crimes of a primarily sexual nature
A highly ambiguous sign of progress
And this right to be murdered by the state
Even accrues to children in cases
Of petty theft & animals convicted
Of involvement in acts of maleficent witchcraft
Highlighting the paradox that equality
Under the law often begins with the
Universalization of heretofore selective
Forms of oppression, the opening of new
Horizons in disenfranchisement
And the inequitable widening of the path
Into the graveyard\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If Weirde Sister<\/em>\u2019s critical lens reflects poorly on humanity, it does so in the most humane spirit, like a plea for improvement. Or as Gendron writes, \u201cThis is not an anti-human feeling \/ This is a feeling of wanting to protect humans from people.\u201d As new horizons in disenfranchisement open up, Weirde Sister<\/em> is a call to action, a necessary reminder that everything old is new\u00a0again.<\/p>\n

<\/figure>\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIf you\u2019re a girl & you want to be heard \/ Then maybe have a demon flap your gap,\u201d suggests James Gendron in his book of narrative poetry, Weirde Sister. In a seven-chapter story in verse, Gendron assumes the voice of a woman who was accused of, and ultimately executed for, witchcraft during the witch […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26760,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,85],"tags":[92,507,294,175,5],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u2018I Was a Witch Because People Hated Me & No One Knew Why\u2019 - Electric Literature<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/i-was-a-witch-because-people-hated-me-no-one-knew-why\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u2018I Was a Witch Because People Hated Me & No One Knew Why\u2019 - Electric Literature\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u201cIf you\u2019re a girl & you want to be heard \/ Then maybe have a demon flap your gap,\u201d suggests James Gendron in his book of narrative poetry, Weirde Sister. 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