The Gateway, Fiction by Vance Mikin-Laurie
The Gateway
Vance Mikin-Laurie
I watched a play once in an old theatre in Quito, Ecuador. It was in an old white building with high ceilings and intricately detailed cornices and ancient artwork in gilded frames on the walls. Artist and activist types filled the lobby, conversing about the causes and crises of the times. Someone tried to push through with a video camera to talk to a woman on the other side of the room. The play was about femicide, about the unreported deaths of women as a result of male macho culture in the city and how the government was doing little to prevent it or prosecute the perpetrators or protect the victims.
The problem was that the mentality of the men who committed the crimes also existed in the brains of the men who were in charge of finding the criminals and the men in charge of arresting the criminals and the men in charge punishing the criminals. Different sides of the law found in their experience with women a commonality, a brotherhood of justification. And in those circumstances it became apparent that the law was only an assortment of words and words could be rearranged and in that country as in all the others, money was
the great rearranger
the great reinterpreter
the great reimaginer
x
It is as if the law exists in its ideal form, as it was written and as its author might imagine it to function, but then in order to enter our reality and the reality of its practical application it must pass through a kind of metaphysical gateway that exerts a force upon it that is of so much power that it becomes altered, mutated, and in some cases reversed from its original form.
This gateway is our nature, the unfortunate portal through which our ideals must pass before they can be applied to our actual lives, for example:
Murder is a crime, and as a crime it carries a punishment. Existing as a free woman in the city of Quito was not a crime at all and as such it carried no punishment. That is the original form of the law.
As it passed through the gateway of our nature it began to change. What came out the other side was the reality that women were murdered in the city simply for existing, and the murderers were unpunished, uninvestigated and ignored.
So then, what became the crime? What became the punishment? Was the crime existing? And the punishment death? This is the distortion the gateway of our nature makes upon even the most pragmatic of ideals.
x
At one point in the performance the audience was ushered onto the stage, and I remember being led up there as we walked across the boards and turned back to face our own seats. The lights were upon us, almost blinding. Cold white searchlights like a prison yard. I shielded my eyes with my hand and saw the darkened rows of seats where we had sat a moment ago. The actors stood and held newspaper articles with bloodstains across them. I was very young. Too young to have encountered the world that the performance was protesting, but I felt the pain in the room somehow, this rage that had to find somewhere to go, the rage ignored by those with the power to change it, the rage ignored by those afraid of what was true, the rage that found its expression in that room in that moment like someone screaming in the street, screaming at God, screaming at nothing.
Vance Mikin-Laurie is a writer from Melbourne, Australia. His work has been published in Pithead Chapel, The Molotov Cocktail and Thickjam, among others. He holds a Bachelor of Arts majoring in literature and media studies from Swinburne University.
Inquiry
The demonstration discussed in this piece was designed to create an impactful experience for the participant. You know the kind I mean, where something is going on — a play, a concert, a reading, an art show — and then, sometimes suddenly, in the middle of said performance you as the audience member are made to become a part of the show. Conscripted as you are into a situation outside of your control can be jarring, and, honestly, often this is the point. Perhaps you have been a part of such a performance; have been forcibly confronted in some direct way with a problem or idea that had before been distant. This can lead to a moment of catharsis or discovery; the abstract in one moment coalescing into something tangible, important and inescapable. The demonstration in this piece seems particularly apt, with audience members being placed into a situation that is outside of their control, in the same way that women in Quito (and indeed around the world) are so often placed into such positions. The powerlessness to avoid the difficult confrontation with the scene of the actors holding up the blood spattered newspapers mirrors the powerlessness so many women have felt in their own difficult situations.
This clash of power and powerlessness, of violence and oppression stretches its sword-bearing, gun-wielding, muscle-bound arms in so many directions. The law, as noted here in this piece, are words of power, a power that can so easily to be twisted against those it purports to protect. And with this discussion of power and violence against women - Femicide, let’s not mince words - is it any surprise we come quickly here to the topic of economics? Money and power, after all, are never far from each other.
What gives me hope here, though, in the end, is the rage. Rage at the oppression, rage at the violence, rage at the abuse. Rage in the streets is an act of hope. It comes from a place that is the opposite of acceptance, the opposite of resignation, an act of pure revolution. A shout of rage is an artifact of optimism, the belief that the powerful will not always win, that the time of oppression must (and can) come to an end. That justice must (and can) prevail. So let’s get to it. Shout in the streets, my friends. Raise your voices, and let your rage be the holy harmonics that shatter the false and violent world.