Dare I Question The Patron Saints

How dare you question a dead woman?

Have some decency.

She's already dead.

Can't you see she has suffered enough?

Besides, we've finished improving her.

The woman was complicated.

Disgusting, really.

She had contradictions.

Existential dysfunctionalities.

Barometric fluctuations of headspace pulled at the poles between serotonin and cortisol.

Children.

She had children.

A kitchen.

And, a life that refused to behave like a feminist literature seminar.

So naturally, we killed the woman and kept the name.

That's just so much easier.

The corpse doesn't ask for royalties.

The corpse doesn't say, "actually, that's not what I meant".

The corpse doesn't object when you put a flag where the diagnosis used to be.

And suddenly,

miracle of miracles, 

suicide becomes empowerment.

Despair becomes resistance.

A breakdown becomes a declaration of rebellion.

A tragedy gets an inspiring backstory.

A nervous system gets a political affiliation.

The dead are very progressive that way.

They never contradict the people speaking on their behalf.

But there were children. Two infants. In another room.

And this is where the poetry gets awkward.

Because if the gas had spread,

if the fire had started,

if the accident had become what accidents occasionally become, 

the literary canon might have had two additional corpses to turn into metaphors.

What a relief that literature got lucky.

Apparently luck is now a feminist virtue.

Don't misunderstand me. Or actually do. 

But don't miss the fishbone in the throat.

The poems can be brilliant.

In fact, let them be brilliant.

That's the fucking point.

I don't need the poet to be a saint to read a poem.

I don't need Shakespeare's moral clearance before reading Shakespeare.

I don't need a poet's childhood, marriage, politics, sins, saints, sins against saints, or parking history

stapled to the back of every metaphor.

A poem isn't a character reference.

A metaphor doesn't inherit its mother's criminal record. Or its father's.

Art is not a family court.

But apparently

we've decided the artist and the art must be Siamese twins.

So when the artist does something you in your deluded godliness deem unforgivable, 

cut the poem in half.

When the artist is clinically insane, 

medicate the metaphor.

When the artist is politically inconvenient, 

ban the stanza, because burning was never enough.

When the artist is useful to your politics, 

quick, somebody laminate the corpse.

This is not criticism.

This is taxidermy with a reading list.

And feminism, 

dear God, 

feminism has become

the world's most convenient laundering service.

Put anything through it long enough

and apparently it comes out empowered.

Victimhood? Empowered.

Despair? Empowered.

Self-destruction? Empowered.

Abandoning infants while constructing a potentially lethal environment?

Careful.

That's not a sentence we like in the brochure.

Please say “act of rebellion” and keep walking.

The really delicious part is that 

you cannot question any of this.

Because she is dead.

Which apparently means

she has been promoted

from human being to constitutional amendment.

You may not dissent.

You may interpret.

You may adore.

You may write three thousand words about her courage.

But question?

Absolutely not.

How dare you question a dead woman?

She cannot defend herself.

Which is precisely why everyone has decided to use her like mascara:

apply when politically convenient, 

wipe off when the argument ends.

We do this constantly.

We find a dead person who suffered beautifully and immediately ask:

What can we make this suffering mean?

Not, 

what happened

to this person?

Not,

what was wrong?

Not,

what could we have

understood?

No.

Meaning first.

Human being later.

We don't want the corpse to teach us about human dysfunctionalities.

We want the corpse to teach us about our imagined brilliance.

Much more flattering.

So here's my heresy:

perhaps a woman can be brilliant and broken.

Perhaps a poet can write masterpieces and commit acts sanity cannot forgive.

Perhaps damage is not automatically empowerment just because the patient wrote beautifully about it.

Perhaps feminism doesn't require a woman to become a saint, and a man, a sinner.

Perhaps the dead don't become morally immaculate simply because their funerals are over.

And perhaps, 

brace yourselves, 

a poem can survive its poet.

Apparently this is now radical politics.

So bury the woman if you must.

Canonise her. Weaponise her.

Turn her into a feminist warrior, a tragic heroine, 

a patron saint of every argument that needs a dead woman to stop answering back.

But leave the poems alone.

They did nothing.

And if you insist that the poet's sins must contaminate the poetry,

fine.

Be consistent.

Start burning the entire canon.

I'll bring matches.

You bring the hypocrisy.