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| Giulia Cecchettin, a 22-year-old university student was killed by her ex-boyfriend in 2023. Graphic: Giulia Cecchettin Foundation |
Femminicidio
a word not in daily use
Femicide
a word that needs to be in use.
I am the product of violence.
That’s a pretty word for it.
It sounds like, I dunno, parfait.
I’ll have the parfait violence per favore.
Soft sibilant whispering sounds
for being quartered and drawn emotionally.
Violence might as well as be my name.
The very existence of me is a scenario of violence.
My mother escaped my father several times.
The year before I was born, she lost a pregnancy,
from getting hit or kicked or punched
or pushed down the stairs, or maybe she fell out of fear,
this story has been told different ways over lifetimes.
He wooed her, pursued her, wouldn't let her go.
Impregnated her. Whether it was romance between beatings
or violence amidst a beating, I will never know.
She was subjugated; that’s for sure.
She was a woman enslaved in a Bronx Italian marriage.
None of her family wanted to see her pregnant again.
They wanted her to get out.
Yet. Here I am.
Born into a violent hell
My body shakes when I hear glass breaking.
There are reasons for this. Facts. Episodes.
Shattered glass around my crib.
I am sensitive to noises, beeps, neighbors’ fighting.
I wonder how it was that I was not killed.
That my mother was not killed.
That my father had some kind of emergency brake
That my mother got the hell outta there, finally.
That we survived, I consider miraculous.
My father remembered being beaten as a boy
and as a Marine, he learned to kill and to dismember.
He survived one of the more vicious battles on earth.
The very last major battle of WWII:
the American invasion of Okinawa in 1945,
eighty-two days of ferocious rabid hell
over 241,000 people were killed
Soldiers and civilians.
Femminicidio
the killing of women
In 2018, I walked the streets of Roma and Napoli
where exterior walls of buildings
are covered with the photos of women
all who have been killed to violence
most from men they knew
brothers boyfriends husbands acquaintances
Femminicidio
the killing of women
In Italy, there's a long history of "honor killings"
killing of women—basically sanctioned
the kill
understood
One day in New York, I ran into an old friend.
I was feeding the meter
standing on the sidewalk
pushing a quarter into the metal slot
turning the nose of the meter
when I looked over at two women in straw sun hats
walking down the sidewalk, in my direction.
I pushed the quarter into the slot
heard it click and our eyes locked,
me and the younger woman.
I recognized her instantly from high school.
Her eyes were the same, from years ago.
She was one of the sweetest kids I'd gone to school with.
Now we were in our fifties.
In that moment, we hugged and talked
as if no time had passed at all.
I asked her, "Ya got a quarter?"
And she dug in her pocketbook and filled my meter up.
Her mother remembered me from when I was sixteen.
She recalled a moment I spoke with her at the high school gong show.
She said, you came up to me and said,
“I have to tell you that your daughter
is the sweetest kid I ever met,
and she stands up for the underdog,
if a kid is being bullied,
she always sticks up for them.”
There was a street fair going on.
All flowing dresses on racks on the sidewalk.
We happened to be standing,
right outside a new place,
where a portrait of a beautiful girl was in the window.
I read the inscription. She had been murdered
by a man she was dating.
The place was called "One Love,"
a non-profit for education to combat femicide.
I remember saying,
“Isn’t this wild, in between these boutiques
probably paying thirty grand a month rent,
is a foundation for domestic violence?”
We fell into a conversation about domestic violence
And I was open about the violence I grew up with
And how it affected me.
I’d always feared for my life
didn't want my blood relatives knowing where I lived.
The declining health of my mother exacerbated family interactions.
Emergency room visits and holidays were tense.
Most holidays we ended up in the Emergency Room
my mother getting dangerous blood pressure spikes from tension.
Looking back on our reunion,
I wish I read things semiotically, spiritually.
Paid attention to the signs:
The parking meter
My memento mori
Time expiring
The portrait of the beautiful dead girl in the store front window
Femminicidio
Not long after that,
My friend was shot dead by her brother
in front of her mother,
on their front lawn.
They’d been bickering about emptying the dishwasher
No one knew he kept the old gun in the basement.
The old gun their father had many decades ago
For his own protection.
