To Heresy: A Love Letter
I play Faculty of Horror into my Goblin ears and they talk about witches. The Faculty remind me of one of my favourite article titles from when Weinstein first broke and also that I couldn't enjoy the film The Witch because I was impatient with witches still being cast as monsters.
When the movie came out I was working with idle women in Lancashire, the home of Pendle Hill and one of the best documented witch trials in England. I was reading Sylvia Federicci's Caliban and the Witch and furious papers and articles of the trials as a Gendercide.
No, no, I could not buy your fairy tale witch...even if the coven was Thomasin's liberation.
I think about witches.
Witches were women. They were heretics. They were the healers, the aged, the mad. They were black, indigenous and colonised. They were people who wanted to own their sexuality and maintain any kind body autonomy. They bloodied their fingers tearing down the enclosures around the common land. But the land, their knowledge and their bodies were enclosed anyway. In turn they were made monstrous and so I think about monsters.
And Ontario elects Doug Ford as their Premier.
To everyone who felt like the world just got even more unsafe, be the Witch. If they try to destroy you, it is because they fear you and if they fear you it is because they know you have the power to destroy them.