Page 74 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

The road is picture-­‐perfect again. All three corpses have vanished, leaving not a trace of blood or bone

or fur. Courtesy of the Sedona municipality and our tax dollars, the red rock vistas can again rejoice

the vision and hearts of drivers from behind the looking glass of a car’s windshield, without stain of

death. All is forgotten.

I think: if all the corpses of road kill on that scenic road were to be piled up along the side of the road,

they would surely rise higher on each side of the tarmac than the graceful yellow grasses that delight

with their movement and wispy color. Would a forest of crosses bright with flowers do these deaths’

justice? What kind of witnessing would this be, truly? Are pangs of pity and gazes of recognition

enough?

To witness

I want to turn the concept of witness on its head.

I have prided myself on being a witness to these road-­‐ kill with my prayers and my thoughts of

ceremony. The harsher truth is that I have not once stopped to honor the dead ones.

The wanton corpses of creatures killed as they travel the tracks of their lives are witnesses to the

wanton narcissism of my breed of humans. To privatize my sorrow -­‐ I have a heart thank God! -­‐ is to

re-­‐enact the very narcissism that built this scenic road that cuts through the land and the tracks of

others without consideration or respect. The pang of grief I feel is not only my own; it is the pain of a

covenant that has been broken.

I have read in Deborah Bird Rose’s Reports from A Wild Country that a band of Victoria River Australian

Aboriginals camp “on the blood and bones of their people that had been murdered” at Kinbarra by

colonizers at the turn of the 19th century (2004:56). The camping is neither protest nor

memorialization. The band keeps their murdered ancestors company during daily living and

remembers them, because they loved their kin and their kin loved them, and that is what those