viva mia (explicada)

Last week I was hanging out with one of my friends. Since we both have some similar tastes in music, we were dishing about the new CDs we'd gotten and new bands we were listening to. He proceeded to tell me, "Now I know you like Joan Jett, but have you heard this CD called Evil Stig?" That's what got me to write the previous post, but with further meaning behind it.

Evil Stig is an album put out by a band called The Gits, and it was recorded with Joan Jett on lead vocals. The Gits were a punk band from Seattle with a very feministic message and a uniquely bluesy sound to them. "Evil Stig" is "Gits Live" backwards. To many, The Gits are a forgotten band in music history. They only had 3 albums and didn't last particularly long. However, if you bring up the name of their singer, Mia Zapata, you might get people who are very familiar with her...or should I say familiar with what happened to her? Mia had a really distinctive voice and some strong lyrics, but she never made it to the age of thirty (she was 27). When walking home from a club one night, she was intercepted by a much older and stronger man and brutally beat and raped before he stabbed and mutilated her numerous times to kill her. If you think that's gross, you haven't heard the half of it. The woman who found her body was so shaken up to see this that she required assistance in walking to a phone and calling the police. It took over ten years to find Mia's assassin.

That's a terrible story, and one that is horrifyingly gruesome. I know that it grossed me out to hear it, even though she died before I discovered her band. What just really bothered me is that whenever you hear about that band, the only thing that comes to mind is the murder of the singer. As if her death is the most important thing about her. There's no mention of the feministic activism she partcipated in, or the anti-violence (ick, ironic, isn't it?) work she did. Not to mention the fact that the Gits were unique in introducing the blues to punk.

But then I got to thinking...how many other Mias are there? No, I don't mean other women with her name, but rather other women whose victimization was the only thing people remember about them. How many times do we hear about yet another crime victim whose story is told in TV-titillating detail and splayed out all over the national news and papers? We don't hear much about the person behind the statistic or the back story of the woman in the crime victim's body. Consider the femicides of Juarez, Mexico. Do we hear any of the names of the murdered women? Do we know what they did for a living, or what their lives were like? Most likely not. Think on the thousands of women who are attacked in times of war (and DON'T tell me that that's "normal" in war!) as a ways of destroying an enemy's "morale." Do we hear anything about them? No, unless you count the dehumanizing term "collateral damage."

"viva mia" is inspired by Mia Zapata, but it is actually about the thousands of "Mias" out there. It isn't my best poem but one that needed to be written. I write it for her and the thousands of the other women who never made it home alive. Something needs to be done so all of us can come home alive and home safe. To quote the late great Andrea Dworkin, "Not one of us is free unless all of us are free."