tender

In Preacher’s Daughter, Isaiah is a murderer. But in the holy texts, he is a prophet who was martyred, murdered in gruesome circumstances, but whose promises of a coming messiah welcomes hope, redemption, and healing after a time of suffering and tribulation. What to make of this subversion? Maybe the fact that abusers can be adept at appearing like a promise, a redemption, and a source of love, only to later to reveal themselves as the opposite. The martyr in Preacher’s Daughter is not the namesake of the prophet, it is Ethel. Blessed are the meek. Through the mythic, the religious, the profane, Ethel tells us the terrifying truth. The world wants to comfort us with images of victory and illusions of liberation. But reality is different. Terror still resides here.  What is the cost of intergenerational and childhood trauma? What is the cost when that is combined with gender-based violence? It costs us our very life. Before you traumatise your girls with ideologies that only know of punishment and limitation, think of the emotional life of the woman she will become. Think of the fate that you invite for her. No woman deserves the fate of Ethel Cain, who knew liberation only in heaven.