INTRODUCING e nina jay

By Hilla Kerner, Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter

As activists, who believe that public education is an important element in creating social change, we are always on the lookout for effective ways to do it. We often create new content and try new formats to engage with our audience. 

In today’s world, modern audio media is free from the old radio limitation of scheduled and live voice entertainment. Many people can now listen to what they want, anytime they want, and however often they want. We can listen to podcasts when commuting, exercising, or working, and right now, during COVID 19 times, while we maintain social distancing and isolation.

Last year, we launched Women’s Waves, our very own podcast produced by our member Florence B. Lepage, the former producer of the Montreal based feminist radio show – Ève & Pandore. Our first few episodes were about the global fights for abortions and the abolition of prostitution.

Our new and “must listen to” episode, is an interview with e nina jay, the “black lesbian, womanist, feminist, poet and survivor”, as she describes herself.

Last month we celebrated International Women’s day by hosting a poetry reading with e nina jay. During an intimate evening with us and other women from Vancouver, she spoke about rape and incest, racism and sisterhood shared through a series of poems and conversations with the audience. 

She flew to us from Chicago and spent the weekend with us in Vancouver. We showed her our rape crisis center and shared meals together. We talked about her own experience of working at a rape crisis center, which was a pivotal point in her life:  “It was a way to solve a puzzle. A puzzle of where we women are in society, and where men are and how they use that power and violence against us. And what we do with it and what we don’t do with it. It provided context. It made me understand a world I didn’t understand.” It’s when she found anti-rape work that she realized the poems she had been writing for years could help her heal. It’s only later she started to share them and say them out loud. “I didn’t care what anybody thought, I didn’t care about what anybody felt about what I said, who didn’t want to hear about the rape. I was going to torture them with it because I’ve been tortured my whole life.“

Here is an excerpt from her poem “To All My Sister Rape Crisis Workers”

in a voice, scratchy from non-use and a confusion one could not fathom without actually knowing it, she says out loud, "i'm just gonna forget this ever happened." i simply nod and squeeze her fingers tighter. inside, i know she will never ever forget it but i cannot say this. i also know she might need to believe this in order to survive. i will not take that away from her. i do not tell her that the smell of the hospital, walking down the street, bruises between the legs – all of it takes me back 12 years to the night i promised to forget as well.

We invite you to listen to our interview with e nina jay here