The Queen of Peace RoomWhat is memory, and where is it stored in the body? Can a room be symbolic of a lifetime? Memories are like layers of your skin or layers of paint on a canvas. In The Queen of Peace Room, Magie Dominic peels away these layers as she explores her life, that of a Newfoundlander turned New Yorker, an artist and a writer — and frees herself from the memories of her violent past. On an eight-day retreat with Catholic nuns in a remote location safe from the outside world, she exposes, and captures, fifty years of violent memories and weaves them into a tapestry of unforgettable images. The room she inhabits while there is called The Queen of Peace Room; it becomes, for her, a room of sanctuary. She examines Newfoundland in the 1940s and 1950s and New York in the 1960s; her confrontations with violence, incest, and rape; the devastating loss of friends to AIDS; and the relationship between life and art. These memories she finds stored alongside memories of nature’s images of trees pulling themselves up from their roots and fleeing the forest; storms and ley lines, and skies bursting with star-like eyes. In The Queen of Peace Room, from a very personal perspective, Magie Dominic explores violence against women in the second half of the twentieth century, and in doing so unearths the memory of a generation. In eight days, she captures half a century. |
Contents
| 1 | |
Chapter 1 Friday Midnight | 5 |
Chapter 2 Saturday Morning | 13 |
Chapter 3 Sunday 7 AM | 25 |
Chapter 4 Monday 6 AM | 45 |
Chapter 5 Tuesday Dawn | 65 |
Chapter 6 Wednesday Predawn | 81 |
Chapter 7 Thursday 9 AM | 91 |
Chapter 8 Friday Rain | 95 |
Epilogue | 99 |
| 101 | |
Reading The Queen of Peace Room As Witness An Ethics of Encounter | 103 |
Selected Texts of Related Interest Canadian emphasis | 114 |