What 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.
Authors
- Bibliography, etc. Note
- Includes bibliographical references
- Control Number Identifier
- CaOOCEL
- Dewey Decimal Classification Number
- 362.74/092
- Dewey Decimal Edition Number
- 21
- General Note
- Issued as part of the desLibris books collection
- ISBN
- 0889204179 9780889208339
- LCCN
- HV6626
- LCCN Item number
- D65 2002eb
- Modifying agency
- CaBNVSL
- Original cataloging agency
- CaBNVSL
- Physical Description | Extent
- 1 electronic text (xiii, 114 p.)
- Published in
- Canada
- Publisher or Distributor Number
- CaOOCEL
- Rights
- Access restricted to authorized users and institutions
- System Control Number
- (CaBNVSL)gtp00521598 (OCoLC)560145001 (CaOOCEL)402600
- System Details Note
- Mode of access: World Wide Web
- Transcribing agency
- CaBNVSL
Table of Contents
- Contents 10
- Acknowledgments 12
- Liturgy of the Hours 14
- Introduction 16
- Chapter 1 Friday, Midnight 20
- Chapter 2 Saturday Morning 28
- Chapter 3 Sunday, 7 A.M. 40
- Chapter 4 Monday, 6 A.M. 60
- Chapter 5 Tuesday, Dawn 80
- Chapter 6 Wednesday, Pre-dawn 96
- Chapter 7 Thursday, 9 A.M. 106
- Chapter 8 Friday. Rain. 110
- Epilogue 114
- Works Cited 116
- Afterword: Reading The Queen of Peace Room As Witness: An Ethics of Encounter 118
- Selected Texts of Related Interest (Canadian emphasis) 129