If you were a young wordsmith at Queen’s in 2018, you may have received the same advice that Catherine Hernandez was trying to tell herself at the time. The award-winning author and screenwriter was that year’s writer-in-residence at Queen’s and, as she urged the emerging writers she mentored to be brave, she also needed her own dose of courage.
“When you’re a visiting author, you spend most of your calories inspiring budding authors to keep going, to not be afraid, to not let their fears cloud their work,” she explains. But she, too, was afraid, she admits, and needed similar words of wisdom.
While at Queen’s, Ms. Hernandez wrote parts of her second novel, Crosshairs, a dystopian account of an armed resistance against a regime that locks up communities of colour, the disabled, and the LGBTQ2S in Toronto.
“I was worried about backlash, of being dismissed or erased for telling the truth,” she says.
But she also knew she had to be bold. “If I didn’t follow my own advice, I know I would have failed my readers.”
Ms. Hernandez took her own advice again when writing her most recent novel, Behind You. Flipping back and forth in time, it follows two narratives examining the insidiousness of rape culture. In one, a young Filipina named Alma grows into womanhood as a serial rapist and killer attacks women and girls in Scarborough, Ont. In the other, years later, Alma struggles with her own ideas of consent as she watches her son’s dangerous behaviour toward his girlfriend.
Although the attacker in Behind You is fictional, the novel’s themes and subject matter hit close to home for Ms. Hernandez. She moved to Scarborough as a 10-year-old in 1987, the same year a notorious perpetrator known as the Scarborough Rapist began terrorizing women and girls. “Although he was eventually incarcerated, there have been countless people around the world who have survived sexual violence, including myself,” says Ms. Hernandez. “What did we learn from this? How have investigations changed since then? The answer is, not much.”
Ms. Hernandez is quick to point out, however, that this novel is not about knowing the serial killer. It’s about the survivors and victims of sexual harm and how society allows perpetrators to do what they do, she says. “Rape culture tells us that if we lock up perpetrators, we’re good. We’re all safe. But dismantling rape culture means a daily practice of honouring each other’s boundaries, celebrating each other’s bodies, and having difficult discussions when we hurt each other.”
In short, this book is Ms. Hernandez’s rallying cry for embodied change. And she has done her best to not let any fears cloud the work. “We must all look at how we are complicit in rape culture,” she says, “and how we can reparent ourselves and raise a future generation of people who respect the bodies of people around them.”
Behind You is available from HarperCollins Canada.
