With courage and poetic virtuosity — Ruth Edgett’s review of Kelly Watt’s The Weeping Degree: How Astrology Saved Me from Suicide

The Weeping Degree: How Astrology Saved Me from Suicide
Kelly Watt
Wild Rising Press (August 2024)
110 pp

“You may not get justice in this life but healing is the highest justice of all.”
~“Survivor Rules,” The Weeping Degree 

I’ve known Canadian author Kelly Watt for a number of years; soaked up her mysteriously dark first novel, Mad Dog (2001 and 2019), and admired her powers of imagery. Since then, I’ve had occasion to read or listen to some of her poems and short prose. Always there was an inkling the murky-yet-somehow-purifying tone of Watt’s writing arose from personal experience. I had no idea, until reading The Weeping Degree, the chaotic depths of despair and trauma from which she salvaged those pieces.

I say “salvaged” because, while this book is undeniably creative in the way it melds the ancient wisdom of astrology with the deep and un-nameable experiences of a lost little girl, it is also a chronicle of corporeal salvage and spiritual salvation.

If you are a historic survivor of abuse, here is reassurance that you are not alone, that horrible as the memories may be, there is light to be captured from them. And that healing is possible.

In this short work is the example of one woman’s ability to glean hope and personal completion from the subterranean dark of her experiences, which include hellish episodes dating back to the 1960’s and ‘70s intermittently under the control of men and women who—even before the term had been coined—produced and dealt in child pornography. In fact, that term was not formally recognized in Canadian law until 1993.

With courage and poetic virtuosity, Watt reveals the hidden past and suppressed memory that dogged her for decades. Her unremembered traumas led her to teen-age rebellion, drug and alcohol abuse, a suicide attempt and an eventual mental breakdown. But it led also to a Tibetan Buddhist monastery where, surrounded by rugged mountains and strict rules, she learned to confront and process her memories. And it led her to astrology where she found an explanation for her life’s barely-speakable path.

Even through the early gloom, there is a thread of religious faith. It begins with a grandmother teaching her the Christian hymn “Jesus Loves Me,” and with her crying out for that love but not finding it. In the dark, this scared little girl whispers her secrets to a night light in the shape of an angel: “I want to go home!”

The thread gets picked up again following a forced apology to an elderly neighbour in her mother’s apartment building. This ultimately results in a brief reprieve from the “Home for Little Girls,” after-school cookies and lessons about Jesus. Later, Watt discovers Buddhism, astrology and her individual path to healing.

If these fleeting vignettes of Watt’s difficult life are the building blocks of The Weeping Degree, astrology is its frame. Each piece is prefaced with notes on how a particular conjunction of planets and stars combines to explain the turns of events that follow.

With a writerly deftness that calls to mind an artist suggesting a complete image in a few pencil strokes, Watt manages to tell us just enough of her now-remembered childhood that we can carry the knowledge without it weighing us down. In free verse, shape poems and micro essays, Watt gives us just enough of where she’s been and where she’s going.

In “The Home for Little Girls,” Watt relates a type of childhood story familiar to many of us: Two girls sneaking into the neighbour’s garden and luxuriating in the taste of forbidden vegetables. The elderly owner catches sight of them, “loping through rows of tomatoes and eggplant, shooing us away.”

“I’m going to tell your mother! she shrieks. We stagger back from the fence but stand our ground.

“We have no mothers! Good luck! I shout back. Our mothers don’t know our days.

“From Sunday to Friday, we are orphans… The old lady gives up in defeat… [F]or a moment, we know the invincibility of having nothing and no one.”

Decades later, having learned how to process memories of the hours/maybe days locked in a dirt-floored cellar, of being forced into photographs by cruel men and complicit women, of believing them when told alternately that her mother said they could do this, or that they would kill her mother if she told—after finally tracking down her abusers and, in 2005, reporting their crimes to ineffective and unsympathetic law enforcement—Watt found her voice.

As a member of Persons Against Ritual Abuse Torture, Watt joined thousands of other women from around the world at the United Nations between 2005 and 2010 to lecture and speak out against the sexual exploitation of children.

…Armies of the altruistic
six thousand women
whispering in every tongue
the language of liberation.
Gathered here to represent
The unrepresented: child brides, child soldiers,
sex slaves, trafficked girls and boys,
the beaten, raped, silenced, and sold.
Hellen Keller was right—
the world is full of suffering
but also full of the overcoming of it…

Just as these cries were building and gathering attention, says Watt, the term False Memory Syndrome (FMS) entered into common parlance. First raised by a researcher in the 1980s, this theory held that patients could have memories implanted falsely while undergoing such treatments as hypnosis or recovered memory therapy. The effect on Watt’s movement was to drive it back into the shadows. But, as Watt writes, it did not stop their quest for justice and healing.

FMS has since lost credibility among mental health scientists. It is not listed in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the recognized bibles for diagnosing disorders and disease. While scientists accept there are such things as false memories, they continue to debate whether memories of sexual assault, particularly ones as detailed and life-changing as those recounted by Watt, fall into that category.

The Weeping Degree’s descriptions of unbidden flashbacks repeatedly disrupting the author’s life, of unexplained triggers that left her paralyzed or in tears, of her ocean-spanning search for healing, of finally confronting one of her abusers—together with her determined-yet-unfulfilled quest for justice through the legal system—point to one conclusion: You can’t make this stuff up.

That Watt has been able to spin poetry from her experiences is a feat in itself; that she has dared to do so is a testament to her courage, and to her abiding faith in the ability to heal.

A Maritime Canadian by birth and upbringing, Ruth Edgett has been both a journalist and a communications consultant. Her Maritime and war-themed fiction and nonfiction appears in collections, literary journals and magazines based in Canada, the U.S. and the UK. She is author of a family memoir called A Watch in the Night: The story of Pomquet Island’s last lightkeeping family (Nimbus, 2007), and of a debut novel in search of a publisher. She takes every opportunity to improve her craft, and finds reviewing books that speak to her is a valuable means for doing that.