The Conversion: A Murder Story

J. Neil Garcia’s poem The Conversion is the account of a murder. It speaks of the sad details of the killing of a little girl by a group of men who commit the deed in the name of love and the little boy who tried to protect her but lost. The perpetuators’ justification lay in the fact that the little girl lived inside the boy; an unnatural spirit/being of which the boy must be exorcised and saved.

Garcia begins the poem in a straightforward fashion, describing the circumstances in which the offense was executed. “It happened in a metal drum.” The economy of the first line is powerful in its restraint, painting only a picture of a functional cylinder of rusted metal and initially keeping the horrific function that the enclosure will host at bay.

Before detailing the act itself, Garcia, through the persona of the grown man recounting the story, tells us of the careful preparations (the premeditation) that the men in the family undertook, bestowing upon the crime the aura of occasion like a baptism or a confirmation. It is an event that must take precedence over banal affairs as washing clothes, dishes, or faces. These can wait. The salvation of a boy is at stake. “The water had been saved just for it, that day.” Like the stench emanating from the neglected pile of soiled laundry, “that day” will leave a permanent stain on the persona, even as he has purportedly been cleansed.

More than an occasion however, the incident also becomes a spectacle, exposed to the curious eyes of neighbours and onlookers. That the men do nothing to conceal the event and even enter the scene “booming”, hints that what they plan to do is also in their own interest – to showcase and prove their own masculinity in its violent but “righteous” imposition on a weaker party.

The persona as a boy though, while innocent, is not naive. He understands his father’s and uncles’ intentions and that contrary to the older males’ justifications, he is not to be the object of their rescue. Instead, he is to be their sacrifice. Hiding “in the deepest corner” of his dead mother’s cabinet, whose scents and softness offers him safety and refuge, the reader discerns the lonely and vulnerable condition of the child. He has no ally to protect him from an impending attack.

The boy is captured and dragged to the waiting metal drum where he is viciously dunked over and over again. “Girl or Boy” the Father shouts, a demand for a choice to be made but whose correct answer, the only acceptable answer has already been determined. The boy is defiant at first, speaking his self, even as water curls under his nose. But he knows that the brutal onslaught will not end until he conforms and with each submerging, the girl inside sinks “deeper in the churning void.” He must renounce his self, banish the girl and emerge from that drum, reborn as a full blooded male.

The boy does convert and he learns how a man must act and feel. “I got my wife pregnant,” the persona now boasts, telling not of love but of an achievement. “Our four children, all boys are the joy of my manhood, my proof.” They are his testimony of his heterosexuality. He also learns that “A woman needs some talking sense into,” just as his father and uncles “talked sense” into him with the help of a metal drum. Purportedly, his conversion is his redemption and now, everything he does with the force of his newfound masculinity is vindicated, just like his Father’s deed.

But Garcia’s poem is also a ghost story. The image of the drowned girl that he was then helpless to defend and save continues to haunt the man. “I should feel sorry but I drown myself in gin before I can.” Through another variety of liquid, the persona deadens himself – his denial of the girl within him making him as hollow as the now empty drum, a ghost of a man.