Behind You Book Review

What drew me to read Behind You was its cover: an image of a fist with keys poking out of the fingers against an unsettling yellow background. The picture unlocked the memory of my cousin instructing me how to walk alone in Toronto streets safely late at night. I was to hold the keys, attempting to cosplay wolverine. Supposedly, this maneuver empowered you to fight off lurking predators in a society that was hellbent on making you their prey.

The keys-between-your-fingers reflected the cultural slumber towards sexual assault before the #MeToo movement awoke broader society to the reality of rape culture. The fist maneuver represents the many fantasies in circulation that keep women (which includes cisgender and transgender) accepting the “common sense” violence of North American life. The problem with this self-defence maneuver, aside from its ineffectiveness pragmatically speaking, is that it puts excessive responsibility on individual women to defend their bodies against violence. It gives false hope for potential victims of sexual assault. It simplifies sexual violence as one encounter among strangers.

More importantly, the keys-in-fist maneuver embodies a fundamental contradiction. Our society unjustly strips women of their power through laws, cultural expectations, and societal pressures in the name of patriarchal protection while telling women that they have the power and responsibility to fight any trespass towards their bodies. Many don’t question the shamelessness of perpetrators to see their victims as prey. They ask why victims don’t fight back.

If we consider contradiction as the basis that fuels cultural systems, rape culture hinges on the gap between the reality of women’s power and its rhetoric, which is also part and parcel to our white colonial patriarchal structure. And this contradiction cuts across Catherine Hernandez’s 2024 novel Behind You, as she boldly takes us to the life of queer Filipino Canadian protagonist Alma Alvarez whose first-person narration navigates the horrors of Scarborough in the eighties and nineties with the looming threat of Paul Bernardo, the “Scarborough Stalker.”

Hernandez begins the novel in the dark editing room where Alma assembles the last episode of the new True Crime series Infamous. The episode is on the Scarborough Stalker, who is loosely based on his counterpart in real life. Alma is the video editor operating in the dark in contrast to the show’s flashy host and producer. She represents the contradictory positionality of Asian Canadians who are visible minorities yet are invisible in the public. She does the work that keeps the show running but never earns the credit. She is economically well-off, but she doesn’t call the shots. The contradiction here for Alma is between being the perpetual foreigner and the model minority.

Nonetheless, her positionality provides her with the vantage point to see through the media’s artifice in representing violent crimes against women. As an editor of the show, Alma knows the game is more about getting eyeballs glued on screens and less to do with honouring the lives of victims marred by the crime. And yes, she is complicit in the game. She has to pay the bills and edits knowingly using cliches, “like the assembly instructions you get with your IKEA furniture” (4). Still, she cannot remain unaffected by the footage she sees because this time it hits too close to home. One of the stalker’s victims is Victoria Ruiz, who is a Filipino Canadian just like Alma. Editing the episode triggers something within Alma, as she realizes that she could have easily been the stalker’s target. More than that, she is a victim herself.There were many more monsters during that time. The stalker is just the mere glimpse of the larger rape culture.

Thereafter, Hernandez’s narrative alternates between Alma’s past growing up in Scarborough with her mother Luz and older sister Leah and her present life with her wife Nira and their son Mateo, to show how the present is shaped by the past.

The past begins in a bungalow in Orton Park in 1987 where Alma lives with her mother and sister. The home is where Alma is first exposed to violence and the contradictions of being loved by a parent who also beats her. Luz controls the household through corporeal punishment which is doled out at the whim of her moods. At the same time, she loves her daughters, as she materially provides for them whether it is through food or her sacrificing all of herself just to work. Luz is determined as a first-generation immigrant to move up the echelons of white Canadian society and secure a middle-class position.

Similar to her construction of the white supremacist Cory in her 2017 debut Scarborough, Hernandez characterizes Luz as complex, resisting easy villainization. Hernandez is more interested in pointing a finger at the conditions that breed violence than the individual’s capacity for violence. Readers see Luz’s struggles of being abandoned by her husband in the Philippines and having to raise two daughters independently to succeed in the eyes of both white society and the Filipino Canadian community. While her spare-the-rot-spoil-the-child ethos is a way for her to feel in control in a reality where she has little, Luz’s physical disciplining of her daughters’ bodies is a form of protection motivated by love and fear, teaching them toughness and the importance of correct behaviour in a cruel world, which harkens to what James Baldwin observes of Black parental discipline in his 1963 The Fire Next Time. Unfortunately, the violence only inculcates Alma to see her body as out of her control. She copes with the abuse by freezing, eating, disassociating, and pleasing her mother. Alma retreats further within herself to cope with her lack of power in her household and in her school.

When news of the Scarborough stalker reaches the household, Luz tries to teach her daughter to fight back. Demonstrating how to strike an assailant using a fork, Luz becomes so angry at Alma’s shy attempts that she intimidates Alma into freezing and submitting to her power. Ironically, the potential pitfall in harsh disciplining even from a place of love is that the child becomes obedient. Outside, in the white settler patriarchal society, blind obedience is as dangerous for racialized women as direct confrontation.

While Hernandez keeps the fictional Bernardo ob skené to centre the victim’s voices and avoid himpathy, she certainly critiques white privilege’s role in insulating abusers. This is where the Scarborough Bluffs come in. Standing above the shoreline of Lake Ontario, the Bluffs is an escarpment known for its beach and scenic views. Until the 2000s, the affluent suburban areas surrounding the crag remained largely white (as in European-descended Canadians) compared to the rest of Scarborough. From the sixties until the eighties, the real Paul Bernardo grew up in Guildwood, one of the upper-middle class neighbourhoods in the Bluffs. In the eyes of Canadian society, Bernardo’s charm and convincing performance of respectability, which his class upbringing helped hone, likely weakened authorities’ suspicion of him.

As Hernandez’s novel shows quite subtlety, these white affluent suburbs that Asian Canadians strive toward are far from safe. In another flashback, Alma is at her classmate Linda’s “spectacular” house in the Bluffs (141). She is only there because Linda is forced to be inclusive and invite everyone to her birthday. Alma’s inclusion to the event only highlights her exclusion, as they cruelly bring her to the forest to scare her. After taunting her that she is too undesirable to be raped by the stalker, they leave her in the forest. In the eyes of her white classmates, Alma is not a human much like how the victims of the stalker appear to him. The narrative voice at this moment then moves to Victoria Ruiz: “Did I know that your killer lived a stone’s throw from Linda’s house? No, I did not” (143).  Her direct address suggests that the classmates’ cruelty could have easily placed her in the path of the stalker, but more importantly, the implication here is that these perpetrators of violence come from the same enclaves of privilege (whether it is male or whiteness), entitling them to abuse those beneath them in the pecking order.

The novel is at its best in the past. However, when the story is in the present with the subplot involving Alma’s son Mateo and his on-and-off girlfriend/hostage Hong, the narrative becomes cringey like a Hollywood movie about racial oppression rushing to the hoorah when all the discomfort gets swept under the rug of triumph. While I appreciate Hernandez’s desire to end the narrative on a note of optimism about women’s resilience and capacity to resist, her suggestion that meaningful change within individual perpetrators like Mateo is highly unapplicable in real-life, and the resolution that sees Alma confronting her son about his behaviour is much too simple and too hurried.

Changing abusers is incredibly difficult – let alone changing society. It is still incredibly difficult for victims to report. It can take up to six years for Canadian police to charge rapists. Even in court, the Canadian criminal justice system continually fails to hold sexual abusers accountable. Below the 49^th parallel, our neighbours recently elected a president even after he was found liable for rape in the court of law. And it’s not even the first case, he is mired in allegations upon allegations of gross sexual misconduct towards women, but he still gets to be head of state. While the rhetoric about sexual assault might have changed, rates of sexual assaults persist. Abusers are not swayed by logical or moral appeals, nor are institutional bodies or the bystanding public, who are largely driven by self-interest and self-preservation. With this reality, it is hard for me to suspend my disbelief towards Behind You’s ending.

The value of the novel is its provocation, not solution. Hernandez raises an important question in the book: how can we – a very provisional and diverse we – have the power to stop abuse when we have been conditioned to be powerless? Perhaps confronting this question—and its contradictions—reveals that these very contradictions are designed to sustain the power of the dominant, the impotence of the oppressed, and the confusion that keeps the oppressed from seeing the system for what it is. Perhaps it’s time to stop gripping keys in fear of imagined threats and start raising our fists at the real forces that sustain abuse.