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from the goddess
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I live in a country that has done awful things, all over the world, in my name. You can't miss that. I didn't make those decisions, but I have benefited from them materially. I live in a society that grew prosperous from exploiting others. England has a strong tradition of postcolonial literature but here in the U.S., we can hardly even say the word "postcolonial." We like to think we're the good guys. So we persist in our denial, and live with a legacy of exploitation and racial arrogance that continues to tear people apart, in a million large and small ways. As long as I have been a writer I've wanted to address this, to try to find a way to own our terrible history honestly and construct some kind of redemption. &endash; Barbara Kingsolver, author of The Poisonwood Bible
Life is better than the Internet, and I'm not speaking only of the wonderful redwood trees outside my window, noble though they are, but the vast spectacle of human activity, the frolic of ugliness and beauty that is played out daily against the background of Her infinite being. Kali, Kali Ma, That power in whom all consciousness and all ignorance resides. Reverence to her, reverence. Take a look at the current era, if you will, with the eyes of a tree -- as the forest looks upon three generations of human inhabitants in Barbara Kingsolver's magnificent novel, The Poisonwood Bible. Here we have stupid ignorant men playing dangerous games with the future of our planet. It will endure, but we may not. I think of the words of Gore Vidal, whom I heard on KPFA a few weeks back. We must understand, he said, that the men in Washington are completely ignorant of foreign affairs. While they may continue to run our own country with remarkable efficiency, thereby keeping us comfortably deluded before our television sets, bellies stuffed with holiday fare, they brazenly utilize the resources of the world for their own benefit, maintaining their positions of power by robbing the world's poorer peoples of the last shreds of life. Just read your Poisonwood Bible. And listen to Arundhati Roy. She recently gave her entire award from the Booker Prize for her elegant novel, The God of Small Things, to fight the Narmada Dam. The 250,000 people who live in that valley far out of the reach of modern day India, peaceably farming their remote land with harm toward none, will be displaced by the construction of no less than 30 dams, flooding farmlands to fuel a power plant that will further the domination of India by the Great White Way. Displaced, those people will surely die, or become more of the teeming mass of Calcutta's beggar class, who live and sleep and cook and defecate on the streets of that filthy city -- thanks to American generosity through the likes of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Like the Dine people here at home, they cannot be separated from their lands; but doesn't matter. Who needs the Indians anyway, or the untouchable farmers from the Narmada Valley? Yes, and a million more are threatened in China, by a massive dam on the Yangtze River, the biggest dam ever to be built. Impressive, yes, but these big dams don't last. They become clogged by silt as the hills sink into the rechanneled river beds. These huge dams will be outlasted and finally broken by the great rivers they have enthralled. Liberation to the rivers! Today in our rich land of television and tater tots, our young people have undertaken to champion the trees and the animals of wood and meadow. Julia Butterfly weeps at the sight of every paper cup she sees used for coffee, as she tell us repeatedly in her evangelical talks, such as the one she gave at the Bioneers this year. And now someone has gone and dealt a death blow to her beloved Luna. Our children are trying to save what they see, what they can comprehend. They cannot see the 1 million and 250,000 people about to be swept away by the tidal greed for P O W E R, Petty Indian bureaucrats trying to please the Great White Father. The media does not publicize these events. The U'Wa in Colombia have made it to the front pages of our newspaper, thanks no doubt to the ghosts of three beautiful young American warriors who were murdered in Colombia while supporting this valiant tribe, which stands ready to die if the oil line crosses their sacred lands. But the million and a half refugees are not on television, nor the Dine, our own American elders threatened with extinction as a result of shoddy corporate games in their sacred Big Mountain. (Please read what Maria Gilardin has to say about their heroic struggle against the coal company in our interview with her.) They are powerful, these children of ours, and passionate, with tremendous power to move the world in the right direction. But we cannot expect them to do our work for us. That would be another rotten legacy. Yet I hear people of my generation say this repeatedly: the young people will lead the world. I do hope so, but if they are to triumph, we must first clear the way. With a loud voice, we must penetrate the jungles of white patriarchal rule over this beautiful, troubled planet. We must demand a different kind of rule. Let it be the ferocious wisdom of the grandmothers. At the Bioneers, Alice Walker joined a chorus of wise women asking that America follow the brilliant political arrangement of our forebears on this continent, the wise Iroquois people. Our so-called Founding Fathers modeled their government almost entirely on that of the Noble Savages whose lands they inhaled in their quest for riches. But they left out the key. In their Christian delusion, they ignored the fundamental structure of the Iroquois nation, one so ancient and powerful it still rules their people today, just as it has obtained in all peaceful countries and tribes the world has ever known, beginning, of course, with the Neolithic. It is the Council of Women Elders. War cannot be declared among the Iroquois without the approval of the council of women elders. And so war is not often declared at all. Old women know that there is very little reason to fight wars, that most conflict can be resolved by negotiation, most misbehavior arrested by the firm, affectionate guidance of a mother's wise hand. They know this because their love for a man has produced a kitchenful of children who must be fed, and who fight each other if their own needs go unmet. That's what every mother knows. Old women have raised their children, they have passed through girlhood and motherhood, they have loved and been succoured or wounded by their men, they have bled and birthed and they have stopped bleeding and birthing. Through the needle's eye of passionate attachment such as only the love of children creates, they have moved on to a holy place, no longer the victims of outraged desires. They &endash; we! -- have loved and lost, and yet go on loving, whether screaming and shouting or pressing their lips together in that tough grimace that has sustained women surviving on the edge of the wilderness for generations. They love, and they live. We join Alice Walker in asking that the government be placed in the firm hands of the grandmothers. We can begin in our own communities. We can create wise women's councils in every town and neighborhood, and we can demand that the men's councils (and currently all councils are men's councils) hear us... The world is on a terrible path propelled by the ignorant men of Washington and all their slimy cohorts throughout the uncivilized world. Barbarians suck the tit of nature dry, pursuing gold, diamonds and the rich black oil reserves that have been cooked in Her deep cauldron for centuries. At every junction, they toss life aside like a soiled hanky in their mad pursuit of trinkets and power. That demon is about to devour our world. Here we sit, the world's enlightened people. Around us, a rich culture is flourishing, of organic gardens, indigenous music, spiritual practice, invocation, inspiration and dance. It is the radiant world of the future, a world transformed by consciousness. Whether it has come to us through Jesus or the Great Mother, whether we have found it on acid or in the Tibetan monastery, or farmed it in the rich grooves of the land, we, like the Native peoples, now see the light through the forest. There are millions of us, and we agree. Let us come together with an urgent call to stop the destruction. Like Tara, let us heed the cries of the world, and give voice to salvation. |
