KVLT OF NYX

Νύκτα θεῶν γενέτειραν ἀείσομαι ἠδὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν. Νὺξ γένεσις πάντων, ἣν καὶ Κύπριν καλέσωμεν.

κλῦθι, μάκαιρα θεά, κυαναυγής, ἀστεροφεγγές, ἡσυχίῃ χαίρουσα καὶ ἠρεμίῃ πολυύπνῳ, εὐφροσύνη, τερπνή, φιλοπάννυχε, μῆτερ ὀνείρων,5 ληθομέριμν’, ἀγαθή τε πόνων ἀνάπαυσιν ἔχουσα, ὑπνοδότειρα, φίλη πάντων, ἐλάσιππε, νυχαυγές, ἡμιτελές, χθονία ἠδ’ οὐρανία πάλιν αὐτή,

ἐγκυκλίη, παίκτειρα διώγμασιν ἠεροφοίτοις, ἣ φάος ἐκπέμπεις ὑπὸ νέρτερα καὶ πάλι φεύγεις10 εἰς Ἀίδην∙ δεινὴ γὰρ ἀνάγκη πάντα κρατύνει. νῦν δέ, μάκαιρ’ ὦ Νύξ, πολυόλβιε, πᾶσι ποθεινή, εὐάντητε, κλύουσα ἱκετηρίδα φωνὴν ἔλθοις εὐμενέουσα, φόβους δ’ ἀπόπεμπε νυχαυγεῖς.

Nyx depicted in the Paris Psalter presiding over the parting of the red sea, a 10th-century Greek manuscript, National Library of France

To Nyx, The Fumigation with Torches.

I shall sing of Night, progenitor of gods and of mortal men. Night is the source of all things, whom we also call Cypris.

Hear me, blessed goddess, dark-radiant and star-illumined, delighting in stillness and in deep, tranquil sleep; joyous one, gracious one, lover of the all-night vigil, Mother of Dreams, forgetful of care, who grants blessed repose from toil; giver of sleep, beloved by all, driver of swift horses, radiant in the night; both incomplete and complete, chthonic and heavenly alike,

ever-circling, who delights in wandering through the misty air, who sends forth the light into the depths below, and then again returns to Hades—for dreadful Necessity holds dominion over all.

I bet you're worried. I was worried. That's why I began this piece. I was worried about vaginas. I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don't think about them. I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context of other vaginas-a community, a culture of vaginas. There's so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them-like the Bermuda Triangle. Nobody ever reports back from there.

In the first place, it's not so easy even to find your vagina. Women go weeks, months, sometimes years without looking at it. I interviewed a high-powered businesswoman who told me she was too busy; she didn't have the time. Looking at your vagina, she said, is a full day's work. You have to get down there on your back in front of a mirror that's standing on its own, full-length preferred. You've got to get in the perfect position, with the perfect light, which then is shadowed somehow by the mirror and the angle you're at. You get all twisted up. You're arching your head up, killing your back. You're exhausted by then. She said she didn't have the time for that. She was busy.

What Does Democracy Mean?

Our forebears overthrew kings and dictators, but they didn’t abolish the institutions by which kings and dictators ruled: they democratized them. Yet whoever operates these institutions—whether it’s a king, a president, or an electorate—the experience on the receiving end is roughly the same. Laws, bureaucracy, and police came before democracy; they function the same way in a democracy as in a dictatorship. The only difference is that, because we can cast ballots about how they should be applied, we’re supposed to regard them as ours even when they’re used against us.

– Democracy means police. Democracy doesn’t just mean public participation in making decisions. It presumes that all power and legitimacy is vested in one decision-making structure, and it requires a way to impose those decisions.  As long as anyone might defy them, there have to be armed personnel to regulate, to discipline, to control.

Without police, there would be anarchy: people would act on their own initiative, only implementing decisions they felt to be in their best interest. Conflicts would have to be resolved to the mutual satisfaction of all parties involved, not suppressed by a gang with a monopoly on force.

– Democracy means borders. Democracy presumes a line between participants and outsiders, between legitimate and illegitimate. Only a fraction of the men could vote in ancient Athens; the Founding Fathers owned slaves. Citizenship still imposes a barrier between included and excluded, shutting over 10 million undocumented residents out of the decisions that shape their lives.

The liberal answer is to expand the lines of inclusion, extending rights and privileges until everyone is integrated into one vast democratic project. But as long as all power must flow through one bottleneck, there are bound to be imbalances and outsiders. The alternative would be anarchy: abolishing centralized power structures and all the borders they impose. Without borders, people would only live and work together of their own free will, flowing freely between communities without top-down control.

– Democracy means prisons. Those who don’t accept the authority of the state must be isolated, lest their disobedience spread to the rest of the population. We’re told that prisons protect us, but the only constant since their invention has been that they protect the state from those who might threaten it. In practice, by breaking up communities and fostering antisocial tendencies, they only endanger us—even those of us who aren’t behind bars.

Without prisons, there would be anarchy: people would have to work out conflicts directly rather than calling in the authorities, and it would no longer be possible to sweep the inequalities of this society under the rug.

– Democracy means surveillance. Democracy presumes transparency: a marketplace of ideas, in which decisions are made in the open. Of course, in an unequal society, transparency puts some people at risk—the employee who could be fired for expressing the wrong opinion, the immigrant who fears deportation—while the powerful can feign transparency as they make back-room deals. In practice, political transparency simply equips intelligence agencies to monitor the populace, preparing reprisals for when dissidents get out of hand—and what government could maintain its authority without intelligence agencies?

Without surveillance, there would be anarchy: people would say and do what they really believe in. Those who defend centralized power fear nothing more than privacy—the keeping of secrets—which they call conspiracy.

– Democracy means war. Democracy means constant competition. Just as corporations contend for resources in the marketplace, politicians and governments vie for power. When power is centralized, people have to attain domination over others in order to determine their own destinies. Those in power can only hold onto it by waging war perpetually against their own populations as well as foreign peoples: hence the National Guard troops brought back from Iraq to suppress domestic protests.

As long as we remain at a distance from our own potential, being governed rather than acting freely, being represented rather than acting on our own interests, people will seek power over each other as a substitute for self-determination. The alternative is anarchy: a world in which people fight only for themselves—not for empires, flags, or gods—and conflicts cannot produce hierarchy and oppression.

We have to be tireless in our critique of democracy, as the alternative people in this society intuitively fall back on against the excesses of capitalism. The more unpopular this is, the more important it is that we do it. Private property and government are the two great sacred cows of our age—the ones for which our lives and the earth itself are being sacrificed—and challenging the ways they monopolize legitimacy is one project, not two. They are two heads of the same beast; they cannot be beaten separately.

In 1876, Blanche Monnier was a typical young woman of Paris society, but the time had come for her to find a suitor. She set upon a lawyer who lived nearby. Although he was a professional, he was also older than she, and not successful in his business. Her mother tried everything she could to stop what she saw as a doomed romance, but Blanche would not be swayed.

And then? Blanche simply disappeared. Nobody in Paris saw hide nor hair of her, and the public believed she’d mysteriously vanished. Her mother and brother mourned her and went about their daily lives, all the while carrying with them an unspeakable secret.

Their scheme came to light in 1901, when the office of the attorney general of Paris received a mysterious, unsigned letter. The sheet led off with a chilling pair of sentences:

Monsieur Attorney General: I have the honor to inform you of an exceptionally serious occurrence. I speak of a spinster who is locked up in Madame Monnier’s house, half starved, and living on a putrid litter for the past twenty-five years – in a word, in her own filth.

Police were shocked – Madame Monnier was a paragon of high society, from an aristocratic family, and the recipient of community awards. How could this be possible?

They were about to find out. A group of officers went to the house and, upon being denied entrance, forced the door open. They searched the premises and discovered a shocking sight. Upstairs, another locked door concealed a dark, foul-smelling room with its windows boarded up. When the police pried off the windows, they had quite a surprise. Cowering on the bed, covered in food and feces, was an emaciated Blanche Monnier. The woman had been kept prisoner for a quarter of a century, never once seeing the sunlight or another human outside of her family during that time.

Blanche’s physical state was abysmal – she was severely malnourished and weighed just 55 pounds. Police wrapped her in a blanket and rushed her to the hospital. The nurses who took care of her remarked on her surprisingly pleasant disposition. She enjoyed being washed up and commented on how nice it was to see the sun again for the first time in 25 years.

Madame Monnier was immediately arrested following the discovery of her daughter. When she was taken to prison, the stress caused her to suffer a heart attack, and she perished within the month. Before she died, police were able to coax a confession out of her, filling in the missing details of her daughter’s life.

When Blanche refused to give up her romance with the lawyer (a romance some have suggested might have included a pregnancy, quite scandalous for the era), her mother shut her in the upstairs room until she changed her mind. But the lovestruck woman never did, refusing to renounce her beloved, and her mother didn’t relent.

For the next two and a half decades, Blanche only ate scraps from her mother’s meals, delivered to her room by housemaids or her brother. Even after the lawyer passed away in 1885, Blanche’s punishment continued. Food waste built up in her room, attracting rats that were her only companions.

Marcel, her brother, was put on trial for his part in Blanche’s imprisonment. He was found guilty and sentenced to 15 months in prison, but appealed the fact that he never physically restricted his sister’s movement. He also claimed that Blanche could have left at any time, but chose not to. Marcel won his appeal, to the horror of the crowd assembled in the courtroom, and walked free.

It’s still unknown who wrote the anonymous letter that led to Blanche’s rescue. One theory is that her own brother did it, knowing that his mother was in poor health and wanting Blanche to be freed before he became her sole jailer. Another is that one of the house staff blabbed to a boyfriend and he sent the letter.

Whatever the case, the remainder of Blanche Monnier’s life wasn’t pleasant. She was driven mad by her captivity and, unable to re-integrate with the world, was institutionalized. Monnier passed away in 1913 in a sanitarium in Bois.

Kali is the goddess of destruction, the Clawed Hands, the Blood Drinker... And that's one side of her, as it is for any god. If you knew her for thousands of years you'd know she could be all colors. The sky is black at night, but if your eyes were good enough, they could see the different lights of a million stars. Death is part of her because death is part of life.

Om karala-badanam ghoram mukta-kEshim chatur-bhuryam. kalikam dakshinam dibyam munda-mala bibhushitam sadya-chinna shira kharga bama-dordha karambujam abhayam baradan-chaiba dakshina-dardha panikam

In Hindi, chipko means, “to embrace.”  The Chipko Movement in India became one of the most successful environmental activism struggles in the world.  Vandana Shiva was one of the women involved in this movement, which resisted industrial forestry and logging in rural India.  Local women physically put their bodies between the machinery and the forest that provided their livelihood–literally hugging the trees (Callicott, 218).  The largest success of the Chipko movement was convincing Indira Gandhi, India’s prime minister in 1981, to declare a fifteen-year moratorium on logging in the Himalayan forests in Uttar Pradesh (Callicott, 218).

Dr. Vandana Shiva is a woman whose work is focused on embracing not only the principles of feminism, but also the principles of ecology.  In fact, as an ecofeminist, she sees these two movements as interconnected and believes that the worldview that causes environmental degradation and injustice is the same worldview that causes a culture of male domination, exploitation, and inequality for women.  Vandana Shiva titles her feminist theory “political,” or “subsistence” ecofeminism, to differentiate it from the more spiritually focused ecofeminism popular in Western countries (although, since the WTO protests of 1999 and the events of September 11, 2001, Western ecofeminism has become equally politically aware).   Both her activism and theory has had a global and concrete focus.  Her work has dealt with “third world” women, whose lives are adversely affected by the forces of corporate globalization and colonialism.

A tireless author, speaker and activist, Shiva has written over 13 books that reveal the true impact of globalization on the lives of women and men in developing countries. She has founded several organizations, including The Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology, Navdanya, and Bija Vidyapeeth, an organic farm and center for holistic living.

Born in 1952, she began training as a nuclear physicist.  When Shiva’s sister, a doctor, explained to Vandana the effects of nuclear radiation on life forms, Vandana was shocked because her science education had not addressed the risks and horrors of their work.  This was a pivotal moment that caused Shiva to critique science and the worldview behind scientific ideology.  This critique led to the development of her “subsistence” ecofeminist theories, and her relentless activism to protect both women and nature.

“Ecofeminism” was a term first used by Francoise D’Eaubonne in 1980 and gained popularity in protests and actions against continued ecological disaster.  Shiva and Maria Mies explain:

“We see the devastation of the earth and her beings by the corporate warriors, as feminist concerns.  It is the same masculinist mentality which would deny us our right to our own bodies and our own sexuality, and which depends on multiple systems of dominance and state power to have its way” (14).

From Shiva’s perspective, women’s liberation cannot be achieved without a simultaneous struggle for the preservation and liberation of all life on this planet from the dominant patriarchal/capitalist worldview (Mies and Shiva, 16).  Ecofeminism distinguishes itself from other theories of feminism, which maintain the hierarchical worldview of the Western world. “Rather than attempting to overcome this hierarchical dichotomy many women have simply up-ended it, and thus women are seen as superior to men, nature to culture, and so on” (Mies and Shiva, 5).

Shiva and other ecofeminists are explicitly anti-war and anti-capitalist, because both war and capitalism are seen as patriarchal structures. “The capitalist patriarchy perspective interprets difference as hierarchical and uniformity as a prerequisite for equality” (Mies and Shiva, 2).  For Shiva there is connection between the escalation of war, “musclemen” culture, and rape and other violence against women.  “It is no coincidence that the gruesome game of war—in which the greater part of the male sex seems to delight—passes through the same stages as the traditional sexual relationship: aggression, conquest, possession, control.  Of a woman or a land, it makes little difference” (Mies and Shiva, 15).

The historical context that radicalized Vandana Shiva and many others was the Green Revolution and the vast globalization of the mid to late twentieth century.  Shiva refers to this model of economic development as maldevelopment. “Maldevelopment militates against equality in diversity, and superimposes the ideologically constructed category of western technological man as the uniform measure of the worth of classes, cultures and genders” (Shiva, Staying Alive, 5).

The “Green Revolution” is a misnomer used by U.S. industrial agriculture and biotechnology seed and chemical corporations (Monsanto, Cargill, Dekalb, ADM, et al) to aggressively promote the implementation of their products to farmers in the “third world.”  As Shiva explains in a lecture given in 2003 (An Hour with Vandana Shiva), these corporations convinced farmers in India to shift from subsistence farming (where a family grows food primarily to meet their own food needs, and trades a small amount of their crop for other local goods and services) to growing a monoculture (growing a single plant species over a large area) of a cash crop bound for the global food market (for example, growing potatoes in India that end up as French fries at a McDonald’s in Detroit, Michigan).

This method of farming, aggressively forced on Indian farmers by the WTO (World Trade Organization) and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) in the 1980s and 1990s, was disastrous for the farmers of India.  Cash crop industrial agriculture caused farmers to go into debt to the multinational seed and chemical companies, and when their crops failed, the result was over 20,000 farmers taking their own lives by drinking the chemical fertilizers and pesticides sold to them by the corporations that held their insurmountable debt.

Vandana Shiva credits Article 27.53b of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which allows corporations to hold patents on forms of life, for pushing her to become an ecofeminist activist.  Under this article, it is illegal to save seeds and plant them the following year if a corporation holds a patent on that plant.  For a farmer, this means that he or she cannot be independent, but must now pay the corporation every year to plant that seed.  For the corporation, it means that it can appropriate any life form (such as basmati rice, which had been developed over thousands of years in India through traditional breeding and selection techniques), apply for a patent, and is thereby granted complete legal and biological control over that species, anywhere in the world.  In resistance to these violent forces of globalization, Vandana Shiva founded Navdanya in 1991, an organization in India that saves seeds, promotes biodiversity, empowers women and children, and protects indigenous knowledge.

To the western worldview, the patenting of seeds or the deforestation of the Himalaya may seem completely unrelated to feminism.  For women in the global South, however, the “environment” is the place where they live, and it encompasses everything that affects their lives (Shiva, Close to Home, 2).  According to Shiva and Maria Mies, “urban, middle-class women find it difficult to perceive commonality both between their own liberation and the liberation of nature, and between themselves and ‘different’ women in the world” (5).  This disconnect is due to the fundamental dualistic nature of the western worldview, where the nature of reality is divided into opposing parts, and hierarchically arranged.  Thus, humans are seen as separate to nature, technology is seen as superior to indigenous knowledge, men are superior to women, and humans are superior and separate from animals, etc.

Shiva and Mies write, “The women’s movement…had fastened it hopes on the progress of science and technology, particularly in the area of reproduction, but also of house- and other work” (7). This progress would have to be based on the continued dominance over nature, and pursuing the goal of “catching up” to men in “advanced” societies (Mies and Shiva, 7).  But if the definition of “equality for all” is that all people in the world are able to live at the same level of consumption of resources enjoyed by men in advanced societies, this equality is quite simply impossible.  “With a limited planet, there can be no escape from necessity.  To find freedom does not involve subjugating or transcending the ‘realm of necessity,’ but rather focusing on developing a vision of freedom, happiness, the ‘good life’ within the limits of necessity, of nature” (Mies and Shiva, 8).

Dr. Madronna Holden points out that, “Political or subsistence ecofeminists such as Shiva and Mies place part of the blame for the oppressive influence of patriarchy on the rise of Western (and Marxist) ideas of development and ‘progress’” (6). To further show this disconnect between Western views of feminism and ecologically based feminism, Shiva explains:

“A common criticism leveled at ecological feminist approaches to the current crisis, is that of ‘essentialism’; relating environmental issues to women in a specific way is seen as an ‘essentialist’ world view. Yet the charge itself emanates from a paradigm that splits parts from whole, fragments and divides, and either sees the part as subjugating the whole (reductionism) or the whole as subjugating the parts—in other words, essentializing both” (Close to Home, 7).

The alternative worldview promoted by Shiva is one of partnership and cooperation. Shiva believes different definitions of freedom, knowledge, and progress are needed for the liberation of both women and the environment, from those definitions held by Western culture since the Enlightenment. Shiva’s ecofeminist perspective makes no distinction between “basic needs” (food, clothing, shelter) and “higher needs” (freedom and knowledge).

For women in the affluent North such a concept of universalism or commonality is not easy to grasp. Survival is seen not as the ultimate goal of life but a banality—a fact that can be taken for granted.  It is precisely the value of the everyday work for survival, for life, which has been eroded in the name of the so-called ‘higher values’ (Mies and Shiva, 13).

Modernization brings with it new forms of dominance to subsistence cultures.  Subsistence, on the other hand, has been shown to be a model of interdependence and cooperation.  “The complimentarity (sic) of the separate male and female domains of work is the characteristic mode, based on diversity, not inequality” (Shiva, Staying Alive, 5).  Modernization, however, brings domination and the devaluing of women’s work, which is not done for financial gain, but for meeting the daily needs of people and families.

Shiva argues that as long as the Western world sees the environmental movement and the women’s movement as separate and unrelated, the environmental movement will be co-opted by the forces of ‘maldevelopment’ and used as a “new patriarchal project of technological fixes and political oppression” (Shiva, Staying Alive, 48).  She explains that oppression will continue in the Western worldview because it devalues what she terms the feminine principle.  This concept is often confused with the promotion of gendered femininity, but Shiva sees the feminine principle as the larger creative force in the world.  “The new insight provided by rural women in the Third World is that women and nature are associated not in passivity but in creativity and in the maintenance of life” (Shiva, Staying Alive, 47).

The feminine principle is based on inclusiveness and its recovery in men, women, and nature, is the recovery of “creative forms of being and perceiving” (Shiva, Staying Alive, 53).  Shiva proposes that the feminine principle is killed in Western women by the association of passivity as a category with the feminine (53).  In men, this principle is squashed by the notion that “activity” is destruction rather than creation, and “power” is domination rather than empowerment (53).

As natural resources become more and more limited on our finite planet, a shift in our worldview will become compulsory.  Vandana Shiva’s vision for a combined movement to end oppression of both women and nature is part of the answer to how we can achieve sustainability on this planet and find our place as a species.  We must acknowledge that we are part of the larger web of life that provides for our survival, and therefore it is imperative that we protect that fragile web of life, not as dominators—men over women and humans over nature—but as partners with every other life form on the planet.

References

Callicott, J. Baird. Earth’s Insights. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1994.

Democracy Now! An Hour with Vandana Shiva. 27 November 2003.http://www.democracynow.org/2003/11/27/an_hour_with_vandana_shiva_indian.

Holden, Madronna.  WS 450 Ecofeminism Class notes. Oregon State University. 2009.

Mies, Maria and Vandana Shiva. Ecofeminism. Halifax: Fernwood Publications. 1993.

Navdanya. http://www.navdanya.org

The Complete Marquis Who’s Who (R) Biographies.  Marquis Who’s Who LLC. 2008. Lexis-Nexis. 18 January 2009 http://www.lexisnexis.com.proxy.library.oregonstate.edu/us/lnacademic/search/loadForm.do

Shiva, Vandana, ed. Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health and Development Worldwide. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers. 1994.

You cannot be free if you are contained within a fiction -- Julian Beck, The Life of Theatre

Once upon a time there was a wicked witch and her name was

Lilith Eve Hagar Jezebel Delilah Pandora Jahi Tamar

And there was a wicked witch and she was also called goddess and her name was

Kali Fatima Artemis Hera Isis Mary Ishtar And there was a wicked witch and she was also called queen and her name was Bathsheba Vashti Cleopatra Helen Salome Elizabeth Clytemnestra Medea

And there was a wicked witch and she was also called witch and her name was

Joan Circe Morgan le Fay Tiamat Maria Leonza Medusa