A few years ago, a human neighbour picked me a handful of beans from her garden. She lived not far up the road from where I am writing this. It was a warm day and my first visit to her home. Her …
Heterotopia, Radical Imagination, and Shattering Orders, edited by Paula Acari, Routledge.
Not easy reading, this efflorescence, different voices ranging out together, holding each other, becoming truth together, calling for justice, urging towards joy, surging towards transformation. A glorious grounding. Local, right across the world, held in this basket that ‘grows and evolves’ (1).
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dad nods and we stop laughing
mum’s big story verified
no clouds up the hill new moon
this is Djargurd Wurrung land
bright like a lightbulb due north
next Sunday lunch what is that
window reflection but wait
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Cordite 4 February. Image detail of cover by Henry Lai-Pyne
When everyone is teaching, everyone is learning. Laughter a marker of change. Unpredictability, contingency, all the mystery of what happens to create a class. A windowless room, , the save found sitting in a circle. Food creating shared tables. Listening for every voice.
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Deep faith. Souls ‘drawn together the way they were in the life before life’ (116). The fight against the ‘proliferating, evolving whisper of instability’ , that ‘constant threat’ to women (218). The ‘sanctity’ in privacy (269). Love as an ‘unsubstantiated recognition’ (292).
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Forest of pain. ‘The hungry cat sees the girl, her wounds still warm. … gets close to try the flesh; a bomb pounds the street. No flesh, no girl, no father, no cat. Nobody is hungry. The moon overhead is not ….’
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Finessed sledge: ‘corrupt, empty, selfish, self-absorbed … horrified to realize that they are made of skin, flesh that can be cut, boiled, and eaten … despise this world and therefore they are engaged in a constant act of covering themselves up …’
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A sharp gentle work that looks rural life in the eye to create the ‘thin, delicate, layer of ice’ found in truth (279). Mice, mould and humans part of that to be feared then managed. Space itself as a form of prayer.
This chapter is part of an ongoing study of snake–human relations that is reorienting me from the harms of ophidiophobia. All through my childhood I was terrified of snakes. This culturally inherited fright led me to lead others to snake killings.
The Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals, edited by Chloe Taylor, Routledge.
