Take a Word
asked for I AM WOMAN. There was some kind of serendipity as I’ve just finished
Unless, by Carol Shields, a study in awakening and the belated loss of innocence. Mainly the author reflects
over the role that is reserved to women: "The world is split in two
between those who are handed power at birth, at gestation, encoded with a
seemingly random chromosome determinate that says yes for ever and ever, and
those like Norah, like Danielle Westerman, like my mother, like my
mother-in-law, like me, like all of us who fall into the uncoded female
otherness in which the power to assert ourselves and claim our lives has been
displaced by a compulsion to shut down our bodies and seal our mouths and be as
nothing against the fireworks and streaking stars and blinding light of the Big
Bang."
Background is mine; doll on the right uses elements by Rebecca Mcmeen; texture by Kim Klassen; words: lyrics of I Am Woman, by Helen Reddy and Ray Burton.
