Page 5 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II
P. 5
Lise Weil
Editorial
Welcome to issue #5 and Part II of our two-part series on “Making Kin,” inspired
by Donna Haraway’s call for an expanded vision of kin and kinship.i For this
issue, we again received a record number of extremely strong submissions and
as a result, Kristin, Melissa and I had to make a lot of hard choices. I think you’ll
agree that every single piece of writing and artwork here is stunning, original,
beautifully crafted. Some of it is devastating, but all of it is nourishing and
necessary. I hope you will take the time to give each one your careful attention.
This is the first issue of Dark Matter to appear since the November elections in
the US. I admit my mood about this journal, as with just about everything else in
my life, has in these months wavered between “Why bother?” and “Now more
than ever.” In the case of Dark Matter, I’m glad to say I’ve come down firmly on
the side of the latter. Between the unprecedented disconnectedness of the
president of the world’s most powerful nation and his recent withdrawal from the
Paris climate accord, the conditions this journal was founded to address have
only become more pronounced. As Miriam Greenspan writes in this issue, “The
ascendancy of Trump is a threat to the earth and all its sentient beings, a threat
that, if left unchecked, will speed our way to planetary disaster.” The matter, so it
seems, is now darker than it’s ever been, our relationship to the earth more
broken. But maybe not—maybe the darkness and the brokenness are just being
exposed in a way they never were before. Certainly this is so of the
disconnectedness. Bruno La Tour, in the May issue of Harper’s, argues that the
“complete indifference to facts” that’s been a hallmark of this presidency so far is
actually symptomatic of the direness of “the overall geopolitical situation....If
there is no planet, no earth, no soil, no territory for the globalization to which all
countries at COP21 [Paris Climate Conference] claim to be heading, what should
we do? Either we deny the existence of the problem or we seek to come down to
earth.” https://harpers.org/archive/2017/05/the-new-climate/
But it’s not just the disconnect and denial that are being exposed. It’s the fact that
patriarchy is alive and well. Not so long ago the word was more or less banished
among feminists for being too blanket, for erasing important cultural differences.
But it is hard not to feel now that around the globe we are being held hostage by
a bunch of guys with outsized egos they are feeding at the expense of all other
living beings on the earth. Watching the US president’s exclusively white male
entourage cheer him on as signature by signature he dismantles protections for
women, the non-wealthy, and the earth, I find myself flung back to my radical
feminist days of the ‘80s when I was fond of quoting Alice Walker’s character
Shug in The Color Purple: “You got to git man off your eyeball, before you can
see anything at all.” In playwright Karin Malpede’s “There’s a Wilding Inside: