Page 118 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

Patricia Reis

After • Word DINING OUT ON THE GREAT DIVIDE: Donna

Haraway, Thomas Thwaites, Frans deWaal, Karen Joy Fowler,

Charles Foster and Helen MacDonald.

Like all defensive wall building, the Great Divide that separates humans from

other-than-humans has been long in the making. Built over several millennia and

supported by such stony stalwarts as Genesis, the Great Chain of Being, and

René Descartes, the wall requires constant shoring up and anxious monitoring.

With Darwin’s help, parts of the wall came down. Like cows looking for better

grass, no one wants to squirm under, wriggle through, or leap over the barrier

more than a few errant homo sapiens, sapiens who write books.

I have recently read six books addressing the subject of humans’ relationship to

other-than-humans. There is a veritable flood of these books lately, each of them

coming at the subject from a different perspective, each concerned, more or less,

with issues of human ethics, morality, intelligence, politics, psychology,

philosophy, religion and spirituality.

The authors in question are all highly educated, privileged white Western

anglophones—three Brits, two Americans, and one Dutchman who lives and

works in America. Each of them presses hard against the boundary that

separates humans from those other creatures with whom we share the planet.

Reading their works, I am reminded of the ancient story about people in the dark

(in most of the stories, it is blind men) who touch an elephant to learn its nature;

each puts a hand on a different part and describes it, but no one has a complete

sense of the whole animal.