Reconstruction 7.2 (2007)

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Can Nature's Language be Written, Spoken, and Heard? Mahasweta Devi's "Pterodactyl" and Marlene Nourbese Philip's Looking for Livingstone / Lori Martindale

 

Abstract: How do traditional western epistemologies affect natures' subjectivity? This essay deconstructs the status of nature as silent Other. I argue Mahasweta Devi's The Pterodactyl and Marlene Nourbese Philip's epic Looking for Dr. Livingstone translate nature, or the radical Other, as subject. Scientific, xenophobic, and imperial behaviors have affected the status of natures' subjectivity in the naming, mapping, and exploitation of land, during colonial and commodity enterprise. As a result, natures' language has become increasingly radical and is one to be translated for an awareness and avoidance of imposition; nature is a language yet to be understood.

 

All things are our relatives; what we do to everything, we do to ourselves. All is really One.

Black Elk

 

<1> Can nature's language be written, spoken, and heard? This essay explores two works of postcolonial literature in order to imagine ways in which to write, speak and hear nature's language. I have chosen Mahasweta Devi's Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha and Marlene Nourbese Philip's epic Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey into Silence to show how they successfully translate the radical Other or nature, for a cultural understanding of nature's subjectivity.

 

Part I: How do Traditional Western Epistemologies affect Contemporary Western Conceptions of Nature?

<2> Since the death of Jacques Derrida, much theoretical attention has been drawn to the absence of his body; his physical death as a kind of ghost or absence, much like the status of writing as the Other. Derrida, the ghost and muse, continues to radicalize deconstruction today, through his influence in postmodern conceptions of mastery and the subjectivity of nature.

<3> In his deconstruction of Culture/Nature, Self/Other, Speech/Writing, Derrida offers a standpoint of nature as rational subject. Nature and culture have long been traditionally viewed as opposites of one another; culture, or society, has assumed a role as dominator over nature. Hegel, one of Derrida's philosophical influences, understood a progressive notion of Nature, which precedes essence, as he illustrates in the following passage:

In regard to Nature, it is agreed that philosophy ought to know her as she is, that if the philosopher's stone (der Stein der Weisen) is hidden anywhere, it must at any rate be within Nature herself, that she contains her own reason within her....the ethical world (die sittliche Welt), on the other hand, the State... Innocence, therefore, is merely nonaction, like the mere being of a stone (das Sein eines Steines), not even that of a child (1981: 172).

A philosopher's stone, or nature herself, a subject, a rational being, hidden. The status of nature is hidden / mystery / invisible and presence all at once. The tree stands, is hidden, mysterious, invisible, old, yet innocent. Yet, "Innocence is nonaction" or the state of nature at times remains passive and moves into a radical action; nature is presence/absence, word is spoken/written. Nature embodies language/sight/sound/ reason /life/death.

<4> Derridean and Foucauldian deconstruction has radically influenced eco-criticism in the past ten years. In his article Nature and Silence, Christopher Manes says that nature has been muted by 'our culture' and 'needs to be expressed' in a 'language of ecological humility' and 'free from the directionalities of humanism' (1996: 17). Manes confronts the ethics of exploitation of nature and calls for a search toward environmental counter-ethics: "nature is silent in our culture (and in literate societies generally) in the sense that the status of a speaking subject is jealously guarded as an exclusively human prerogative" (1996: 15). He traces this silence, or what he calls an "erosion" of animism as "the idiom of Renaissance and Enlightenment humanism," which changed western perceptions of nature as "silent in our discourse, shifting from animistic to a symbolic presence, from a voluble subject to a mute object" (Manes 1996: 17). Traditional western metaphysics lay claim to declare nature an object; however, nature is dominated in mass cultural, political and consumer contexts and moving into radical action, a revolution, rather than silent sufferer. Rather than a silent "muted object," which needs to be "given voice", nature has been dominated and conveniently placed on "mute" until the repercussions of human action will no longer be sustainable. Nature embodies a multiplicity of voices, a polysemic arena, which must be listened to in the context of global warming and environmental exploitation. To "give" nature a voice keeps the illusion of the "dominating" human speaking subject at the center of conversation. It is time to do more than deconstruct the ideology that nature is a silent object (or object-in-itself). Hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, storms, tsunamis, the sea, are not silent, nor are the various sounds of the woods, and even the most tranquil mountainside speaks. Nature has subjectivity and agency, with a body and language of its own for expression.

<5> Silence implies muteness and absence, dichotomies of voice and presence. Sound embodies silence and silence embodies sound. Sound and silence are not opposites, but sound exists as a field of silence, which is never truly silent. The earth, in the midst of hurricanes, sea storms, or howling winds is not a silent object, but a revolutionary agent on the verge of mass rebellion, as demonstrated in the last few years of global natural disasters. Manes and I both suggest in our essays, however, that there is an urgent need to dismantle or deconstruct the human subject, even within language itself. The human subject, traditionally perceived as center, has been equated with voice, reason and presence in opposition to nature as silent and as the subordinate object for humans. Similarly, women, often seen as closer to nature, become equated with the body, absence, silence, object, and irrational behavior, within that same logic of opposites. In a time of environmental disasters, such as oil spills or the harms of toxic chemicals on/in the earth and our bodies, there is no better time to question the various human hegemonic stances over nature's body and to take action towards change for a healthier environment. It is our responsibility to be aware of the current state and condition of the planet and the polysemic language of Nature. Nature, which has been categorized and stereotyped as irrational, wild and thus to be dominated, is our sustenance for life. We are only one species among a multiplicity of beings. Therefore, to decenter the historical use of presence as equated within the human subject is necessary: nature speaks, nature embodies a language, and nature embodies wildness, agency, and raison d'être; nature is a sacred, inviolate, living text.

<6> In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates represents his concerns for the learner in the following line through imagery suggestive not of the natural world around him, but of other people and culture as the source of his wisdom. He muses on the nature of learning as linked with the polis... "I am devoted to learning; landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me-only people in the city can do that" (1995: 6). The status of nature as silenced or even subordinate to culture is established in this passage, by Socrates' systematic ordering of dualities of culture as superior to nature. Yet, it was underneath the cicadas and by the rivers that such philosophical conversations took place in Plato's Phaedrus. In their translation and introduction to the Phaedrus, Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff notice the countryside imagery as an inspiration to the "production" of philosophical discussions:

Instead of returning to Athens, the two friends (Socrates and Phaedrus) decide to stay in the country and continue their discussion, on a philosophical level now, through the early afternoon. Socrates, in addition, points out the cicadas singing overhead. Consonant with respect for myth and traditional theology which his visit to the countryside has produced in him, he describes the cicadas as the Muses' messengers (1995: xxx).

Such philosophical discussions were "tribute to the cicadas' patron goddesses" (1995: xxx). Yet, the countryside, as an absence of knowledge, ("I am devoted to learning; landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me - only people in the city can do that") according to Socrates, reveals the logic of the Platonic episteme of hierarchical oppositions between the perception of culture as presence and nature as absence. The Platonic logic of humans as equated with speech and the living soul is especially revealing of attitudes towards nature when compared, say, to animism or the view that plants and inanimate objects have souls. For instance, some Native American cultures depict animals both as sustenance and as possessing sacred qualities, such as revealed in totemic images, which represent the realm of the sacred drawn from both nature and human societies.

<7> How do traditional, Platonic western dualisms effect the 'feminization' of madness associated the irrational, wildness, and thus nature? I use the term "feminization" because the feminine is equated with silence and object according to the Platonic episteme that I am discussing here. I use the term 'madness' because madness is often equated with wildness and what is then associated under this episteme as "irrational." The Platonic epistemology I am discussing here, or Western metaphysics, is based on logocentrism (the word as equated with logic and reason). Derridean deconstruction identifies the dominance of the logos over writing and absence, while the hegemonic status of 'reason' is equated with masculinity, linearity, speech and presence. While the presence of the logos, or reason equated with truth in the traditional, philosophic western world, is a system, or a Platonic hierarchy of dominant / subordinate binaries, the status of nature as 'object' comes into play within this standpoint epistemology. Rather, Derridean deconstruction recognizes a system which functions via dichotomies and polarizes all "negative" subjects of the same ontological system as other, lesser, absent, and silent.

<8> The corroboration of a positive extreme and, in turn, the oppressive subordination of all esteemed 'negativity' is an ideological 'chimera' of dichotomies. The suppressive way in which this polarization of Culture/Nature functions, which privileges reason as equated ideologically with manhood and public space, constructs mastery over the subjects traditionally equated with the feminine, which is merely a discourse of power. Therefore, one can understand how the bodies and voices of women, nature and perceptions of 'silence' are viewed as subordinate within this standpoint epistemology. What has been traditionally equated with the body, then, is theoretically subjugated or usurped by the 'logical' identity of mimicry, and detained ideologically by a gendered masculine 'presence.' The commonalities of feminism and eco-criticism expose a critique of traditional, western epistemologies, specifically within the problematic status of nature as subordinate, other, passive, and 'silent' within that same ontological system. Derridean de-centering of identity/sameness/ presence within language is then exactly what Manes calls for in his essay Nature and Silence for a new, deconstructive language to speak about nature; a language that does not assume an ideological hegemonic stance against nature. However, I think deconstructive language is actually a language, which includes nature as subject - as voice to be heard rather than a voice to be 'given' to nature by culture.

<9> Ecofeminism can be traced to the critique of women and nature as objectified and oppressed in a global context, with the recognition of that suppression in order to transform stasis into agency. Ecofeminist Greta Gaard explains that "ecofeminists tend to believe hierarchy takes place as a result of the self / other opposition" (1993: 3). If nature's body, then, is conceived of as "other" to any locus of public speech, then stasis must be transformed into agency. Rather, in order to challenge the privilege of "culture" as superior to nature, a "strategic essentialism" must be applied to this discussion. [1] The significance to understanding the theoretical status of women's speech in a politicized, psychoanalytical, public, and theoretical context, will inform the status of nature's speech.

<10> Let's now look briefly at the status of women's speech in the traditions of philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. In her book Speculum de l'autre femme, Luce Irigaray interrogates significant theoretical writings in traditional philosophy and science, such as Sigmund Freud's writings on sexuality, which involve the concept of femininity as castrated, silent, other, subordinate, and absent. According to Freud, a female sexual clitoris is a 'castrated penis' which suggests a 'lack' of male sexuality. Therefore, according to Irigaray in This Sex which is Not One, feminine sexuality has always been ideologically perceived "against the center" of masculine power (1985: 23). Nature, too, has been perceived on the margins of this center for perusal of its enigmatic body. Women's sexuality has been a forbidden, suppressed, dark and mysterious unknown 'terrain' in the world of traditional psychoanalysis. Irigaray studies Freud's use of sameness to deconstruct his argument. Thus, Irigary argues that women have been recognized as the defective or lack of male sexuality; an illusion or "shadow" to masculinity. Irigaray (1974) refers to female subjectivity and sexuality as 'a sexuality denied'. This 'sexuality denied' is also a denial and castration of the body.

<11> Irigaray's study focuses on the representation of the feminine as equated with invisibility, lack, and castrated male sexuality in widely disseminated works, also in Plato's Myth of the Cave. Irigaray asks the reader to read the myth as 'a metaphor for inner space, of the den, the womb, or hysteria, sometimes of the earth - though we shall see that the text inscribes the metaphor as, strictly speaking, impossible' (1974: 243). Here, she sets the stage for what she calls a 'silent prescription for metaphysics' (Irigaray 1974: 243). Rather, those chained in the cave can see straight ahead, the 'Chains, lines, perspectives oriented straight ahead - all maintain the illusion of constant motion in one direction' (Irigaray 1974: 245). Those in the cave are prisoners to the cave; they are chained up and can only see in one direction. Rather, those who fall into a 'silent prescription of metaphysics' suffer from a '(masculine) hysteria' (Irigaray 974: 268). The traditional, "silent prescription" is such an old way of thinking, or training, that some find themselves ideological prisoners to the notion of masculinity as superior to femininity. Irigaray calls on Derridean deconstruction to decenter the privileged status of gender in the context of sexuality.

<12> Différance is to defer, or to postpone, and differ in meaning - which gestures toward how sexual différance is then also difference from. Nature embodies a sexual différance. Irigaray says that 'sexual différance is probably the issue in our time which could be our salvation if we thought it through.' With applied deconstruction, nature's sexuality involves a différance, a construction of identities deferred from male or feminine sameness. Nature is an embodiment of sexuality - beyond masculinity and femininity; a multiple sex. Irigaray argues in The Sex Which Is Not One, that the valorization of masculine sameness is destructive to the multiplicity of female sexuality; could then that same valorization be destructive to nature's multifarious sexual procreation? At least, if the destruction of the earth is looked at through a multi-gendered lens, then the earth embodies more than two genders, a multi-dimensional web of sexual difference.

<13> Derrida's critique and general critical deconstruction of western metaphysics is one aid to how the theoretical locus of women's speech and subjects traditionally conceived as otherness, can be applied within ecocriticism. The word/logos centered around patriarchy, or phallogocentrism, can be seen as a modus operandi of masculine power and ideology, which has traditionally constructed a linguistic mastery over the spheres of speech, writing, and public agency. The destruction of the Earth goes beyond masculine power: men and women alike have participated in the destruction of nature. Rather, the speaking subject, natures' voices, have been seen as silent, 'muted' and objectified - to control, use, and destroy for human needs and desires, much like the commodification and trafficking of bodies. The Earth is subjected; bodies have been used, and abused, without consent. The earth, a multidimensional 'I', has ironically been perceived as an object: an Other, a voiceless article/body for human perusal.

<14> While nature is 'objectified' in a capitalist, commodified way, the drive of the 'will to power' over the natural world is applicable to a discussion of economics and power. In a time of neocolonialism and environmental disruption, global perspectives on the locus of speech and power need to be addressed with regard to the gendering and radicalization of nature. It is key to recognize that historically, in the context of a traditional metaphysics of presence, nature, like the female and colonial Other, has been ideologically spoken for. To become subjected to ideological domination, under the contract of a voiceless object, is to be subjected as a marketable commodity, a prison house of capitalism.

<15> Although deconstruction has offered channels of radical intervention within language, the concept of deconstruction as a project in which nature is discussed is now revealed. What I am proposing here is a re-defining or a re-imagining of the politics and aesthetics of nature.

<16> French feminism calls the nature of the gendered body into question. L'ecriture feminine, or 'women's writing' notions of 'women's time' writing the body, jouissance, and liberation can be found through abandoning a principle logic of sameness and reason. [2] Gayatri Spivak (1996) strategically writes women's 'castrated' bodies within a global context in her essay French Feminism in an International Frame. Spivak calls genital mutilation into question as a further disruption of women's self-defined presence; the body's sexual center for jouissance is then mutilated. The body is cut and dominated. Ecocriticism calls for a similar project in the gendering of the bodies of nature, which have been cut (castrated), dumped toxins into, spilled into, bombed, unnecessarily built on, cut down, cemented over, and torn apart, are mutilated and dominated. Poets have long spoken and written about the beauty and power in nature; however, it is not superficial now to say that in places, nature is not only eradicated but mutilated to the point of revenge. Thus, in its worst human damages, the more the earth becomes mutilated the louder the nature revolts, the more natural catastrophes happen, the more potent nature becomes. This is a kind of death of the procreative seed, which will take time and work to rejuvenate in places of extreme damage and mutilation, if these places on earth continue to be treated as a marketable commodity.

<17> How, then, can nature's 'bodies' and 'voices' be written and spoken to circumvent mastery? How can the body be written with a voice or multiple voices to influence how the bodies of nature are treated? How can ecocritic's urge agency in the revitalization of nature? How can ecocriticism help heal the earth? Ecocriticism calls for a multi-dimensional project. In addition to race, class, and gender studies, ecocriticism is critical cross-fertilization; human culture/politics are connected to the physical world, affecting this natural world and being affected by neocolonialism, cold war mentality, consumption, violence, war and the destruction of our planet. In other words, the layers and layers of race, class, and gender studies are embedded within ecocriticism; all interconnected with cultural politics centered in the abuse and domination of the physical environment. How can people reconnect with nature after centuries of abuse?

<18> Manes asks for us to reestablish a communication with nature. He calls for a new language to discuss nature:

Unmasking the universalist claims of "Man" must be the starting point in our attempt to reestablish communication with nature, not out of some nostalgia for an animistic past, but because the human subject that pervades institutional knowledge since the Renaissance already embodies a relationship with nature that precludes a speaking world (1996: 25).

'Unmasking the universalist claims of Man' is a place to start. The speaking world Manes discusses is a speaking world of privileged 'institutions,' not the 'fourth' world, not the 'animistic past' not the world of the invisible, unseen and unheard. Yes, these universalist claims about Man as the sole privileged subject must be decentered in this standpoint episteme, but learning to listen is another step that must be taken seriously. Globally, humans need to listen to nature and the warnings being given. And we, as humans, need to do more than just listen and talk - we need to act. We have had to learn that toxins are bad for our bodies - and so of course they are for the planet's body. Shooting more toxic gases into the atmosphere is not an example of listening to the earth to stop global warming. The result of global warming has been an ecological revolt against humanity.

<19> To analyze western traditions reflects a concern to question these traditional epistemologies of dichotomous oppositions and how nature has been impacted and haunted by the perception of voicelessness. First, since I am questioning the role of speech, the point I would like to make can again be illustrated with the ancient (men, agency) speech/(women, passivity) writing hierarchy. Derrida outlines, for instance, writing and speech are not identical. Différance is not an identity, différance is grounded in a word's 'different' and deferred meanings in relation with and to other words; thus, the play of language. The French verb means to 'differ' as well as 'to defer'. All illusionary polarities are double, as in the pharmakon (both poison and antidote in Derrida's Plato's Pharmacy). Therefore, linguistic meanings are always already referential, as they are construed as different of one another, as famously observed by Ferdinand de Saussure. In the language system, according to Saussure, there are only differences; every element derives its identity from its distinction to other elements in the same ontological system. According to Saussure, the bond between the signifier and signified is arbitrary. [3] Saussure's example of this is the fact that there are different words, in different languages, for the same subject, such as the word 'tree' [4]. 'Tree' is tree in English, but is arbre when translated into French, ağaç in Turkish and дерево in Russian . This theory about the structure of language makes translation vital, but polyfunctionality possible. Rather to separate the signifier and signified can change the relation and meaning between them. (Derrida criticizes Saussure in Of Grammatology, that this makes possible the idea of a single signifier, which could be associated with more than one signified, so as to avoid phonocentrism). [5] An arbitrary nature of the sign makes concepts like the multiplicity of meaning, ambiguity, polysemy, and heteroglossia viable subjects in translation of what Derrida calls freeplay. Thus, the sounds of clapping thunder, the sight of lightening, the sensation of wind and rain, are also single signifiers associated with more than one signified. The signified 'storm', or rainstorm, windstorm, then, not only embodies a language structure, a universal nature language, but also requires translation and interpretation of the layers of multi-voicedness.

<20> Black Elk, a famous Ogalala Lakota medicine man, was born in the Moon of the Popping Trees during the Winter When the Four Crows Were Killed (December 1863). Black Elk tells a story in Black Elk Speaks about the voices of thunder, who take him into a spirit vision. Every time he hears the voices of thunder, he remembers this vision:

Then there was nothing but the air and the swiftness of the little cloud that bore me and those two men still leading up to where white clouds were piled like mountains on a wide blue plain, and in them thunder beings lived and leaped and flashed. Now suddenly there was nothing but a world of cloud, and we three were there alone in the middle of a great white plain with snowy hills and mountains staring at us; and it was very still; but there were whispers (Neihardt 1992: 18).

Thunder is personified as a relative to human beings, who roar with a language of thunder, and whisper the beginnings of rainstorms.

<21> Black Elk reminds the listener that nature language is a multi-lingual, polysemic, multifarious identity embodied in voice and power. For example, in studying a set of binary terms, Derrida illustrates in Plato's Pharmacy one should not focus on how these terms, for example nature and culture, are similar or different from one another, but rather on what is at stake in the construction of their différance . This notion of différance is crucial to understanding what is at stake in the locus of nature language as traditionally equated with quietness, and culture with speech and power. However, there is potency and power in the construction of lightening, loudness in the clapping of thunder, which carries a deferred multiplicity of meaning as interpreted and translated according to place, culture, storytelling or legend. The construction of différance within our interpretations of nature language is crucial to understanding the attempted mastery of nature and the power nature inevitably holds over us. Ralph Waldo Emerson muses on this enigmatic language in his journal:

Nature is a language, and every new fact that we learn is a new word; but rightly seen taken all together, it is not merely a language, but the language put together into a most significant and universal book. I wish to learn the language, not that I may learn a new set of nouns and verbs, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.

What Emerson alludes to is that this significant, vast book has yet to be read. Are many people illiterate to its language? With globalization now as a contributing force in devastation of our planet, nature language has moved into a state of revolt, where both the environment and cultures world-wide are suffering the affects of catastrophic expression.

 

Part II: Ecological Re-imaginings in a Global Context: Mahasweta Devi's The Pterodactyl and Marlene Nourbese Philip's Odyssey of Silence. How can writing be used to illustrate and promote ecological awareness?

<22> Mahasweta Devi, novelist and activist, wrote the book Imaginary Maps, which exposes the agony of decolonization in India through three stories: The Hunt, Douoti the Bountiful, and the novella, The Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Spivak suggests in the preface to Devi's book that her stories can deconstruct a number of opposites, such as culture/nature, and First World / Third World. According to Spivak, Devi's work can lead readers to question these divisions:

The imaginary in our title - "imaginary maps" points at other kinds of divisions as well. India is not an "undivided" perspective, much as both conservatives and radicals in the United States would strive to represent it as such. And the divisions within the United States are there for deconstructive pedagogic use, although both politicians and ideologues on both sides in India would like to convince us otherwise. In what interest or interests is it necessary to keep up this game of difference - India is " India" and the U.S. is " U.S.," and the two are as different as can be - emerge, today? The stories translated in this collection can help us imagine that interest or those interests. I am convinced that the multiculturalist U.S. reader can at least be made to see this difference at work, and it is the expatriate critic who can make the effort... (1995: xxiii).

Spivak notes that questions on 'divisions' should emerge from the multiculturalist U.S. reader, who is complicit in the oppression of indigenous Indians. I have found that stories such as The Pterodactyl can educate students on global disaster, as well as the decolonization of India. And students communicate with one another: what are we to do about ecological catastrophe? Where are the solutions to these global problems? We write, discuss, some students even take action in their community. Devi reminds them to listen to the stories they are about to read; listen to the voices; listen to the gaps. Devi explains to the reader that it is our task 'to resist development actively and to learn to love' (1995: xxii).

<23> In her story of Indian peoples, however, Devi demonstrates, 'If read carefully, 'The Pterodactyl' will communicate the agony of the tribals' (1995: 197). Devi's stories can open up a conversation about multi-dimensional ecocriticism. Neocolonization, decolonization, gender, race, and ecological lines all criss-cross and intersect in Devi's novellas. The Pterodactyl, for instance, is told from the perspective of an urban journalist, Puran Sahay, who goes to a famine-stricken tribal village to report on a pterodactyl creature that has been seen flying overhead as a "monstrous shadow" in the moonlight (Devi 1995: 103). The local tribal people think the pterodactyl is an animal living in ecological catastrophe, and represents the spirit or soul of the ancestral tribal peoples of India who have been pushed out of their land. A young village man, Shankar, speaks of this ancient creature as an ominous sign of extinction:

-Alas! In pain we are stone, mute. We failed to give peace to the ancestors. We are coming to an end, rubbed off the soil. And the quiet soul casts its shadow and hovers. We didn't know how it would look. This is surely the ancestors' spirit! This is surely the curse of the ravaged land, village, field, home, forest! Now no one can save us. Now we are all unclean, in mourning. (Devi 1995: 120)

"We are coming to an end" illustrates the concept of endangerment of people, as "rubbed off the soil" or land, to become extinct. The people are in grave mourning, a dirge for the endangerment and displacement of home.

<24> A young village boy sees this animal and turns into a shaman, and he never speaks again. He goes into inward silence. The Pterodactyl, as an ancient spirit, is embodied in the natural world:

Among the South Indian tribals, Sita, the Queen of King Rama in the ancient epic Ramayana, is not a human being. She is the wind in the grass, she is the flowing river, the fruit yielding trees, the harvest to be gathered. She is Nature (1995: ix)

Like Sita, the Pterodactyl is the spirit and voice of nature. According to Devi, The Pterodactyl, "...wants to show what has been done to the entire tribal world of India" (1995: xxi).

<25> Puran "is carrying the Pirtha village in his heart" (Devi 1995: 194). He despondently describes this lack of communication between two worlds: "By comparison with the ancient civilizations modern progress is much more barbaric at heart" (Devi 1995: 195). He goes on further to explain: "We built no communication point to establish contact with the tribals. Leaving it undiscovered, we have slowly destroyed a continent in the name of civilization" (Devi 1995: 195). Rather, because the communication and understanding was not established, the space in between these parallel lines is a gap of silence, a gap of what is not heard or understood by the urban world. An "imaginary map" is a line between an unheard language displacement of the oral cultures, the division of land, the loss of lives and traditions.

<26> The economic maps of the World Bank uninhibitedly penetrate the space of tribal peoples. The constantly changing maps of the world are strictly economic, or in Spivak's words, "as fluid as the spectacular dynamics of international capital" (1996: 200). Here the problem of a global "fourth world" is due to massive economic domination and growing land scarcity, where ecological catastrophe is even more at stake through the neglect to listen to and protect the devastation of land. [6]

<27> However, when Devi speaks of indigenous peoples, she is not only speaking of "tribes." André Béteille writes on the definition of the tribal, in Society and Politics in India:

The principal novelty in this scheme, it seems to me, is not the distinction between band and tribe or between tribe and chiefdom, but the definition of the tribe system. As Sahlins put it, 'A tribe is a segmental organiza­tion. It is composed of a number of equivalent, unspecialized multifamily groups, each the structural duplicate of the other: a tribe is a congeries of equal kin group blocs' (cf. Béteille 1999: 1).

Hence, the definition of what constitutes 'indigenous' expands into an arena of the relationship between languages and groups. The role of language is then called into question. Béteille writes about the orientation of language to the hazards of "using kinship as a basis for discriminating between 'tribe' and 'civilization'" in the following passage:

Two brief comments must be made here about the relationship between civilization, language and tribe. The Dravidian languages of India include not only Tamil, which is one of the oldest literary languages of the world, but also languages spoken by a number of tribes such as the Baiga and the Kond who lived by shifting cultivation until the other day. The Tamils are proud of their ancient and medieval civilization which created elaborate irrigation works on the one hand, magnificent temples on the other, but their cultural affinity with some of the simplest tribes of peninsular India would appear to be beyond dispute. In a recent impressive work, Trautman has shown how the Tamils share the same fundamental structure of kinship and affinity with the Baiga and the Kond. Further, Dravidian kinship, in both its 'civilized' and 'tribal' forms, is markedly different from North Indian kinship. Nothing could demonstrate more effec­tively the hazards of using kinship as a basis for discriminating between 'tribe' and 'civilization' or 'tribe' and 'State' ( Béteille 1995: 3).

Communities associated with these languages are associated with 'tribes' in India. Hence, the definition of 'tribe' encompasses far more people than what some critics might think. Devi is speaking of the indigenous, which, in the Indian context as Devi wrote about, does not necessarily mean a tribe. Hence, Béteille illustrates the danger within the discrimination between 'tribe' and 'civilization.' Béteille discusses this problem in his article The Idea of Indigenous People in the following passage:

The nineteenth century view was that the tribe represented not only a particular type of society, but also a particular stage of evolution. The presumption with which most anthropologists then worked was that the tribe was an isolated, self-contained, and primitive social formation (1998: 187).

Béteille discusses the dangerous idea of the 'primitive' as close to nature, and 'evolution' as further from nature technologically, as a clear example of ethnocentrism and arrogance in 19 th and 20 th -21 st century attitudes about indigenous societies. Indigenous societies are indeed civilizations, full of complex languages and customs.

<28> Since people have used the language prevalent in the region they inhabit, with a loss of or displacement from land, there is homelessness and exile. This example includes indigenous (both tribal and village) peoples of the fourth world that Devi is writing about. Language is inevitably tied up with the land and meaning of that culture. For instance, Devi explains that in the ancient Ho language, there is no word for "deprivation" or "exploitation" so there are no words to explain the daily life for the tribal in today's India (118). Béteille admits this impact on the loss of language as a significant part of the loss of a community in Society and Politics in India:

When the loss of language is accompanied by a loss of other cultural traits, a sort of invisible threshold is crossed, and the tribe ceases to function as a tribe although it does not thereby lose its identity as a community ( Béteille 1999: 3).

The pterodactyl is an embodiment of the ancestral spirit, who has come to warn the people of this loss of land, identity and community. The loss of a connection to the forest homeland is a warning for endangerment and possible extinction, yet to come.

<29> Puran and villagers explain further on what the pterodactyl is trying to communicate about the changes happening in and to the land, consequently to food, and even chemical warfare as a threat to existence. Therefore, endangerment concerns all of humanity:

You too are endangered. You too will become extinct in nuclear explosions, or in war, or in the aggressive advance of the strong as it obliterates the weak, which finally turns you naked, barbaric, primitive, think if you are going forward or back. Forests are extinct, and animal life is obliterated outside of zoos and protected forest sanctuaries. What will you finally grow in the soil, having murdered nature in the application of man imposed substitutes? Deadly DDT greens /charnel-house vegetables, /uprooted astonished onions, radioactive potatoes / explosive bean-pods, monstrous and misshapen, /spastic gourds, eggplants with mobile tails/bloodthirsty octopus creepers, animal blood-filled / tomatoes? (Devi 1995: 157).

Existence itself is at stake. Like the ancient nations, the earth is greatly disrespected through the use of chemicals, toxic experimentation and nuclear threats to existence. Puran explains for the reader:

The collective being of the ancient nations is crushed. Like nature, like the sustaining earth, their sustaining ancient cultures received no honor, they remained unknown, they were only destroyed, they are being destroyed (Devi 1995: 157).

The people of Pirtha believe the ancient Pterodactyl has come back from the past to attempt to communicate about the mysteries of nature. Puran speaks in the following line: "We have lost somewhere, to Bikhia's people, to Pirtha. By comparison with the ancient civilizations, modern progress is much more barbaric at heart. We are defeated" (Devi 1995: 195). The barbarity of modern progress is exactly what the village people believe the Pterodactyl warned them about. Puran explains his findings further: "There is no communication between us and the Pterodactyl. We belong to two worlds and there is no communication point. There was a message in the Pterodactyl, and whether it was fact or not we could not grasp it. We missed it" (Devi 1995: 195). In the name of progress and civilization, ironically, destruction has taken place. In his story to the people, Puran the journalist comes to the conclusion that "we have not understood" (Devi 1995: 195):

We have not understood because we didn't want to and now it is evident that Bikhia's people are finally much more civilized, holder of the ancient civilization and so finally they did not learn our barbarism, there is possibly no synonym for 'exploitation' in their language. Our responsibility was to protect them. That's what their eyes spoke (Devi 1995: 196).

The ancient civilization is being destroyed in the name of "progress" and "civilization." Puran exclaims, in the end:

Only love, a tremendous, excruciating, explosive love can still dedicate us to this work when the century's sun is in the western sky, otherwise this aggressive civilization will have to pay a terrible price, look at history, the aggressive civilization has destroyed itself in the name of progress, each time. (Devi 1995: 196)

In turn, Puran decides he "cannot remain distant spectator anywhere in life" (Devi 196). He recalls the Pterodactyl's eyes at the end of the story and laments the loss of an ancient civilization "We destroyed it undiscovered, as we are destroying the primordial forest, water, living beings, the human" (Devi 1995: 196).

<30> How can the people of the "fourth world" then, speak to the gaps between a parallel world? Spivak writes that one of the "not inconsiderable elements in the drawing up of these maps is the appropriation of fourth world ecology" (1996: 198). The connections between local elites and international capitalism are exposed in the ecological loss, the loss of forest as one foundation of life, and the complicated complicity of local developers and global capital.

<31> Where is the sense of fellowship in our relationships to bodies, in the context of capitalism, in an overly developed first world country? This is not to suggest that essentially women and tribals are closer to nature. Ramanchandra Guha calls this idea 'Reverse Orientalism.' Devi, however, writes about a sense of honor: "Among the tribals, insulting or raping a woman is the greatest crime. Rape is unknown to them." Women have a place of honor in a tribal society (Devi 1995: xviii). In fact, she explains that "one of the causes of the great Santal Revolt of 1855-56 was the raping of tribal women" (Devi 1995: xviii).

<32> In following passage, Devi describes how the tribal people of India, who are one sixth of India's population, understood nature fellowship:

They had no sense of property. There was communal land holding because, just like the Native Americans, they also believed that the land and river and forest belonged to everyone. Their society has of course broken under mainstream onslaught. Today in the village of Kuda only seven families hold 21 acres of land. Now those 21 acres are getting irrigated and the crop will be equally divided among the entire community. They understood ecology and environment in a way that we cannot imagine. Happily, the Native Americans are trying to resurrect that spirit and place it before the world. Like them the Sobors (the hunting tribes) will beg forgiveness if they are forced to fell a tree: You are our friend. I do this because my wife doesn't have any food, my son doesn't have any food, my daughter starves. Before they killed an animal, they used to pray to the animal: the bird, the fish, the deer (Devi 1995: x).

To beg forgiveness before cutting a tree is so far removed from a viewpoint of nature as object; it is the recognition of nature as a sacred, voiced subject. Devi says that the forests "are gone" and now "the tribals are in dire distress" (1995: x). Part of the problem, too, she explains, is that "tribal land is sold illegally every day" and there is no education, no way of generating income in the fast growing "mainstream machination" and globalization (Devi 1995: x). Here, she reminds American readers of the parallels to the treatment of Native Americans and the reservation land in the United States. Home, then, refers to displacement, environmental devastation of land due to unclean water, sickness, broken families, and, of course, economic scarcity. This is no secret for the initiative of a global movement for ecological justice. As Puran's epiphany about complacency unfolds at the end of "The Pterodactyl", readers might ask, how can the academic reader who is complicit in an exhibition of global devastation, remain a passive spectator any longer?

<33> Take, for instance, Vandana Shiva, who discusses the cosmology of the human and the non-human as a continuum in ecological devastation in a 2003 interview with YES! on "Earth Democracy." The ecological cosmology she speaks of in India is poverty and clean water, which is, of course, essential for the survival and health of human bodies and the body of the earth. The following passage illustrates the familial devastations due to the contamination of water:

The ecological crisis is a severe form of insecurity, especially in conditions of poverty when rivers are polluted and you have no clean drinking water, when groundwater is exhausted and you're forced to migrate. There couldn't be a deeper insecurity than this. Many conflicts within Third World countries are related to the practice of exploiting resources faster than nature can renew them or diverting them away from where people need them. Dams in every society have become major sources of conflict. As water scarcity grows, neighbors, families turn against each other (Van Gelder 2003:).

Devi writes of a similar situation in India and calls for a critique of our academic practice by connecting this exploitation and complicity within the urbanized intellectual's everyday life. The Pterodactyl illustrates a global need for a view of nature as sacred. Water, for example, now in many places contaminated and scarce, is a sacred and endangered life source. Puran reports that "the water of the wells for the tribals of Sangatoli, Madhola, and Pungarb is bitter, foul tasting" (Devi 1995: 179-180). He explains the problem further: "Pirtha, Gabahi, Dholki, all the villages are thirsty" (Devi 1995: 180).

<34> These examples of water shortage and contamination occur globally. In the recent book on global Water Forums, Douglass Nakashima and Moe Chiba write: "Efforts to recognize indigenous peoples' ownership of ancestral or territorial lands and collective water resources are a challenge to national legislations, which most often affirm the territorial right to the State" (2006: 12). Water is a human right and a human need, so then shouldn't that human right be protected by the State? However, Victoria Tauli Corpuz, chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, states:

When the water industry and its supporters run the World Water Forum, there is a clear disconnection with the assertion of the UN Human Rights bodies, indigenous peoples and civil society that water is a basic human right. Neither indigenous peoples, nor those who are suffering most from the water crisis are respresented in the Global Water Council or the Global Water Partnership, the two organizations responsible for the Second and Third World Water Forums (Corpuz: 2006: 24).

Defending the ancestral lands becomes difficult for indigenous peoples vis a vis the context of State, laws and economics. Thus, Corpuz says, the United Nations and the World Water Forum are highly valued because they provide "an opportunity for us to work more constructively with governments" (2006: 31). According to Corpuz,

The right to water, which includes access and control over water resources, is one of the most basic demands of indigenous peoples. Water is an integral part to our ancestral territories and resources and when we claim our right to ancestral territories; this includes our right to the water found there (2006: 29).

Corpuz speaks out on the global issue for indigenous peoples and how "water as a human right disappeared from the outcomes of the Water Forum. And the Ministerial Declaration, even if it was unofficial, agreed that water was a human need, not a human right" (2006: 30). The irony is how water, a human need, is now becoming available to "those who can afford to pay for it can enjoy it" (Corpuz 2006: 30). Therefore, Corpuz ends her compelling argument with a quote out of the Indigenous Peoples' Discussion Paper: Water, Human Settlements and Sanitation, which indicates that "governments should support the immediate adoption of the United Nations Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that will help ensure the recognition and protection of indigenous peoples' rights" (2006: 32). Among those rights are: "to own, control and manage traditional territories, lands and natural resources" and to "represent themselves through their own institutions" and also to "require free prior and informed consent to developments on their land" (Corpuz 2006: 32). It seems that these rights, among the other rights outlined, would solve some of the issues that are problematic in transnational contexts. The scarcity of a "sacred" or inviolate view of nature is then linked with the abuses of capital and economic claims over the body of nature. If this viewpoint of protection of rights of water and nature could be addressed more to the context of sacred land and ancient nations, nature's bodily rights could not be ignored. Devi illustrates in The Pterodactyl how this lack of understanding nature as sacred leaves people as spectators as the world moves into the twenty-first century (1995: xxiii-xxix).

<35> A book of poetry which encourages readers to listen more closely to unheard and unseen voices is Marlene Nourbese Philip's Looking for Dr. Livingstone: An Odyssey into Silence. Philip explores the unheard voices of the tribal peoples of Africa, in the context of the explorer Dr. David Livingstone's re-naming of the falls of Mosioatunya to "Victoria Falls" and his claimed 'discovery' of African land. Described by the Kololo tribe living in the area in the 1800's as 'Mosi-oa-Tunya' - 'the Smoke that Thunders', the falls were renamed by Dr. Livingstone, a Scottish explorer who lived from 1813-1873. Philip writes that Livingstone "was one of the first Europeans to cross the Kalahari" (1991: 7). Although Livingstone was shown the falls by the Zambezi, he claims to have "discovered" the falls. Now, even today, the area of " Victoria Falls" is also a tourist area called "Livingstone."

<36> To expose an epic into the status of indigenous peoples and lands of Africa, Philip goes on a quest to listen to the people, their stories and perceived silences. Philip writes about how the Cesliens, an embodiment of all ancestral peoples of Africa, taught her about the power of silence and nature's voices, and how wrong she had been about nature as an absence of voice: "Nothing in nature is silent, they taught me, naturally silent, that is. Everything has its own sound, speech, or language, even if it is only the language of silence..." (Philip 1991: 35). The language of silence is a language of sound, if one listens. Philip demonstrates how silence has its own voice and nature works as a language... "nothing in nature is silent" (1991: 35). Nature's language can inform this understanding of silence as subject. Philip subverts traditional western assumptions about silence (and what is socially silenced) as equated with absence, or even madness, irrationality, hysteria. The history of madness in civilization is deconstructed into a cacophony of chatter, bombs, empire, and volcanic eruption: "Murderous with the mad / in tongue / the Babel of chatter / into / erupt of Krakatu Vesuvius / into Hiroshima and History..." (1991: 46).

<37> The problem with imposing a Western / imperial name on the indigenous name of the falls is exposed in Philip's critique of Dr. Livingstone's "renaming" and thus claiming of African land in this process of naming. The act of 'renaming' or 'claimed' land and space produces a map, a barrier, a direct ethnocentric imposition and dismissal of the people who named the Mosioatunya Falls.

<38> Philip outlines her map, so different from Dr. Livingstone's map, as her map is 'scratched on animal skin', made up of "little pieces of bark...some bones and various pieces of wood with directions incised on them" (Philip 1991: 7). Her map has flexible boundaries, imaginary lines, which she deconstructs throughout her epic. She describes her own map as one of the Earth's materials:

My own map was a primitive one, scratched on animal skin. Along the way, some people had given me some of theirs -- no less primitive -- little pieces of bark with crude pictures of where they thought I would find what I was searching for. I also had some bones and various pieces of wood with directions incised on them. And a mirror. Where was I going! I had forgotten where I had come from - knew I had to go on (Philip 1991: 7).

The narrator's map is animal skin; she is not encumbered with tools. This is significant for the understanding of Philip's deconstruction of the word and the maps that Livingstone tries to carry with him to create barriers and English names around the natural world of Africa. In Johannes Fabian's book Out of Our Mind:Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa, Fabian discusses how "the travels of Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, Georg August Schweinfurth, David Livingstone, and Gustav Nachtigal had shown that the center of Africa was accessible from the north as well as from the south" (2001: 16). He adds that:

They also marked a shift in motivating exploration, with geographic curiosity overshadowed by political and economic imperial interests. Exploration of unmapped space turned from a universalist project into the pursuit of knowledge in the service of European nation-states (closely watched and often supported by the United States) (Fabian 2001: 16).

The investigation into land ownership and the re-mapping of that land was clearly a form of theft. For instance, Fabian discusses how "the professed aims of exploration, acts of violence are also indications of travelers being out of their minds" (2001: 145). Explorers are reported to have used irrational aims in scientific and political operations, such as 'kicking and slapping Africans' to participate in 'performative' theatrical violence, in the presence of spectators, to assert their authority (Fabian 145). These 19 th century practices were clearly a form of Victorian racist attitudes. As Béteille illustrates earlier, in his discussion of the xenophobic notion of civilization in the nineteenth century, this violent behavior is a clear example of Eurocentric, hegemonic, yet also uncivilized and "out of their minds" behavior.

<39> In the following passage, Philip illustrates the irony of the colonizers' or explorers' imposition, whose names map the lands (s)he navigates through, despite the fact that these places already had been named:

I will open a way to the interior or perish." Livingstone's own words - I took them now as my own - my motto. David Livingstone, Dr. David Livingstone, 1813-73 - Scottish, not English, and one of the first Europeans to cross the Kalahari - with the help of Bushmen; was shown the Zambezi by the indigenous African and "discovered" it; was shown the falls of Mosioatunya - the smoke that thunders - by the indigenous African, "discovered" it and renamed it. Victoria Falls.Then he set out to "discover" the source of the Nile and was himself "discovered" by Stanley - "Dr. Livingstone, I presume!" And History. Stanley and Livingstone - white fathers of the continent. Of silence. (1991: 7)

Two identities intersect with the multiplicity of silence as gendered in the 'naming' of the Mosioatunya waterfall. 'White fathers of the continent', suggests the colonial history presumed 'discovering' and 'renaming' of lands invaded. Livingstone's 'opening the way to the interior' is a sexual metaphor for the opening of the land for the penetration of colonization; to marry the land and claim it as the explorers' property.

<40> Though not a philosopher, Phillip also moves beyond the French feminists to a discussion of the gaps between sign and referent, between symbol and semiotic with regard to silence, race and colonial history in terms of "the geography of silence and the geography of the word" (1991: 32). The word as related to phallic power (phallogocentrism) and the privileging of the word is decentered into a power of language and writing. Philips subverts the notion of silence as a lack of word and therefore a lack of power. For instance, she introduces a decentering of the word as 'privileged' with her poetic innovations:

into Silence
that mocks the again in know
the word discovers
               Word
mirrored
      in Silence (1991: 39).

Here the word is 'mocked' in silence, the word is always haunted by silence, or discovering silence. The word, a reflection, is 'mirrored in silence', or the word is power in a western colonial paradigm. However ironically, silence is power in an understanding of beauty and love: one who listens to the heart and has wisdom within. Silence is inwardness.

<41> Philip demonstrates her inward quest into her body where she finds a connection to historical silence:

I had seen no one, spoken to no one during the last two thousand years, though I did have communication with things around me - I had learnt my lessons well from the CESLIENS - but I had been lonely, savagely lonely at times, and was happy to see a human face - to meet people (1991: 41).

What Philip is saying here is that she learned from these people, this ancestral spirit of the past. She listened to them and learned about their power. This agency is part of a secret of silence, in all of its power, which is different from being silenced. Philip explores how the industrial world can learn and has much to learn from the indigenous peoples of the fourth world. With a riotous multiplicity of voices and silences, intermingled with understanding and inner peace, Philip illustrates what it means to be empowered through the communication with those around her. She ends her epic with a sense of inner peace, after a communion with nature: "I surrender to the silence within..." (1991: 75).

 

Conclusion

<42> These contemporary poems and stories, from Mahasweta Devi's The Pterodactyl to the Marlene Nourbese Philip's Odyssey of Silence, illustrate stories of the gaps between speech and silence as a polysemic, double world of sound embodied in silence. These stories remind us, as readers, to listen to the voices of the gaps. Whether the voices are the sounds of nature's language or of people, their voices cannot go on as perceived objects of the silent, the unheard and unseen. Isn't endangering the earth, after all, endangering ourselves?

<43> It seems that the need to think about the status of Nature as Subject is past overdue. Derrida deconstructs the binaries of Culture/Nature, Speech/Writing as a kind of philosopher's elixir. This stone works through a multiplicity of voices today. With Derrida's recent death, his ghost calls for a continuation, a deconstruction of Culture/Nature. After all, the very idea of dominating or conquering nature seems, in a sense, murderous to all existence. Nature personifies a plurality of voices in ecological difference; a dissonance that the academia may not hear behind closed walls and institutional settings. We, as an entire human race, must learn to listen to nature and make up for our mistakes, before it is too late. Nature is, in itself, a sacred text, a language, yet to be understood and respected. And nature is in a state of revolution - through increase in recent ecological catastrophes; we cannot afford to ignore nature's language any longer. To not try to understand nature's language and subsequent revolution is in a sense, succumbing to our own death and extinction. The problem of translating these voices remains. It is not adequate to shoot toxins into the atmosphere in order to counterbalance disaster. Rather, the task of a good translator is not to impose one's own ideologies or identity upon the voice and meaning of the text.

<44> Remnants of colonial names, boundaries, imaginary lines, maps, scars, and neocolonial forces of global capital onto the bodies of land and peoples, all in the name of progress, must be examined, not repeated. We cannot turn time back. Black Elk questioned this concept of progress: "All things are our relatives; what we do to everything, we do to ourselves. All is really One." Black Elk calls for a bioregionalism that can improve relations between humans and nature, an idea of progress to circumvent mastery over the body, an idea of progress as ecological awareness. Nature language is warning us to not only listen, but to honor the earth.

 

Works Cited

Béteille, Andre. "The Idea of Indigenous People." Current Anthropology: A World Journal of the Sciences of Man 39 (1998): 187-191.

Béteille, André. Society and Politics in India: Essays in Comparative Perspective. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. Intercultural Resources. 10. Oct. 2006 <http://www.icrindia.org>

Corpuz , Victoria Tauli. "Indigenous Peoples and International Debates on Water: Reflections and Challenges." Knowledges of Nature 2: Water and Indigenous Peoples. Ed. R. Buelens, M. Chiba and D Nakashima. Unesco: Paris, 2006. 24-36.

Danius, Sara and Stefan Jonsson. "An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak." Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture 20:2 (Summer 1993): 24-50.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.

--. "Plato's Pharmacy." Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1981. 61-120.

Devi, Mahasweta. Imaginary Maps. Trans. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. London: Routledge, 1995.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 10 vols., edited by

Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1909-1914.

Fabian, Johannes. Out of Our Minds. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000.

"French Feminism in an International Frame." Feminist Literary Criticism. Ed. Mary Eagleton. Longman Critical Readers. London & New York: Longman, 1991. 83-109.

Gaard, Greta. "Living Interconnections with Animals and Nature." Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Ed. Greta Gaard. Philedelphia: Temple UP, 1993.

Irigaray, Luce. Speculum de l'autre Femme. Paris: Minuit, 1974.

-- . This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985.

Neihardt, John G. Black Elk Speaks. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1992.

Manes, Christopher. "Nature and Silence." The Ecocriticism Reader. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Georgia: U of Georgia P, 1996. 15-26.

Philip, Marlene Nourbese. Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence. Ed. Beverly Daurio. Toronto, Ontario: Mercury Press, 1991.

Plato. Phaedrus. Ed. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indiana: Hackett, 1995.

de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charler Bally et al. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966. 68-73.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Spivak Reader. Ed. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean. New York and London: Routledge. 1996.

Van Gelder, Sarah Ruth. "Earth Democracy - An Interview with Vandana Shiva." Yes! Winter 2003. 5 Feb 2003. http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=570.

 

Notes

[1] Strategic Essentialism is defined by Gayatri Spivak as "a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest"(The Spivak Reader 214). [^]

[2] Jouissance is translated here as "pleasure" or "enjoyment." The verb is jouir, meaning to enjoy and to play. [^]

[3] Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charler Bally et al. Translated by Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966. 68-73. [^]

[4] Ibid. [^]

[5] Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. 30-47. [^]

[6] "Fourth World" is a term coined by Manuel Castells to refer to oppressed groups living in the third world countries. [^]

 

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