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Susan Griffin (1943 - )
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 A
Chorus of Stones : The Private Life of War by
Susan Griffin
"Perhaps every moment of time lived in
human consciousness remains in the air around us." With these
words Susan Griffin begins to draw the connections between
personal histories and the violent and often unspoken events of
this century. Believing that "each solitary story belongs to
a larger story," she tells us the sad and violent tale of her
childhood. Her calm and mesmerizing style builds to a crescendo as
she ties her memories to the life stories of more powerful
individuals - the architects of modern war who have shaped our
history. Susan Griffin presents some disturbingly provocative
accounts of war's atrocities, the stories of bomb makers and bomb
victims and the contents of once-classified government documents.
Not only does she bring us face-to-face with the horrific
underbelly of war and fascism, she makes us look fresh at our
journey from innocent child to ruthless warmonger or war enabler.
Adamant that society's gender biases continue to coerce men into
the shadow of war, she challenges us to understand that not a
shred of our violent past is ever forgotten, that in our conscious
lives we have entered into a collective silence which erodes our
ability to see truth and act responsibly. A Chorus of Stones
is a profound and accessible book which infuses insight into the
overwhelming moral dilemmas of our time. -- From
500
Great Books by Women; review by Rebecca Sullivan
 Woman
and Nature : The Roaring Inside Her by
Susan Griffin
In this famously provocative cornerstone of
feminist literature, Susan Griffin brilliantly ponders the place
and role of women in a predominantly patriarchal society. Her
evocative explorations of far-ranging elements of human experience
expose the hypocrisy of standard assumptions of gender and the
environment.
"Woman and Nature is about memory
and mutilation, female anger as power, female presence as
transforming force. . . . Griffin has collected here the most
apparently disparate materials [from lumbering manuals to poetry
to gynecology texts] into an extraordinary collage which, for all
the research and hard intellectual work underlying it, becomes an
intense physical experience." -- Adrienne
Rich
"My journey through the strange and familiar worlds of Woman
and Nature has been strengthening and enspiriting. It is a
book which I will read and re-read, assign to classes, give to
friends. It is a work of great and daring vision." -- Mary
Daly
"Woman and Nature is my favorite -- in my opinion the
best -- feminist book of the past twenty-five years. The prose is
stunning: this is a book to be read aloud with friends." --
Carol P. Christ, author of Rebirth of the Goddess - Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality,
Womanspirit Rising - A Feminist Reader in Religion
and Diving Deep and Surfacing - Women Writers on Spiritual Quest
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Transcript of taped interview by Karla Tonella,
KPFA-FM, Pacifica Radio, 1981
Excerpt:
SUSAN: Reads from her book: Pornography and
Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature. New York:
Harper & Row, 1981.
One is used to thinking of pornography as part of a
larger movement toward sexual liberation. In the idea of the
pornographic image we imagine a revolution against silence. We
imagine that Eros will be set free first in the mind and then in
the body by this revelation of a secret part of the human soul.
And the pornographer comes to us, thus, through history, portrayed
as not only a "libertine," a man who will brave
injunctions and do as he would, but also a champion of political
liberty. For within our idea of freedom of speech we would include
freedom of speech about the whole life of the body and even the
darkest parts of the mind.
And yet, though in history the movement to
restore Eros to our idea of human nature and the movement for
political liberation are parts of the same vision, we must now
make a distinction between the libertine's idea of liberty,
"to do as one likes," and a vision of human
"liberation." In the name of political freedom, we would
not argue for the censorship of pornography. For political freedom
itself belongs to human liberation, and is a necessary part of it.
But if we are to move toward human liberation, we must begin to
see that pornography and the small idea of "liberty" are
opposed to that liberation.
These pages will argue that pornography is an
expression not of human erotic feeling and desire, and not of a
love of life of the body, but of a fear of bodily knowledge, and a
desire to silence Eros. This is a notion foreign to a mind trained
in this culture. We have even been used to calling pornographic
art "erotic." Yet in order to see our lives more clearly
within this culture, we must question the meaning we give to
certain words and phrases, and to the images we accept as part of
the life of our minds. We must, for example, look again at the
idea of "human" liberation. For when we do, we will see
two histories of the meaning of this word, one which includes the
lives of women, and even embodies itself in a struggle for female
emancipation, and another, which opposes itself to women, and to
"the other" (men and women of other "races,"
"the Jew"), and imagines that liberation means the
mastery of these others...
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Excerpts from
"Sometimes It Is Named"
A History of empires and regencies, of warfare,
injustice, inequality, slavery, has shaped the modern vision.
Everything one sees, not only what one would leave behind, but
also what on treasures has been touched by this inheritance. The
whole is like a fresco, appealing in its own way, but also
disappointing, somehow blunted, and even hopeless in the way the
form turns back on itself in irony and despair, but through which
here and there one can see a slightly different coloration, places
where the paint is peeling, to reveal another, more interesting
layer. To see underneath one must pare away the more recent layer,
and perhaps a second or third layer, which obscure the reach of
vision.
As one searches history for the causes of
present crises the fear is of the forfeiture of continuity and
tradition. But this history is also filled with imprisoned wishes,
unrealized dreams, for democracy, a good life, a just society
which on can reclaim only by rereading the past. And in the end it
is only by the light of continued reflection that continuity and
tradition are kept alive...
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Excerpt from "A Collaborative
Intelligence"
The higher a man rises on the social and
political ladder the more he is shielded from evidence of human
embeddedness in the earth. Under slavery, the gentile plantation
owner not only protected himself from physical labor but even
passed on the overseeing of this work to other men. And the mark
of the highest class of man has traditionally been the possession
of a wife who does not work herself, even in the home. The
trivialization of the lives and pursuits of aristocratic women has
acted as a kind of foot binding which signifies the great distance
between nature and the aristocratic men who are their husbands.
Through wealth and power, such men acquire still a second buffer
against the truth of domestic existence, which is the truth of
survival. Their wives provide this second layer of protection my
managing a household but refraining from manual labor themselves.
In this way, an upper-class man can nearly avoid any intimacy with
the understanding which comes from such labor (Though the
extremity of this exclusion may explain that erotic longing felt
by upper-class men for a woman or a man of a "lower"
class, that is, a class closer to the ground of existence)...
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Excerpt:
By the light of our desire to meet and
communicate, language can be taken as proof of our commonalty and
of a commons in the mind. Nor is the life of the mind irrelevant
in this critical, tragedy-bearing time. By what and how we think,
we coerce, confine, distort, and damage or sustain, encourage,
create, coax ourselves and otherness into a fuller realization of
being.
And no one acts alone. No one thinks alone. I
was aided in my effort to meet my mother in her death by countless
other meetings, great marches protesting social injustice (which
were above all protests against indifference to suffering), the
community that surrounds me and cared for me in illness, countless
stories of help, succor, and care told by others, even those no
longer living, written and remembered. Even to write these words
today something unspoken between me and an intimate friend had to
be said. The threads of connection run everywhere and to
unexpected places...
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Names Index:
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G H
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K L
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