From LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Tue Feb 12 16:52:56 2002 Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 18:38:46 -0600 From: "L-Soft list server at UIC (1.8d)" To: Laura Q Subject: File: "FEMINISTSF-LIT LOG0111A" ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2001 11:32:51 -0700 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Mellen Subject: BDG - Nov Comments: To: feministsf-lit@uic.edu, feministsf@uic.edu Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Dear Discussion Groupers; This month of November wešre discussing; The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood. Discussion starts on the 5th. Do remember to order your books in plenty of time for the next selections. Illicit Passage can only, as far as I know, be obtained from the author, via Mysterious Galaxy. Thanks to Mary Elizabeth of Mysterious Galaxy for making that so easy & giving us a discount on most books. mgbooks@mystgalaxy.com, or orders@mystgalaxy.com Blessings - Mellen For the BDG Volunteers Upcoming Books- 3 Dec. War for the Oaks, by Emma Bull 7 Jan. A Women's Liberation: A Choice of Futures by and About Women, edited by Connie Willis and Sheila Williams 4 Feb. Illicit Passage, by Alice Nunn *************************************************************************** The BDG provides a forum for focusing discussion on a particular book during a one month period. The books discussed are nominated and chosen in advance by a vote of all members of the FSFFU-L list serve who choose to vote. Start thinking about your nominations now. To quote our list-mistress, "This does not prohibit discussion of the BDG books at other times; nor does it prohibit discussion of non-BDG books." If you have any other questions about the Book Discussion Group (BDG), it's selections, previous discussions or the Feminist Science Fiction, Fantasy and Utopias Literature List Serve (FSFFU-L), you can start with the BDG website at; http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Comet/1304, or the FSFFU-L website at; http://www.feministsf.org/femsf/listserv/index.html ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2001 17:29:42 +0100 Reply-To: divadiane9@compuserve.de Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Diane Severson Subject: Handmaid's Tale Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Hello Everyone, Since I nominated this book, it falls to me to open the discussion. I'm sure most of you had already read this book. I read it for the first time in early September. What are your thoughts about this book in light of what has occurred in the USA and in Afghanistan recently? How does it make you feel? Diane Currently Reading: The Fellowship of the Rings, JRR Tolkein; White Teeth, Zadie Smith. Recently Read: Harry Potter #1 4/5; The Red Tent, Anita Diamant 4+/5; All the Weyrs of Pern, Anne McCaffrey 3+/5; The Renegade's of Pern, Anne McCaffrey 3/5. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2001 10:39:21 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Dave Belden Subject: Atwood MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit On October 28 (i.e. a week ago) Margaret Atwood wrote an article in the color magazine of the New York Times about her visit to Afghanistan in 1978 with her husband and young daughter. She said that visit became the main inspiration for writing The Handmaid's Tale. That helped to make more sense of the book to me: it was prophetic more about Afghan society than North American society. Looked at like this, the book becomes a way that we can feel with Afghani women the horror of their situation. When I read the book at first publication I thought that it was well written, but its power was drained away by its implausibility. There was no convincing explanation in the novel (for me anyway) of how the fundamentalists had managed to take power. As a sociologist I see that the basic trends of the modern economy are going in the other direction, towards more power for women. It is intriguing to me how feminism was a cry in the wilderness (Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot) until the modern economy brought wages, education, professional careers to women. I learned my feminism in England in the 1970s from women who were socialists; but clearly it is capitalism, or at least the industrial economy, that brought women off the isolation of the farm and into modern cities, employment, education and this enabled them to organize, think together, turn the isolated feminist cry into a mass movement. Likewise, the best hope for women in poor countries today is to modernize their economies. (And one of the best ways to modernize the economy it's now agreed by most economists is to empower and educate women). The future of North America is all bound up with the 'knowledge economy' and women have an equal, if not better than equal, chance of getting good employment within it: women's strength is only going to grow as heavy industry follows farming into an almost insignificant proportion of the working population. It is amazing how fundamentalism has survived in the midst of all this: people basically believing in the equivalent of a flat earth while flying around it in airplanes. But it's just not the kind of threat Atwood envisaged. So I saw the novel as a bad dream that need not disrupt my waking hours, because it's so unlikely. But a well written and creepy bad dream. Terrific imagery. Dave Belden (of www.davidbelden.com) ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2001 11:26:57 EST Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Joy Martin Subject: Re: Handmaid's Tale Comments: To: divadiane9@compuserve.de Comments: cc: davebelden@earthlink.net, feministsf@listserv.uic.edu, feministsf-lit@uic.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit It's been a while since I've read the Handmaid's Tale. Very interesting that Atwood wrote it after a visit to Afghanistan. I'm not sure of the time frame, when the Taliban came to power visavis when Atwood visited. My understanding is that in preTaliban Afghanistan, women were significantly represented in the ranks of the educated middle class, in the cities at least. I'm currently reading a book by Jason Elliot, 'An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan", which gives some insight into the preTaliban, Soviet and post Soviet era. The Soviet invasion spurred the rise of fundamentalism in what was (and is) a very diverse culture. In terms of Islam, the following quotes are interesting (these are fairly long, so I beg your indulgence): Stopping in a mud-walled 'serai' for the evening with his guide Ali, Jason Elliot (the author) became, as always, the object of utmost curiosity. This exchange occurred (now the quote begins): "the old man wheezed a question...'Where in this world is your friend from?' 'Ha! You would never believe where he is from.' [Ali] enjoyed this little tease; he too got weary of the inevitable questioning and, I noticed, at each stop, a little more protective of me. I heard two men speak among themselves in the shadows. 'Is he a believer?' 'Not a chance,' said the other, 'he's a foreigner and a kafir.' 'By Allah, he is NOT!' Ali...shot back; overhearing them. And then, almost coyly, he said:'Everywhere we go people think he is a Moslem.' ...[paragraph] ...I was touched by his defence, which expressed a wonderful ambiguity. It did not matter that I might not be a Moslem: it was enough that people thought I was. In a country where a man's integrity is judged by his adherence to the multiplicitous regulations of religion, the distinction between believer and unbeliever is bound to be fierce. Yet in Afghanistan, where of all Islamic nations you might least expect to find such a softening at the edges, the natural sense of moderation of the people has always kept extremes of religious behaviour in check. Only under the cataclysmic influence of the Soviets were religious leaders able to gain exceptional power...The vast majority of Afghans are deeply observant ...but are no purists... What you hear, when a person's behaviour can't be measured by the traditional criteria, is whether a thing is 'close to Islam' or 'far from Islam'...Afghans, who have never enjoyed being told too much how to behave, make frequent use of the expression." The second quote is this: "Ali...would often ask me if I was tired. I said...that I was only sometimes tired, 'like in life', I said, and recited my old couplet from Hafez:'Though the way is full of perils, and the goal far out of sight...' 'Hah! Bravo!' he chuckled. 'Do people read Hafez in England?' 'A few. And they have heard of Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi, too.' 'Master Rumi? In England? Well I never...You must make a translation, so that everyone in England can read him,' he said, and began to spout couplets, which I endeavoured to match but quickly exhausted my supply. I told him that when I was younger I had visited Turkey and paid my respects at the tomb of the saint himself. 'By Allah!' he beamed, 'There's no difference between your religion and mine after all!" (Sufism is widespread in Afghanistan, and famous Sufis include women. One I've just learned of in Elliot's book is Rabi'a of Balkh, a 9th century woman and Afghanistan's earliest Sufi poet. Her tomb is one of many Sufi shrines in Balkh, near Mazar-e-Sharif, if I've gotten the geography straight. I'm thinking of trying to find some of her poetry. ) The picture I have gained so far of Afghanistan is a very diverse culture, with incredible history as the crossroads of Asia, which has suffered huge setbacks directly related to the Soviet invasion there, American fostering of the Taliban as an antiSoviet force, and now American reaction to the results of that. My memories of the Handmaid's Tale right now,however, are of its consonance with my deepest fears about the present war, which are not fears of foreign terrorism but of fears of a decided right wing drift in our own country. Conspiracy theorists on the internet paint an equally unsettling picture of the current war as part of what could be described as a coup d'etat, using a terrorist attack as a pretext. Certainly we've seen enough attempts to wrap rightwing agenda items in the flag to give that theory some resonance. I myself am not a fan of conspiracy theories, because ultimately they come full circle, it seems to me, and explain nothing. But in terms of the book, and fears, those are the connections that current events inspire. I think we're doing a pretty good job at scaring ourselves right now, so when I say this, I am not advocating these theories, just commenting on the emotional connections to Atwood's work and current events. However, I do not think one can be overly complacent about the robustness of women's rights under capitalism. The rise of fascism in Germany, one of the most cosmopolitan of European states in the prefascist period, belies that idea. Capitalism is the current force pushing the history of the world in all its aspects. Some of the results are much less benign than others. In fact, I think the current elevation of capitalism as the end all and be all theory of everything amounts to a secular religion. History did not stop with the fall of the Berlin wall, capitalism still depends on expanding markets in its current forms, and expanding markets adhered to as a blind principle is bound to bring conflicts with unforeseen outcomes. That unfortunately isn't conspiracy theory, and what I see almost everywhere in the socalled intelligentsia of the first world, is a hidebound refusal to see that capitalism is a historical phenomenon which is no more permanent than any other economic/ideological system in history. The question is, what's next? -Joy Martin ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2001 12:01:50 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Gwen Veazey Subject: Atwood MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0041_01C166BA.D11132C0" This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_0041_01C166BA.D11132C0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable How interesting that Margaret Atwood visited Afghanistan in 1978 and = this influenced her vision for _HT_. Thanks for your comments, Dave = and Diane.=20 I have a little different feeling about the book than you, Dave. While = the rigid rules of dress and behavior seemed exaggerated, the idea of = fundamentalists running things did not appear so far-fetched in the = mid-80's (around 1987) when I read the novel. For those of us feminists = in the U.S. who lived through the terrible day of Ronald Reagan's = re-election in 1984, and witnessed right-wing idealogues like Jerry = Falwell interviewed on TV as the grand poo-bahs of the powerful "Moral = Majority," it was a rough time. And conservatives again took the White = House in 1988. Also, don't forget the Equal Rights Amendment, a simple = statement making sure women were included in the protections of the = Constitution ("Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or = abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex") was = defeated in the early 80's because not enough states ratified it. Quite = a victory for the fundamentalists. I also had a five-year-old daughter then! My lasting impression of this novel is that it was the first time I = truly noticed the difference between adequate/mainstream writing and = literary writing which absolutely sparkled. Atwood is one of the most = talented writers around, I believe, and I have enjoyed all her novels. = (Have not delved into the poetry.) Best, Gwen ------=_NextPart_000_0041_01C166BA.D11132C0 Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
How interesting that Margaret Atwood visited Afghanistan in 1978 = and this=20 influenced her vision for _HT_.   Thanks for your comments, = Dave and=20 Diane. 
 
I have a little different feeling about the book than you, = Dave. =20 While the rigid rules of dress and behavior seemed exaggerated, the idea = of=20 fundamentalists running things did not appear so far-fetched in the = mid-80's=20 (around 1987) when I read the novel.  For those of us feminists in = the U.S.=20 who lived through the terrible day of Ronald Reagan's re-election in = 1984, and=20 witnessed right-wing idealogues like Jerry Falwell interviewed = on TV=20 as the grand poo-bahs of the powerful "Moral Majority," it was a rough=20 time.  And conservatives again took the White House in=20 1988.  Also, don't forget the Equal Rights Amendment, a simple = statement making sure women were included in the protections of the = Constitution=20 ("Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by = the United=20 States or by any state on account of sex") was defeated in the early = 80's=20 because not enough states ratified it.  Quite a victory for the=20 fundamentalists.
 
I also had a five-year-old daughter then!
 
My lasting impression of this novel is that it was the first = time I=20 truly noticed the difference between adequate/mainstream  writing = and=20 literary writing which absolutely sparkled.  Atwood is one of the = most=20 talented writers around, I believe, and I have enjoyed all her = novels. =20 (Have not delved into the poetry.)
 
Best,
Gwen
------=_NextPart_000_0041_01C166BA.D11132C0-- ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2001 19:46:09 -0000 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Lesley Hall Subject: Re: Atwood Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit >On October 28 (i.e. a week ago) Margaret Atwood wrote an article in the >color magazine of the New York Times about her visit to Afghanistan in 1978 >with her husband and young daughter. She said that visit became the main >inspiration for writing The Handmaid's Tale. I find this a really odd statement. Where did she go in Afghanistan? I was there in late 78 and in spite of the tense political/military situation, curfews, etc, found it less oppressive for women (at least in Kabul and Herat) than Pakistan at the same date. Certainly many women in Kabul were working at that date and did not wear the full burqua but only, maybe, a light headscarf. However, Pakistan in this account would work for me (memory of not being able to get on a bus because all the purdah seats were already taken, etc) Lesley Hall lesleyah@primex.co.uk website http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2001 12:19:05 -0800 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Freddie Baer Subject: Re: Atwood Comments: To: feministsf-lit@UIC.EDU Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit >>I find this a really odd statement. Where did she go in Afghanistan? I was there in late 78 and in spite of the tense political/military situation, curfews, etc, found it less oppressive for women (at least in Kabul and Herat) than Pakistan at the same date. Certainly many women in Kabul were working at that date and did not wear the full burqua but only, maybe, a light headscarf. However, Pakistan in this account would work for me (memory of not being able to get on a bus because all the purdah seats were already taken, etc)<< Here's that article in full: ttp://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/28/magazine/28LIVES.html?pagewanted=print October 28, 2001 A Novelist Remembers When Afghanistan Was at Peace By MARGARET ATWOOD In February 1978, almost 23 years ago, I visited Afghanistan with my spouse, Graeme Gibson, and our 18-month-old daughter. We went there almost by chance: we were on our way to the Adelaide literary festival in Australia. Pausing at intervals, we felt, would surely be easier on a child's time clock. (Wrong, as it turned out.) We thought Afghanistan would make a fascinating two-week stopover. Its military history impressed us -- neither Alexander the Great nor the British in the 19th century had stayed in the country long because of the ferocity of its warriors. ''Don't go to Afghanistan,'' my father said when told of our plans. ''There's going to be a war there.'' He was fond of reading history books. ''As Alexander the Great said, Afghanistan is easy to march into but hard to march out of.'' But we hadn't heard any other rumors of war, so off we went. We were among the last to see Afghanistan in its days of relative peace -- relative, because even then there were tribal disputes and superpowers in play. The three biggest buildings in Kabul were the Chinese Embassy, the Soviet Embassy and the American Embassy, and the head of the country was reportedly playing the three against one another. The houses of Kabul were carved wood, and the streets were like a living ''Book of Hours'': people in flowing robes, camels, donkeys, carts with huge wooden wheels being pushed and pulled by men at either end. There were few motorized vehicles. Among them were buses covered with ornate Arabic script, with eyes painted on the front so the buses could see where they were going. We managed to hire a car in order to see the terrain of the famous and disastrous British retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad. The scenery was breathtaking: jagged mountains and the ''Arabian Nights'' dwellings in the valleys -- part houses, part fortresses -- reflected in the enchanted blue-green of the rivers. Our driver took the switchback road at breakneck speed since we had to be back before sundown because of bandits. The men we encountered were friendly and fond of children: our curly-headed, fair-haired child got a lot of attention. The winter coat I wore had a large hood so that I was sufficiently covered and did not attract undue notice. Many wanted to talk; some knew English, while others spoke through our driver. But they all addressed Graeme exclusively. To have spoken to me would have been impolite. And yet when our interpreter negotiated our entry into an all-male teahouse, I received nothing worse than uneasy glances. The law of hospitality toward visitors ranked higher than the no-women-in-the-teahouse custom. In the hotel, those who served meals and cleaned rooms were men, tall men with scars either from dueling or from the national sport, played on horseback, in which gaining possession of a headless calf is the aim. Girls and women we glimpsed on the street wore the chador, the long, pleated garment with a crocheted grill for the eyes that is more comprehensive than any other Muslim coverup. At that time, you often saw chic boots and shoes peeking out from the hem. The chador wasn't obligatory back then; Hindu women didn't wear it. It was a cultural custom, and since I had grown up hearing that you weren't decently dressed without a girdle and white gloves, I thought I could understand such a thing. I also knew that clothing is a symbol, that all symbols are ambiguous and that this one might signify a fear of women or a desire to protect them from the gaze of strangers. But it could also mean more negative things, just as the color red can mean love, blood, life, royalty, good luck -- or sin. I bought a chador in the market. A jovial crowd of men gathered around, amused by the spectacle of a Western woman picking out such a non-Western item. They offered advice about color and quality. Purple was better than light green or the blue, they said. (I bought the purple.) Every writer wants the Cloak of Invisibility -- the power to see without being seen -- or so I was thinking as I donned the chador. But once I had put it on, I had an odd sense of having been turned into negative space, a blank in the visual field, a sort of antimatter -- both there and not there. Such a space has power of a sort, but it is a passive power, the power of taboo. Several weeks after we left Afghanistan, the war broke out. My father was right, after all. Over the next years, we often remembered the people we met and their courtesy and curiosity. How many of them are now dead, through no fault of their own? Six years after our trip, I wrote ''The Handmaid's Tale,'' a speculative fiction about an American theocracy. The women in that book wear outfits derived in part from nuns' costumes, partly from girls' schools' hemlines and partly -- I must admit -- from the faceless woman on the Old Dutch Cleanser box, but also partly from the chador I acquired in Afghanistan and its conflicting associations. As one character says, there is freedom to and freedom from. But how much of the first should you have to give up in order to assure the second? All cultures have had to grapple with that, and our own -- as we are now seeing -- is no exception. Would I have written the book if I never visited Afghanistan? Possibly. Would it have been the same? Unlikely. Margaret Atwood is the author, most recently, of ''The Blind Assassin.'' ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2001 15:42:30 -0500 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Dave Belden Subject: Re: Atwood Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Thanks for reproducing the article. Maybe my description of it as her "main inspiration for writing The Handmaid's Tale" was an exaggeration, but it was clearly part of it, and I think it's interesting that the fears in the novel have been realized (to a degree) not in our society but in that one, a very poor country. It does also seems as if her memory and Lesley Hall's are somewhat different, about Afghanistan at that time, which is curious. Dave -----Original Message----- From: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC [mailto:feministsf-lit@UIC.EDU]On Behalf Of Freddie Baer Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2001 3:19 PM To: feministsf-lit@UIC.EDU Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Atwood >>I find this a really odd statement. Where did she go in Afghanistan? I was there in late 78 and in spite of the tense political/military situation, curfews, etc, found it less oppressive for women (at least in Kabul and Herat) than Pakistan at the same date. Certainly many women in Kabul were working at that date and did not wear the full burqua but only, maybe, a light headscarf. However, Pakistan in this account would work for me (memory of not being able to get on a bus because all the purdah seats were already taken, etc)<< Here's that article in full: ttp://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/28/magazine/28LIVES.html?pagewanted=print October 28, 2001 A Novelist Remembers When Afghanistan Was at Peace By MARGARET ATWOOD In February 1978, almost 23 years ago, I visited Afghanistan with my spouse, Graeme Gibson, and our 18-month-old daughter. We went there almost by chance: we were on our way to the Adelaide literary festival in Australia. Pausing at intervals, we felt, would surely be easier on a child's time clock. (Wrong, as it turned out.) We thought Afghanistan would make a fascinating two-week stopover. Its military history impressed us -- neither Alexander the Great nor the British in the 19th century had stayed in the country long because of the ferocity of its warriors. ''Don't go to Afghanistan,'' my father said when told of our plans. ''There's going to be a war there.'' He was fond of reading history books. ''As Alexander the Great said, Afghanistan is easy to march into but hard to march out of.'' But we hadn't heard any other rumors of war, so off we went. We were among the last to see Afghanistan in its days of relative peace -- relative, because even then there were tribal disputes and superpowers in play. The three biggest buildings in Kabul were the Chinese Embassy, the Soviet Embassy and the American Embassy, and the head of the country was reportedly playing the three against one another. The houses of Kabul were carved wood, and the streets were like a living ''Book of Hours'': people in flowing robes, camels, donkeys, carts with huge wooden wheels being pushed and pulled by men at either end. There were few motorized vehicles. Among them were buses covered with ornate Arabic script, with eyes painted on the front so the buses could see where they were going. We managed to hire a car in order to see the terrain of the famous and disastrous British retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad. The scenery was breathtaking: jagged mountains and the ''Arabian Nights'' dwellings in the valleys -- part houses, part fortresses -- reflected in the enchanted blue-green of the rivers. Our driver took the switchback road at breakneck speed since we had to be back before sundown because of bandits. The men we encountered were friendly and fond of children: our curly-headed, fair-haired child got a lot of attention. The winter coat I wore had a large hood so that I was sufficiently covered and did not attract undue notice. Many wanted to talk; some knew English, while others spoke through our driver. But they all addressed Graeme exclusively. To have spoken to me would have been impolite. And yet when our interpreter negotiated our entry into an all-male teahouse, I received nothing worse than uneasy glances. The law of hospitality toward visitors ranked higher than the no-women-in-the-teahouse custom. In the hotel, those who served meals and cleaned rooms were men, tall men with scars either from dueling or from the national sport, played on horseback, in which gaining possession of a headless calf is the aim. Girls and women we glimpsed on the street wore the chador, the long, pleated garment with a crocheted grill for the eyes that is more comprehensive than any other Muslim coverup. At that time, you often saw chic boots and shoes peeking out from the hem. The chador wasn't obligatory back then; Hindu women didn't wear it. It was a cultural custom, and since I had grown up hearing that you weren't decently dressed without a girdle and white gloves, I thought I could understand such a thing. I also knew that clothing is a symbol, that all symbols are ambiguous and that this one might signify a fear of women or a desire to protect them from the gaze of strangers. But it could also mean more negative things, just as the color red can mean love, blood, life, royalty, good luck -- or sin. I bought a chador in the market. A jovial crowd of men gathered around, amused by the spectacle of a Western woman picking out such a non-Western item. They offered advice about color and quality. Purple was better than light green or the blue, they said. (I bought the purple.) Every writer wants the Cloak of Invisibility -- the power to see without being seen -- or so I was thinking as I donned the chador. But once I had put it on, I had an odd sense of having been turned into negative space, a blank in the visual field, a sort of antimatter -- both there and not there. Such a space has power of a sort, but it is a passive power, the power of taboo. Several weeks after we left Afghanistan, the war broke out. My father was right, after all. Over the next years, we often remembered the people we met and their courtesy and curiosity. How many of them are now dead, through no fault of their own? Six years after our trip, I wrote ''The Handmaid's Tale,'' a speculative fiction about an American theocracy. The women in that book wear outfits derived in part from nuns' costumes, partly from girls' schools' hemlines and partly -- I must admit -- from the faceless woman on the Old Dutch Cleanser box, but also partly from the chador I acquired in Afghanistan and its conflicting associations. As one character says, there is freedom to and freedom from. But how much of the first should you have to give up in order to assure the second? All cultures have had to grapple with that, and our own -- as we are now seeing -- is no exception. Would I have written the book if I never visited Afghanistan? Possibly. Would it have been the same? Unlikely. Margaret Atwood is the author, most recently, of ''The Blind Assassin.'' ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2001 20:47:59 -0000 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Lesley Hall Subject: Re: Atwood Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Thanks for posting this - Atwood also seems to have managed to miss seeing the famous painted lorries (I wonder what happened to those - as many of the motifs were figurative I imagine they have been painted out) - and the bicycles. I recall a good deal more motor traffic than she suggests - though still little even by the standards of urban Pakistan . It was _not_ just the Hindu women who did not wear the chador, at least in Kabul - in fact I was told that it was only women from families which had fairly recently moved to the city who did. As I recollect - over 20 years later - I got this information from the Afghan woman who was secretary at the British Institute. I was in Afghanistan for about 4-5 weeks in the autumn of 1978, mostly in Kabul, but also saw something of Herat and Kandahar, also made a trip to Bamyian (and climbed up one of the now destroyed standing Buddhas through the caves behind). But I can see that the _idea_ of the chador could have been imaginatively powerful for Atwood in writing _The Handmaid's Tale_. Lesley Hall lesleyah@primex.co.uk website http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2001 13:02:40 -0800 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Jo Ann Rangel Subject: Re: Atwood Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit There was a reference on an overnight radio show about three weeks ago, maybe four, when there was a discussion about oppression of women in Afghanistan. I did not catch the name of the guest but he was a self-called "adventurer" who had the chance to meet with Bin Laden's associates at a time when the war with the Russians was over and the country had just started being taken over by the Taliban. He stated that Kabul remained for a long time the town where the media/press wanted to see what "normal" Afghans looked liked and interacted on a day to day basis, so they were taken to Kabul and shown their version of what was representative of the entire country, thus this is the context most westerners saw in the 1980s. According to this person, what you saw in Kabul was way way different than what you saw say in the northern region. The interpretation was you are not oppressed when you follow God's laws. This is why when CNN showed that documentary Beneath the Veil I think it was on their Perspectives show, we were shocked at watching executions being carried out on the football field recorded by hidden cameras by RAWA; and what was even more chilling was the interview between the narrator and the Minister of Information who said if the UN would help them build a place to carry out the executions, they would bring football back to the stadium for all to enjoy again. In the context of how chilling and unnerving to know that such behavior is being done to its own citizens currently(the documentary was made in 2000), I think when a younger person (20-ish these days) reads Handmaid's Tale, they can more than likely compare it to what Afghanistan has become, rather than what it used to be. Jo Ann > Thanks for reproducing the article. Maybe my description of it as her "main > inspiration for writing The Handmaid's Tale" was an exaggeration, but it was > clearly part of it, and I think it's interesting that the fears in the novel > have been realized (to a degree) not in our society but in that one, a very > poor country. It does also seems as if her memory and Lesley Hall's are > somewhat different, about Afghanistan at that time, which is curious. > Dave > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2001 22:12:13 EST Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Marilyn Gibson Subject: Re: Atwood Comments: To: feministsf-lit@uic.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Your story of (most probably female) executions in a football field in Afghanistan is indeed chilling. I read The Handmaid's Tale years ago and felt it to be a great work of feminist fiction, disturbingly close to home now that the right-wing is in power. At the root of all subjugation of women is fear of their power. (This subject is much more exhaustively discussed in The War on Women by Marilyn French, available at Amazon.com). In my opinion, the situation in Afghanistan is parallel to the one depicted in that book and if we were forced to live under these conditions, America would be a police state. But I disagree that women's employment is responsible for the gains we have made. Before men seized power and defined women through their relationship as wives and mothers, matriarchal knowledge was deeply respected. Women's power, now celebrated in a resurgence of magical practice and earth religions, is enjoying a period of growth unrelated to financial or intellectual knowledge. Marilyn Gibson www.hangingbyastring.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 11:08:55 -0000 Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Lesley Hall Subject: Re: Atwood/Afghanistan Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit One other thing I forgot to mention about things I was told about the chador while I was in Afghanistan in 78 (this one I think by an anthropologist working there) - that in most rural communities/villages the women didn't have to wear it in the normal course of events because everyone in the community was of a sufficiently close degree of kinship that they didn't need to - there were no 'strangers' to conceal themselves from. This changed if the family moved to a larger conurbation. This probably doesn't apply in contemporary Afghanistan - apart from anything else presumably the years of upheaval have broken up communities and caused a lot of migration. Lesley Hall lesleyah@primex.co.uk website http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 13:27:07 +0100 Reply-To: divadiane9@compuserve.de Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Diane Severson Subject: Handmaid's Tale (Atwood) Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC >From Dave: > When I read the book at first publication I thought that it was well > written, but its power was drained away by its implausibility. There > was no convincing explanation in the novel (for me anyway) of how the > fundamentalists had managed to take power. Maybe I'm not much of a stickler for realism. Her explanation of how the fundamentalists came into power seemed plausible enough to me. And after the recent events (although they are not really similar), even more so. I don't think it would be terribly hard to disable a government and effect a coup. Especially if the coup came from within. But the way Atwood presents the situation and bit by bit reveals how it came to pass is what I find so brilliant about the book. I couldn't believe that anything like that could really take place in the US but I read on, it took on more and more horrifying plausibility. >From Joy: > My memories of the Handmaid's Tale right now,however, are of its > consonance with my deepest fears about the present war, which are not > fears of foreign terrorism but of fears of a decided right wing drift > in our own country. Yes, my sentiments exactly! I don't really believe that it will happen, I hope that we are too far along for that, but if we don't pay attention and become complacent, I think it *could* happen. Isn't it interesting that a book that was written 20 years ago can have such relevance today? Speaks for the truth of what she wrote about. Diane Currently Reading: The Fellowship of the Rings, JRR Tolkein; White Teeth, Zadie Smith. Recently Read: Harry Potter #1 4/5; The Red Tent, Anita Diamant 4+/5; All the Weyrs of Pern, Anne McCaffrey 3+/5; The Renegade's of Pern, Anne McCaffrey 3/5. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 09:01:37 -0600 Reply-To: daohuis@wmis.net Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Deborah Oosterhouse Organization: Editorial Services Subject: Re: Atwood Comments: To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I have been reading *The Handmaid's Tale* for the second time, and shortly after Diane sent out her original message inviting us to begin the discussion, I read chapter 28, in which She (I don't like to call her by her "handmaid" name and she never gives her real one) talks about how the fundamentalists came into power. The whole way in which it happened struck me far more than it did the first time that I read it, because of the recent events. On p. 225 of my paperback edition, She says that "they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time." I think that's one of the things that I find most troubling about the way our world is shaping up at this time, that it really would be easy enough for someone within our own country to carry out something like this and blame it on someone from the outside and no one (or very few anyway) would question it. Already there are polls asking questions about national ID cards and setting up interment camps, and quite a few of those polled already think such things are a good idea -- as if those are really effective means of keeping us "secure" (whatever that means). I do like to think that we're not yet at the point where there would be no outcry if the Constitution were suspended, and we haven't yet gotten rid of paper money so anyone who would be in a position to make these events reality wouldn't have that advantage. I would also like to express my agreement with Marilyn and Nuria on the subject of capitalism and women's power. Yes, I think that women have been able to take advantage of being able to work and make their own money and not HAVE to find a man to support them, etc. But I don't feel that it has anything to do with women being valuable as people, but only as consumers. I also agree with Gwen's statements about Atwood writing abilities -- absolute beautiful!! Yes, you can definitely tell that Atwood is a poet. Even her prose has a strong sense of rhythm, of movement that is just stunning. Deborah ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 13:01:05 EST Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Joy Martin Subject: Re: Atwood Comments: To: feministsf-lit@uic.edu Comments: cc: fbaer@wested.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 11/6/01 2:09:50 PM Central Standard Time, fbaer@WESTED.ORG writes: << ttp://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/28/magazine/28LIVES.html?pagewanted=print October 28, 2001 A Novelist Remembers When Afghanistan Was at Peace >> Thanks for sending the complete article. It puts things in quite a different light from the original reference.-Joy Martin ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 13:01:01 EST Reply-To: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC Sender: Feminist SF/Fantasy and Utopia Literature ON TOPIC From: Joy Martin Subject: Re: Atwood/Afghanistan Comments: To: feministsf-lit@uic.edu Comments: cc: lesleyah@primex.co.uk MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 11/7/01 5:25:24 AM Central Standard Time, lesleyah@PRIMEX.CO.UK writes: << One other thing I forgot to mention about things I was told about the chador while I was in Afghanistan in 78 (this one I think by an anthropologist working there) - that in most rural communities/villages the women didn't have to wear it in the normal course of events because everyone in the community was of a sufficiently close degree of kinship that they didn't need to - there were no 'strangers' to conceal themselves from. This changed if the family moved to a larger conurbation. This probably doesn't apply in contemporary Afghanistan - apart from anything else presumably the years of upheaval have broken up communities and caused a lot of migration. Lesley Hall >> Actually, I read recently in a newsarticle that when militants from Pakistan started to pour into Afghanistan recently, and also some were blocking off the silk road route, that women in nearby communities complained because the presence of strangers was making them uncomfortable. Whether that meant they were or were not wearing the chador (or burqa,which is more encompassing than the chador, especially around the face) ordinarily, I can't say. In Elliot's book he mentions seeing women walking in burqas in remote villages, but they were on the roads, which are traveled by outsiders, so that could be distinct from other places more off the beaten path.-Joy Martin