Susan Griffin
Susan Griffin
Susan Griffinis an eco-feminist author. She describes her work as "draw connections between the destruction of nature, the diminishment of women and racism, and trac the causes of war to denial in both private and public life." In addition to her many published writings, Griffin co-wrote and narrated the award-winning 1990 documentary, Berkeley in the Sixties. She received a MacArthur grant for Peace and International Cooperation, an NEA Fellowship, and an Emmy Award for the play Voices...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
... This is the paradox of vision: Sharp perception softens our existence in the world.
Borrow a child and get on welfare. Borrow a child and stay in the house all day with the child, or go to the public park with the child, and take the child to the welfare office and cry and say your man left you and be humble and wear your dress and your smile, and don't talk back ...
I know I am made from this earth, as my mother's hands were made from this earth, as her dreams came from this earth and all that I know, I know in this earth, the body of the bird, this pen, this paper, these hands, this tongue speaking, all that I know speaks to me through this earth.
Society, like nature, is one body, really.
we are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature to nature.
Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record.
I think artists can go to a level of vision that can often save us from a situation which seems to have no solution whatsoever.
Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.
Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope emerges for the future...Let us begin to imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in our hands.
The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.
This earth is my sister; I love her daily grace, her silent daring, and how loved I am. How we admire this strength in each other, all that we have lost, all that we have suffered, all that we know: We are stunned by this beauty, and I do not forget: what she is to me, what I am to her.
Just as the slave master required the slaves to imitate the image he had of them, so women, who live in a relatively powerless position, politically and economically, feel obliged by a kind of implicit force to live up to culture's image of what is female.
Philosophy means nothing unless it is connected to birth, death, and the continuance of life. Anytime you are going to build a society that works, you have to begin from nature and the body.
In my lifetime I have seen democracy begin to expand, not only to include those who have been excluded, but to provide a listening arena, a vocabulary, an intelligent reception for stories that have been buried. Not just stories of the disenfranchised and the marginalized, but marginalized and disenfranchised histories even in the lives of the accepted and the privileged.