Page 5 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

Lise Weil

Editorial

Welcome to issue #5 and Part II of our two-part series on “Making Kin,” inspired

by Donna Haraway’s call for an expanded vision of kin and kinship.i For this

issue, we again received a record number of extremely strong submissions and

as a result, Kristin, Melissa and I had to make a lot of hard choices. I think you’ll

agree that every single piece of writing and artwork here is stunning, original,

beautifully crafted. Some of it is devastating, but all of it is nourishing and
necessary. I hope you will take the time to give each one your careful attention.

This is the first issue of Dark Matter to appear since the November elections in

the US. I admit my mood about this journal, as with just about everything else in

my life, has in these months wavered between “Why bother?” and “Now more

than ever.” In the case of Dark Matter, I’m glad to say I’ve come down firmly on
the side of the latter. Between the unprecedented disconnectedness of the

president of the world’s most powerful nation and his recent withdrawal from the

Paris climate accord, the conditions this journal was founded to address have

only become more pronounced. As Miriam Greenspan writes in this issue, “The

ascendancy of Trump is a threat to the earth and all its sentient beings, a threat
that, if left unchecked, will speed our way to planetary disaster.” The matter, so it

seems, is now darker than it’s ever been, our relationship to the earth more

broken. But maybe not—maybe the darkness and the brokenness are just being

exposed in a way they never were before. Certainly this is so of the

disconnectedness. Bruno La Tour, in the May issue of Harper’s, argues that the

“complete indifference to facts” that’s been a hallmark of this presidency so far is
actually symptomatic of the direness of “the overall geopolitical situation....If

there is no planet, no earth, no soil, no territory for the globalization to which all

countries at COP21 [Paris Climate Conference] claim to be heading, what should

we do? Either we deny the existence of the problem or we seek to come down to

earth.” https://harpers.org/archive/2017/05/the-new-climate/

But it’s not just the disconnect and denial that are being exposed. It’s the fact that

patriarchy is alive and well. Not so long ago the word was more or less banished

among feminists for being too blanket, for erasing important cultural differences.

But it is hard not to feel now that around the globe we are being held hostage by

a bunch of guys with outsized egos they are feeding at the expense of all other
living beings on the earth. Watching the US president’s exclusively white male

entourage cheer him on as signature by signature he dismantles protections for

women, the non-wealthy, and the earth, I find myself flung back to my radical

feminist days of the ‘80s when I was fond of quoting Alice Walker’s character

Shug in The Color Purple: “You got to git man off your eyeball, before you can
see anything at all.” In playwright Karin Malpede’s “There’s a Wilding Inside: