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Archive for the ‘peace’ Category

U.S. election post mortem: “As a woman, I have no country”

Posted in 21st century Woolf, 27th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, peace, politics, quotes, Three Guineas, tagged , , , on Wednesday 6 November 2024| 1 Comment »

As a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world. – Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938)

I once wrote that famous Virginia Woolf quote on the wall of my office because it resonated with me. However, it has never resonated with me as strongly as it does today, the day after a U.S. presidential election that will allow a fascist to lead our country for the next four years.

Along with many others in the United States who value freedom, justice, truth, peace, kindness, and love — I find it devastating to face the reality of four years with a president who values none of those things.

But like Woolf — and like countless other women throughout this country and the world — I will not give up the fight. I will never surrender.

Instead, I will continue to fight for all the things I value. I will look to the words and actions of Woolf and others to guide my thinking and my life as we move forward to keep light alive in this dark, dark time. I will do my best to create a close community like the Bloomsbury group that I and my friends can count on for support.

If you have additional advice for me — and others — please do share it in the comments section below.

Virginia Woolf’s advice for defeating fascist thinking

Back in 2017, after Democrat Hilary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election to the most horrible of Republican candidates, I — like many people around the globe — was deeply concerned about the future of our country and our world. So I turned to Woolf for wisdom.

I wrote an essay that I delivered at the 27th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. It was titled “Thinking is Our Fighting: How to Read and Write Like Woolf in the Age of Trump, and it was published in Virginia Woolf and the World of Books (2018).

I never thought that essay would have a long shelf life. But as things have turned out, it still applies today — perhaps more than ever — as we grieve the defeat of yet another woman, Democrat Kamala Harris, who brought such brilliance and joy to the campaign trail.

Now, thanks to a Facebook reminder from Woolf friend, Emily MacQuarrie Hinnov, I will add a quote she shared from Woolf’s 1940 essay, “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” as we move towards a frightening four years with a man who admires dictators holding the highest office in our land.

Who is Hitler? What is he? Aggressiveness, tyranny, the insane love of power made manifest, they reply. Destroy that, and you will be free…Let us try to drag up into consciousness the subconscious Hitlerism that holds us down. It is the desire for aggression; the desire to dominate and enslave. Even in the darkness we can see that made visible. We can see shop windows blazing; and women gazing; painted women; dressed-up women; women with crimson lips and crimson fingernails. They are slaves who are trying to enslave. If we could free ourselves from slavery we should free men from tyranny. Hitlers are bred by slaves…We must create more honourable activities for those who try to conquer in themselves their fighting instinct, their subconsicous Hitlerism…Therefore if we are to compensate the young man for the loss of his glory and of his gun, we must give him access to the creative feelings. We must make happiness. We must free him from the machine. We must bring him out of his prison into the open air. But what is the use of freeing the young Englishman if the young German and the young Italian remain slaves?

 

Post-It notes written by visitors and added to a display at the “People Power Fighting for Peace” exhibit at the Imperial War Museum in London in July 2017.

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Virginia Woolf on war, peace, and #Ukraine on Women’s Day

Posted in essays, peace, Virginia Woolf, war, tagged , , , , on Tuesday 8 March 2022| 4 Comments »

With Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine 13 days old, I can’t get Virginia Woolf’s August 1940 essay “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” out of my mind.

In it, she writes:

Unless we can think peace into existence we — not this one body in this one bed but millions of bodies yet to be born — will lie in the same darkness and hear the same death rattle overhead (173).

As I write this, the Ukrainian people are lying in that same darkness. They are hearing that same death rattle.

One Kyiv woman’s story

This week, I read of a 74-year-old woman who emerged from the basement of her home after 10 days to find everything in sight destroyed and dead bodies lying in the street.

For most of that time, Katerina Oleksiivna had survived without heat, electricity, or water. She had existed on canned vegetables and stale bread while listening to explosions overhead and feeling their reverberations beneath the ground.

A bomb drops. All the windows rattle. The anti-aircraft guns are getting active. Up there on the hill under a net tagged with strips of green and brown stuff to imitate the hues of autumn leaves guns are concealed. Now they all fire at once.

Echoes of Woolf

That could have been Katerina Oleksiivna’s description of her ordeal. But it is not.

Instead, those are some of Woolf’s words written 82 years ago in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid.” They recall the fear she experienced during the Second World War as she heard German planes fly over the Sussex countryside. One plane flew so close that she and Leonard were forced to shelter under a tree in their garden at Monk’s House.

It was not Woolf’s first go-round at war. She had already lived through four years of the Great War, listening to bombing from across the English Channel and hiding under a basement kitchen table in Richmond during air raids (D1, 123-4). From 1939 until March 28, 1941, when she committed suicide by walking into the River Ouse, she lived through the trauma and deprivations of a second.

Is the war everywhere? – Katarina Oleksiivna, 74, of Kyiv, Ukraine

Repeating history

As the brave Ukrainian people defend themselves against the Russians, my heart aches. It aches at the memory of my maternal grandparents, who emigrated to the U.S. from Ukraine in 1923, bringing their Ukrainian culture with them and sharing it with me. It aches at the repetition of some of our modern world’s bleakest history. It aches at our failure to spend the last 82 years thinking — and acting — peace into existence, as Woolf wished. And it aches at the thought that we may never do so.

A display at the “People Power Fighting for Peace” exhibit at the Imperial War Museum in London in July 2017.

For as Woolf says, war perpetuates itself, rippling infinitely outwards in time and space, unless we stop it by turning our minds and our energy towards creating universal peace.

Thinking peace into existence

For Woolf, that means thinking peace into existence by thinking against the current, by thinking against the nationalism that dictators and autocrats like Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Putin promote through propaganda and force.

And in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” Woolf maintains that the primary requirement for fostering peace among all peoples of our world is the act of artistic creation. It is, she maintains, the antithesis to war’s destruction.

For her, “the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.” Artistic creation helps to make sense of the world, a world that in the midst of war makes little sense at all.

Woolf certainly did her part to think — and write — peace into existence. May each of us do ours as well. #StandWithUkraine

Post-It notes written by visitors became part of the peace symbol display pictured above at the “People Power Fighting for Peace” exhibit at the Imperial War Museum in London in July 2017.

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