Spiritual Activism: Joanna Macy & Donna Haraway in conversation with Kara Walker

I wrote this response to a Module in my Spiritual Activism & Transformative Social Change class at CIIS, PARW 6835 with Professor Sara Salazar. Our last meeting for fall 2024 is today. Each week students would give a guest lecture introducing assigned readings and key discussion ideas. The class then responds. 

Preamble:

Thank you Samantha, Grace, and Cindy for the wonderful discussion. I am going to speak about Joanna Macy and some recent connections that came up when I listened to her talk. She and I met in 2016 after a radio show interview. I'd planned to attend the university where she taught, but the institution, was well, an institution, too similar to one I had had to distance myself from. 

          I was so excited to listen to Joanna Macy's talk at Bioneers. It aligns with my recent research into artist Kara Walker's current work, "Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine): A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler. Featuring a Rite of Ancient Intelligence Carried out by the Gardeners toward the Continued Improvement of the Human Specious,"  at the SFMOMA. I prepared in advance so I could get the most from the experience. Yes, I know. Who does this, right? But perhaps others do as well. I don't know. This is my process. I listened to Walker on the SFMOMA website talk about her process and then looked for her catalog which is not out until January 2025. I finally got to SFMOMA yesterday, not last Monday. I met my friend who invited her friend and we had a great time.

          One robot is a prophetess who spits out fortunes. She was jammed, so no fortune for Wanda (sadness). "Obsidian, a volcanic glass with deep spiritual properties," is the ground beneath eight robotic dolls or Gardeners, the artist calls cyborgs (SFMOMA). One female cyborg lying on its back levitates, while a seated male figure lifts his arms in praise. A tall female (with bare breasts) who reminded me of Sojourner Truth, raises her arms as she twirls while another male figure with sweet eyes rings a bell. There is a female figure with a glowing hollow space in her abdomen too, and on the opposite end of the garden a child with a doll stands inquisitively. The child reminded me of Pecola in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.

          In a window facing Mission Street a male figure with arms severed moves up and down as if to pick his arms up which move on the ground. He has glittering eyes. There is a large enclosed glass case with items from the artist's studio that didn't make it to completion: heads and arms and assorted body parts. 

          Walker cites many authors who influenced the work like Octavia Butler's novel, Parable of the Sower, which is set in 2024. Part One ends around 2027. Afrofuturism is nothing more than the present catching up with a projected past.  Sankofa is a more accurate term for what Black storytelling does as it wraps itself in antiquity today. If we are our ancestors, then these cyborgs who visibly carry a traumatic past, represent our story too. A new suit or a cute pair of shoes does not erase or repair the past. 

          I think Joanna Macy addresses this rehearsal of the trauma to move through the trauma in her exploration of the "gifts of uncertainty." These cyborgs have what Macy calls, "the courage to feel what they feel." They are not distracted. They acknowledge their grief, feel the outrage and remember the "raw fear." It is cyclical, Macy says, "What we are doing to ourselves and our world." 

          Of course, Walker designed them so. She is their creator, but then she is not. They come through her because she is both, the garden and the gardener. There is no doubt these cyborgs realize the enormity of what they carried. It is ironic that one of the automatons rings a bell. Macy recites a poem she translated (from the German) of the Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, "Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower" from Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29. 

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.

Let this darkness be a bell tower

and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.

Move back and forth into the change.

What is it like, such intensity of pain?

If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,

be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,

the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,

say to the silent earth: I flow.

To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29

https://onbeing.org/poetry/let-this-darkness-be-a-bell-tower/

 

        Donna Haraway's essay "A Cyborg Manifesto" was quite instructive. The artist, Kara Walker, tangibly plays with gender, technology, and nature and their historical implications. Walker doesn't move far from the plantation thematically, whether this is her silhouettes or now cyborgs. Plantations were early factory systems where people were grown like plants. The plantation was not a free-range farming system.  People were chained to institutions that were profit-driven. African people were worked to death and then discarded. (Note what happened to Sojourner Truth's father when he grew too old to work, then blind and infirm. He froze to death (Truth 24).

          Just as Macy says, the trade-off was silence. The West is still silent. The global economy can trace its roots to the 400 years of capital investment in the bodies of African enslaved and to a lesser extent captives in a system called colonialism. 

          Macy's work in systems theories in this context "Walker's Fortuna," complicates our relationship to machines, not our relationship with each other, sentient and non-sentient. I love what Macy says about the Bodhisattva who avoid eternal life to be of service to those who suffer. 

          Haraway says in a lecture at Evergreen State College (2016), "It matters what stories tell stories." She says to stay with the trouble, just as Macy tells us to not turn away from the grief. Haraway says "One person cannot make a world. . . . We have to build kinship relationships. . . . The Anthropocene and other stories" can interrupt what Macy calls the corporate destructive model that dominates world cultures. 

 

        Fortuna is a grief cycle. We need to feel our feelings, yet not get stuck. Feeling pass. Feelings are emotional weather.  What is real are the corporate systems that mass produce systemic and institutional inequity which makes it hard for certain beings to live well. 

          Love when Macy says, "We are a verb--a being doing." We are beings doing. So we get on with it, even when it, is hard. Nikki Giovanna died Monday (6/7/43-12/9/24). She performed with Javon Jackson the day before. She was a free woman. 

Here is a link to an interview on Wanda's Picks Radio Show (October 26, 2016) with Dr. Macy and two others on the topic of "Liberation Dharma": https://www.blogtalkradio.com/wandas-picks/2016/10/26/wandas-picks-radio-show

Bibliography

Haraway, Donna. Evergreen State College. "2016 Anthropocene Consortium Series: Donna Haraway," May 25, 2016, video, 1:26:37, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWQ2JYFwJWU

Macy, Joanna. "The Hidden Promise of Our Dark Age: Discovering Our Wisdom, Strength and Beauty in the Midst of Crisis| Bioneers," August 22, 2018, video, 31:14,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzmjF1jE2K0

Truth, Sojourner.  Narrative of Sojourner Truth, A Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828. Edited by Olive Gilbert. Boston: J.B. Yerrinton and Son, Printers, 1850.