But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.

A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.

We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.

Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins, "What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?" Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?

As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.

How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.