Dear Yehudit
So, this month, in addition to reading Dorothee Sölle (superb!)
I am also reading a lot of Nawal El-Saadawi
Egyptian novelist, physician
Thorn in the side of patriarchy
She reminds me of you
You both remind me
of the Quakers’ enumeration
of three states of being
worth cultivating:
boundless happiness
absolute fearlessness
and constant difficulty
Here’s Nawal…
“You cannot be creative in a system that is very unjust, like the system we live in, unless you are a dissident. Because when you are creative you are for justice, for freedom, for love. It’s by nature like that. You feel that you want to do something. You cannot accept injustice. You become angry, if this injustice is happening to you or to others. If you are walking in the street and you see children who are begging, beggars, who are starving, they are dying of hunger, what do you do? You become furious. You want to change the system that created this hunger. You discover it’s not national only, it’s international.”
Love,
Perry
–from novel-in-construction, Our Heroic and Ceaseless 24/7 Struggle against Tsuris
