segunda-feira, 1 de outubro de 2007

To think about, before starting a new war

I heard her voice calling "Mother, Mother." I went towards the sound. She was completely burned. The skin had come of her head altogether, leaving a twisted knot at the top. My daughter said, "Mother, you´re late, please take me back quickly." She said it was hurting a lot. But there were no doctors. There was nothing I could do. So I covered up her naked body and held her in my arms for nine hours. At about eleven o´clock that night she cried out again "Mother," and put her hand around my neck. It was already ice-cold. I said, "Please say Mother again." But that was the last time.

Hiroshima survivor, cited in Bel Mooney, "Beyond the Wasteland", in Over Our Dead Bodies: Women Against the Bomb, ed. Dorothy Thompson (London: Virago press, 1983)

My country is the whole world

"(...) Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or "our" country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or to protect myself or my country... As a woman I have no country, as a woman I want no country, my country is the whole world"

"Three Guineas", by Virginia Woolf