Kartik

“It’s being made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas. We’re being asked to believe that the US marines are actually on a feminist mission. (If so, will their next stop be America’s military ally Saudi Arabia?) Think of it this way: in India there are some pretty reprehensible social practices, against ‘Untouchables’, against Christians and Muslims, against women. Pakistan and Bangladesh have even worse ways of dealing with minority communities and women. Should they be bombed? Should Delhi, Islamabad, and Dhaka be destroyed? Is it possible to bomb bigotry out of India? Can we bomb our way to a feminist paradise? Is that how women won the vote in the United States? Or how slavery was abolished? Can we win redress for the genocide of the millions of Native Americans, upon whose corpses the United States was founded, by bombing Santa Fe?”
― Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart: Collected Non-Fiction

“Bianchi’s landmark paper on microchimerism describes pregnancy as enacting a ‘long-term, low-grade chimeric state in the human female’. From the moment I was pregnant, I didn’t just feel different. I was different. I am different. On a cellular level. I would never be singular again.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

“Perhaps the cultural obsession with ‘natural’ birth reflects the extent of our detachment from our bodies and from the Earth. We are so disconnected from the rest of the natural world that we don’t know what ‘nature’ is: bodies failing, cuckoos pushing eggs out of nests, a weirdly small human pelvis and a big infant head, illness and disease, shit and blood, ticks and cockroaches. ‘Natural childbirth’ in the ‘natural world’ often ends in infant or maternal death. ‘Natural’ childbirth can end in clitoral tears, sepsis, rectoceles, fistulas and psychosis.”
― Lucy Jones, Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

“I read that blue whales are the largest creatures ever to roam our planet, as long as thirty meters and weighing up to 173,000 kilograms. They have intricate social lives and complex languages. Hunted to near extinction. Less than a few thousand remained before whaling restrictions were introduced, but whalers continue to serve a black market, and these majestic creatures might disappear from the world. I often wondered what it's like to be a whale. To be the biggest creature on earth, still vulnerable to a small man’s greed.”
― Susan Abulhawa