LANGO~ Ownership ofthe language is power-to demand that the powerful listen is to challenge their power. To hold power over others means that the powerful is permitted a kind ofshort-cut through the complexity ofhuman personality. He does not have to enter intuitively into the souls of the powerless, or to hear what they are saying in their many languages, including.the language of silence. Colonialism exists by virtue of this short-cut-how else could so few live among so many and understand so little? (0 WB, p. 49) Feminism, if released from the burden of an alien and imposed dogma (accusations of "man-hating," "divisiveness," "irresponsibility to the race") offers the possibility of a politically and persorially active outlook that uncovers many connections between our attempts to build a "new society" and our own misconceptions and misunderstanding of the foundations that we are trying to move from: There is no way we can withdraw from these issues ... by calling them "man-connected problems." There is no way we can ·afford to na"ow the range ofour vision. (LSS, p. 228) That vision, whil'e not excluding men (maintaining always the choice of separatism) does underline the very special qualities of working within a "wommyn's" community, a feminist working context. I have never seen my own forces so taken up and shared andgiven back (fro.m "Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev," DCL, p. 5) Expanding the vision further, she speaks of a "Woman-Centered University" in which: Women ... [will] need to address themselves~against the opprobrium and obstruction they do and will encounter-to changing the center ofgravity ofthe institution as far as possible; to work toward a woman-centered university, because only ifthat center ofgravity.can be shifted will women really be free to learn, to teach, to share strength, to explore, to criticize and to convert knowledge to power. It will be objected that this is merely "reverse chauvinism." But given the intensive training all women go through in every society to place our own lo,:,g-term and collective interests second or last and to value altruism at the expense of independence and wholeness-andgiven the degree to which the university reinforces that training in its every aspect-the most urgent need at present is for women to recognize, and act on, the priority ofrecreating ourselves and each other, after our centuries of intellectual at,d spiritual blockading. A. by-product ofsuch a shift in priarities will ofcourse ultimately mean '!n opening-out ofintellectual challenges for men who are emotionally mature and intuitively daring enough to recognize the extent to which man-centered culture has also limited and blindered them. LSS, p. 128 It isn't, strictly speaking, a credo that she's writing, but sometimes (particularly in her poems) elements of a creed emerge. In the beautiful poem "Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff" she says: How we used to work side by side! And how I've worked since then trying to create according to our plan that we'd bring, against all odds, our full power to every subject. Hold back nothing because we were women. • (DCL, p. 44) Rich the.scholar speaks in behalf of "research for" rather than "research on" human beings. Rich the poet, in "Natural Resources," says: My h~art is moved by all I pannot save: so much has been destroyed . I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no ext,:aordinary power, reconstitute the world. (DCL, p. 67)
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