The women in my mother’s family all have beautiful handwriting–elegant cursive forms postured on the page like well-bred ladies themselves. The mail brings hand-addressed envelopes from them for my birthday a few days ago, bearing things like a bar of delicious-smelling soap, a gift card for groceries, a packet of wildflower seeds, and a refrigerator magnet bearing the words “dwell in possibility,” (which words I’ll have the occasion to reconsider every time I grab milk from the refrigerator). I’ve decided to proceed in this space using standard capitalization from here on out, lest it be assumed that I don’t have no schoolin’, or that I have forever abandoned the upper-case for greener pastures. It’s like sitting up a little straighter in my seat.
While shelving this book at the bookstore a few days ago–Sir Edward Creasy’s Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, which most of us will surely die content without ever having read–I was struck with uneasiness about what is implied about the “world” by the specific use the word itself. I quickly noticed that all of the fifteen battles this British fellow from the 19th century included in the scope of his “world” were waged by Europeans. Only one, the victory of the Europeans who would become American at Saratoga in 1777, took place outside the continent of Europe. Granted that some of Creasy’s “decisive” battles, particularly the ancient Greek and Roman ones, were fought by people who lived long before the idea of Europe had been imposed on the globe and could not have anticipated the scale of the horror some of their ideas would predicate and justify. It might be equally unfair to ask Sir Creasy to accommodate the distant, speculative possibility that centuries later in America this girl would come to exist who found his “world” so hard to reconcile with her own. That she would come to know this hard pit of pain in her belly at the fear that her world is without a history.
But I know a lot of folks are familiar with this feeling, cultivated from our earliest self-awareness. It’s a sudden bolt of pain, quickly forgotten, as we briefly suspect that we do not exist. That we are not the inheritors of this earth, this “world.” That doll babies don’t come in our images, that few people like us populate history and that those few were natural servants, easily subjugated, crudely fashioned by the creator to ape his perfection (this perfection more closely approximated by finer noses, fairer skins). This can be felt in the body, this fear that we do not deserve the air we breathe in the world.
The world redefines its own boundaries for each context in which the word “world” is used, re-shifts its very borders to accommodate its immediate context. The “world” is not a physical location, like “planet earth” is. It has no dimensions, no height or breadth, but it expands figuratively to contain height and breadth, rule, ledge, right, implied left, and everything beyond. In the “world” are the known and the unknown, the possible and everything that can be conceived of as impossible. With the swoop of one syllable, it decides what has the right to exist, and what doesn’t. What, perhaps, cannot even be imagined to exist, or even conjectured. It draws lines, or redraws them, wherever it falls.
I couldn’t help but to think of the word “dunia,” one of the words in the Arabic language that can be translated as “world.” I think its meaning is a bit more expansive than “world” in some ways. “World,” I think, packs a lot of hidden, implied power into what seems at first to be a concept so basic that it can’t be questioned–a word so fundamental that most of us would falter for a moment if asked to define it in terms other than itself; a word, like the atom, indivisible. The sense of the word “dunia,” as far as I gather, is just as fundamental to its language. But it sets up different boundaries than “world”: dunia is the ever expanding and contracting radius around one’s experience, applied equally to the room one happens to be in, as to the situation one happens to find or inherit, as to the day, as to the planet. I think somewhere even “world” retains a sense of including the entire chain of being in which this moment has its existence (a damn good working definition, if I do say so), but this sense has fallen out of every day use–where “dunia” is actually applied this way, allowing the world to expand as far as the imagination can take it, centered around our own experience but projected into infinity.
Our sphere.
Anyway. Worlds, planets, dimensions, spheres of being: night from day, east from west, public from private–male and female, he created them. We have the right to recast them. Not to recast them is not to live as though your life is your own. We have the right to move between them. Welcome to the Global South; the globe re-figured, turned on its edge–the “world” re-worded.
Other things that are exciting in this sphere include the Frankfurt Book Fair taking place this week, where we hope my book Fes is a Mirror will be bartered.