Currenly I am being translated into English. I am looking for funds to finish translating myself and a publishing house in that language that would like to give me a home.

Lucy. When “Lucy” was discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, she was one of the oldest hominid skeletal remains yet found. Through her unearthing, she redefined what was believed at the time regarding human evolution, and here she returns to life to challenge us further. By reconstructing women’s contributions to human evolution, in an imaginary letter by Lucy, the author challenges us to recognize that there is a lost paradigm in history that exists buried in all of us, and stresses the urgency for humanity to reconnect to it in the present global crisis. The chapter takes us through a historical route through conventional definitions of human evolution to those that Lucy represents—those that must continue to emerge and be confronted.

Mileva Maric. In addition to being a Serbian mathematician and physicist, Mileva was also Albert Einstein’s first wife. Mileva contributed to her husband’s Nobel prize-winning work, often sharing her knowledge with him in love letters as is shown in the chapter about her written in the style of literary journalism. She reincarnates as a golden coin that the conventional scientific community does not know where to place today. She was never recognized for those contributions and has hardly been acknowledged in biographies and autobiographies until very recently. At the time, women could attend universities, but could not easily graduate, and so were inhibited from practicing their professions.

African American Rosa Parks reconceptualizes the butterfly effect from Chaos Theory which states that everything is so interconnected and so fragile to the influences of those connections, that the smallest action in any one place can have an immense effect somewhere else. She narrates what happened when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Southern USA at a time when segregationist laws weighed heavily against the rights of African Americans to move freely in their own country.

With this action Rosa, together with the civil rights movement, unleashed a wave of nationwide protests that led to the abolishment of those racist laws.

Peripheral Visionaries: Lynn Margulis, Evelyn Fox Keller, Barbara McClintock and Elisabet Sahtouris. These four “peripheral visionaries” in science, all from the U.S.A., have challenged mainstream determinist assumptions in biology, genetics and epistemology, recognizing the place of their female subjectivity as a source of sound scientific knowledge.

Nathalie Miebach is an artist from the U.S. who weaves sculpture of natural fibers that are the result of her scientific investigations related to climate change as reflected in the tides, migrations of whales and birds, and changes in the moon.

Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793) represents women of the French Revolution in her account of what happened to them when they challenged the Declaration of the Rights of “Men” to include women’s rights. In an imaginary letter where she has reincarnated as a termite, Olympe tells the true and very well documented story about how she led a women’s movement during that revolution to push for inclusion of the Declaration of the Rights of Women.

Three Foresteers:

Wangari Maathai, Tetyana Tkachenko, & Manar Faraj. A Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize winner, a teacher in Chernobyl during the nuclear disaster in 1987, and a young Palestinian refugee, respectively, these are women of different ages, ethnicities, and origins whose experiences are nonetheless linked. They have shared and do share the struggle for survival on the planet by claiming, metaphorically and symbolically, that trees have to be seen in their context.

Clementina Back (1854-1922) was a socialist activist whose imaginary letter about her struggles illustrates the strengthening of patriarchy during the Industrial Revolution through the double exploitation of women’s paid and unpaid work in factories and at home.

Boc Dong Kim (Korean “Comfort Woman”) and Marge Taniwaki (Japanese American) are both Asian women who, during World War II were subject to the abuses of militarism, including the Japanese Army, and the Unites States policy towards Japanese Americans and Japanese living in the United States during the war. Recently they broke 50 years of silence about those abuses. The author brings them together in history and how radio in the hands of women connected them.

Molly is a female microchip created by scientist and futurologist Michi Kaku in his book about how technology and science will impact life in the near future. The context of the book is the “intelligent house” of a corporate executive. Molly does everything for this man while knowing in advance what he will want. In the story in the book, Women, Metamorphosis of the Butterfly Effect Molly shows us that technology is anything but neutral through an unexpected action.

Goree, Soaring Soul, takes place in the present time in the small island of Goree in Senegal, at the House of Slaves which contains the “Door of No Return” through which most slaves were shipped from Africa to the Americas, The story, which is written in literary journalism style, is about the interaction between the enslavement of Africans and the enslavement of women.

Latin Americans who appear in the book:

Maria Remedios, the witch of Escazú in Costa Rica is a fictional character who has reincarnated three times—both before and during the Inquisition in Europe, and again during the colonial era in Costa Rica. She documents the “witch hunts” related to the patriarchal shift of mind-set in the alliance that emerged between institutionalized religion, the institutional “rights” framework and the institutionalization of medicine during the inquisitions. These persecutions sought to diminish and curb females’ healing powers and to control their bodies and sexualities.

Alda Facio and Paca Cruz are featured in a story about the political dimension of spirituality in this globalizing World. The work is based on a panel presentation by the two women at the 9th Latin American & Caribbean Feminist Encuentro (Encounter).

Francisca Álvarez, is a Mayan Guatemalan who addresses the epistemological framework of an indigenous, female cosmic vision regarding interaction with the planet. The story is based on a paper Francisca presented in Guatemala during the aftermath of the Hurricane Stan disaster in October 2005, in which she weaves her ancestral knowledge with present day theories about the left and right side brain functions. She challenges us to rethink our relationship to the environment.

Luisa Guadalupe (1918-2000). The focus in this chapter is the efforts of the women of the Island of Vieques in Puerto Rico, presented in the image of Luisa, to end US Naval military bomb practices that affected both the environment and their lives. The story is woven together with the similarities of the struggle of the women in the Island of Diego Garcia in the Indigo Ocean to end Great Britain’s use of their island for the same purposes.

Celeste Strong and Brave is the political-subjective construction of a survivor of incest in Costa Rica who creates her very own last names to illustrate her healing process through feminism. Her story connects incest as an abuse within the family to the term “The Fathers”—an expression used by the Costa Rica State in law, education, and elsewhere in society—as the ones who name and decide for all, which amounts to abuse of democracy, participation, creative education, etc.

Guadalupe Urbina is a Costa Rican folk singer and composer. In this story, she discusses the relationship between art and women’s ways of knowing.

Katelyn Sullivan is an African-American drummer interviewed by the author of the book in 1992 in Oregon, U.SA.. Her story serves to bring out an often ignored fact about the nature of the vibration of African drums in a holistic approach to life. The chapter also challenges many assumptions regarding the invisibility and devaluation of the honored place that women had in pre-patriarchal times through the example of some rites in the African Yoruba drumming traditions.

Libia Herrero Uribe is a Latin American peripheral visionary, a Costa Rican microbiologist who is challenging the very definitions of what constitutes “life” according to science. Her research challenges us to reexamine our assumptions about current disease epidemics such as SARS and HIV-AIDS viruses.

What are they about?

The women in me claim that the present hegemonic mind-set (paradigm) promotes and affirms forms of life in society on this planet which are non sustainable, considering the destruction and devastation of the political-social weave that happens when authority is abused and women are "otheres", alongside the destruction of the environmental weave that connects us to the rest of nature.

Throughout history, many women, and in some cases their whole communities (indigenous among others)have lives in resistance to the hegemonic mind-set, thus presenting alternatives that have been rendered invisible and devalued, yet might have interesting and significant contributions towards new ways for humankind to find their way out of the present crisis...

We Would Like to Hear From You!

Please post your comments below: