Atrium

EDITORIAL

Luís Sá Cunha

RC celebrates The International Year of Women by dedicating the contents of this issue entirely to that subject. An appropriate and timely gesture!

A global phenomena, feminine emancipation has probably transformed the twentieth century more than all its wars. A movement initiated in the West, it rose to its greatest impact with the most dramatic consequences in the East. It developed from the unsolvable conflict between the unstoppable progressive values which began to take shape during the First Industrial Revolution and the traditionally conservative socio-anthropological ethics of the agrarian structured civilisations of the East.

Since its advent in the Orient, no other artform more than cinema has captured with such charismatic creativity the multiple and diversified situations of the poignant drama of Chinese Women. Equally prolific since the 4th of May 1919 and as early as the incipient writings of Lu Xun up to their contemporary peak of outspokenness with Jung Chang and Zhang Yimou, fiction and realism have been the versatile 'champion tools' of Chinese feminine literature. From abundant writing focusing either directly or indirectly on the twentienth century condition of Chinese Women, rose a universe of feminine Oriental voices claiming new social status and defending their own sensitivity.

Although this issue is dedicated to Women in general, in the following miscellanea of assembled texts there predominantly rises the silhouettes, attitudes and voices of Oriental women, relentlessly claiming changes in their restricted lifestyles and the incongruous trappings of unrelented centennial mores.

Within the rigidity and the aversion for change of the Middle Kingdom, venerated proverbs reveal the ambivalent duality of essence and existence of the feminine condition in China. For instance, the Confuncionist maxim: "A woman is not worth a hundred ducks", which expresses the depreciative status of women in a predominantly patriarchal hierarchy, is incongruously associated with the popular saying that: "a woman is worth half of Heaven".

This issue of RC also renders a particularly emotional homage to the many generations of women who in Macao, at the edge of China and under the shadow of the Occident, contributed towards the 'making' of the City of the Holy Name of God.

Macanese women of African, Indian, Malay, Indonesian, Japanese and Chinese descent; victims of the ravages of war, of abominable starvation; of shipwrecks; of ruthless human trade; of shattered families; of abandonment and prostitution; of multiple wrongdoings and exploitations... survivors, heroins of fidelity and dedication. They were the matriarchs of one of the most formidable trans-social adaptations in world history.

Throughout the centuries, in continuous contact with other religious creeds and rituals, social mores and customs, they generated the offsprings of the great hybrid 'family' which became ethnically identifiable as the Macanese 'sons and daughters of the soil'.

This issue of RC is no more than a humble tribute to their merits of eternal femininity.

In the deepest of beliefs of most archaic cultures, the feminine gender was closely associated to the cult of seduction, the principle of rebellion, the premonition of doom, and, by affinity to the unleashing of diabolical forces. In Daoism all Yin is feminine. In the Cabala, evil degeneration emanates from the feminine dyadic attribute (diabolos, or, 'that which divides'). In Pharaonic Egypt, the condescending goddess Isis was revered for the subvertive and perfidious emanations of her dark latency. In Genesis the origin of the eternal catastrophe of the Fall is attributed to the transgression of the peccant scold.

In fact, the concept of the Fall is universal to all humankind. It is integral to all major civilizations whose legends revealed it under multiple facets: oral, literary and imagetic. Overpowering, the submissive principle of Unity (symbolically manifested by the male gender) rules the order of the Cosmos (symbolically manifested by the feminine gender) whose continuous action upon the former might eventually provoke emanations of unimaginably chaotic consequences.

The union of the male nous with female physis imminently endangers the former to become forever a prisoner of darkness, or figuratively, to become the liquified essence of its own narcisistic reflection.

The reinforcement of such virile prepotent beliefs strongly reinforced the premonitory norms of the Islamic and the Western religions, such as: "Castigate the Women!"

To our understanding, the human counteraction of the 'weaker sex' against a 'male dominated society' occured at the middle of this century and, increasingly gaining acceptance, being no more than the decisive outburst of a perenially contained demand for natural justice. It is the inevitable return of the literal, mediocre and superficial acceptable that successive generations, throughout the millenia of civilisations, immersed in their primordial mythologies and the revelations of their incantations. It is a fundamental mistake in the static assertion of the social positions of the male and female genders; a crucial mistake in the transfer of symbolic inferences into the ontological 'perception' to the realm of morality; an alienating mistake in the 'mankind' abdication of capacities to recognize the inherent blossoming potentialities of womankind.

"Castigate the Women!" is the archaic expressive utterance of a sacrificial rite, a reflection of the humankind inner self, primordially identifiable with the feminine principles of rebellion, disorder, chaos, physical emotionalism and inner passivity; a contemplative reorientation towards the cleansing of body and soul. It should not be forgotten that the word 'castigate' derives from the Latin castigare, from castus, pure.

Was the 'war of the sexes' implicitly meant to be a component in the creation of humankind? The truth is that is has always existed, amongst the gods as well as amongst humans, in myth as well as in the history of all civilisations. If femineity is invariably rendered as'aphrodisiac' and 'demeterial' antagonistic to the spiritual initiation and, ultimately, to the sublimated realization of man.

Once again, we feel that the primordial crux of such exteriorizations derive from immediate 'therapeutic' formulas aiming at intimate and individualistic emergency necessities of initiatic societies, rather than dictums projected at the 'profane' realm. These formulas were meant to specifically act as 'intellectual paliatives' in the much broader context of eschatologies where message adhered to the super-substantialism of the sexual dyad. The Christian tradition is an example of such religious concept, furthering that Christ was a man, humanly being born and having died as such, but resurrected 'neither man nor woman'.

Historically, the most recent evolution of women's rights determinism is in sharp contrast with the inflamed spirituality that has characterised the most exalted examples of Western femineity. The 'new' Woman is certainly distant from the frail damsels of the chivalrous Courts or the jubilant maiden of Dante's Divine Comedy where Woman — in sophic embodiment — is the agent of the ascencion of Man from Hell to Paradise. Se is distant also from the virginal Fraulein of Goethe's Faust — that woman of sublimated cupidity and transcendental carnal desire. Far, too, from the prophesising heroins of Berdiaeff's visionary future societies, much less the gynocratic sufragettes socially androgynous to man, the product of more recent out-of-focus accelerations in the emancipation euphoria.

The 'new' Woman is not Teilhard de Chardin's muse longing for 'cosmic bliss', the perfect receptacle of natural instincts and mystical devotions, nor even Aragon's comforting matriarch expressed by his saying: "La Femme c'est le futur de l'Homme!"

And why not conceive Her — at least, for the time being — as the confidant of the secrets of Mother Nature, the herald of forthcoming realms contributing to a better understanding of the human race? Let us beware of the prophecy of the Florentine and prevent Her becoming the psycho-fantastical escapism of manliness entangled in its own web, doomed to burrow in ever darker and harder ground, a masculinity for which Heidegger felt a miracle to be the only salvation.

Exceptionally, this issue presents an alternated cadence of texts and visual representations of the concept of femineity specially commissioned to artists resident in the East.

Luís Sá Cunha

Editorial Director

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