And Eve said to us all

Harmonising masculine and feminine voices in the home of our shared garden with philosopher Abi Doukhan

A piece of fruit cannot be female. Yet an incident involving one woman taking fruit from one tree has reinforced the representations of femaleness for centuries. What began with Eve’s desire to devour that which had blossomed in the Garden of Eden became an interpretation of woman as catalyst to our collective condemnation.

‘Cursed be the ground because of you,’ God said to Adam after he’d accepted the fruit from Eve. ‘For dust you are / And to dust you shall return.’ Interpretations of Genesis 3:16 often germinate from this crucial moment, but God’s wrathful words are not the ending to this story. Thereafter, ‘The Human named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all the living.’ After their sacred scolding, man and woman shared a silent understanding, coexisting in harmony, punished and yet at peace.

‘Heaven may have faded from her brow when she fell in paradise; but all that is glorious on earth shines there still,’ Charlotte Brontë once wrote of the mythological Eve. ‘She is taking me to her bosom, and showing me her heart.’ And though heaven has also largely faded from the chaos of our contemporary cosmos, we can reclaim a blue sky of our own making if we relearn, as Adam and Eve illuminate, the power of revealing our hearts to the other. Striving to coexist in a state of silent understanding, giving and receiving in the presence of saints and serpents.

A piece of fruit cannot be male, either. But as women and men we may fiercely blossom, just as apples do, once we remember how to live in industrious harmony.

KATHRYN CARTER: Who is Abi Doukhan?

ABI DOUKHAN: I am a seeker, I think I have been ever since I was a child. I remember one distinct memory. When I was young, we lived in Mauritius, and I used to wake up very early. Nature would just draw me up, out of bed, and I would go out and I would always sense this mystery there. I was feeling that there is something very profound that is calling me. Later, I sensed the same calling coming from my parents’ bookshelf. I’d just stare at the titles and just feel this mystery calling me, and [so] obviously the path would be philosophy. For me, philosophy is really feeling the sense that there is a deeper mystery, and responding to that call.

And what are you currently being called to as a philosopher and woman?

In my last book, Womanist Wisdom in the Song of Songs, I explored the Song of Songs—a text which belongs to Hebrew Wisdom literature—through its main female character, the Shulamite, who journeys from patriarchy to her own self-individuation as she discovers a wisdom of love that is deeply personal and feminine. Right now, I am going a little beyond that text. The patriarchal culture is prevalent in the Hebrew bible (Tanakh), but there is a whole subculture of matriarchy. What I am trying to discover and decipher are what I call the lost and forgotten feminine voices of the Tanakh, found within what I call “the mother’s house” of the Bible, as opposed to “the father’s house”.

I love that. Have you observed certain characteristics—whether in tone or via themes explored—within both the feminine and masculine houses?

Mother’s house texts are typically found in the wisdom literature texts of the Hebrew Bible, or the Writings. It so happens that these texts also have a very strong feminine flavour. And so, I am trying to explore those books. Also, I am trying to get to a feminine spirituality which is very different from the spirituality we grow up in, as taught by the church, synagogue, or mosque. It’s a very different approach to the divine, to what it means to be human. The father’s house is more about what I would call “temple spirituality”, which is a doing. And the mother’s house is more of what I would describe as a “garden spirituality”, which is a resting with God and a receiving from God.

The discipline of deciphering is such a joy to the philosopher, even so, many today seem hesitant to define your craft. How do you define philosophy?

In Academia, I think we have forgotten the point of philosophy. For a definition of philosophy, I think we should go back to the definition given to us by the Ancients: Philosophy as the love of wisdom, as a sense of wonder at the Mystery of Being. Not only Greek philosophy, but Hindu, Chinese and Hebrew philosophy all have this same love and wonder in common. They are all a quest to reconnect to this mystery. It’s not just a knowledge or a “knowing of”, it’s a genuine existential connection that philosophers are trying to make with the source of life. And their lives are inspired and revitalised by that connection. It gives a new meaning, a new purpose, a new dawn to their lives. It almost sounds religious except that there’s no God there. It’s really a connection to Mystery.

The concept of God is, I feel, open to interpretation, too. Some refer to a divine source, for example. It’s a word some people shy away from, and others feel repelled by, but it doesn’t necessarily mean a monotheistic God. I feel it as more of an energy, and I see no reason why we can’t all coexist, respectfully, whilst experiencing different relationships to the concept.

You’re a true philosopher when you speak like that. The twentieth-century German philosopher Karl Jaspers distinguishes between the two when he says this: religion tries to define whereas philosophy stays in the mystery. So, religion is trying to put a face to it, you know, to give it a word. Whereas philosophy stays and remains in the mystery and Jaspers thinks that’s healthy. He thinks that theology could learn from philosophy a little bit.

This reminds me of something the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke once said, to trust the questions, just stay with the questions.

That’s it. Philosophy dwells in the questions whereas religion attempts to answer the questions. I personally think that both approaches are beautiful. I dwell in both houses and both houses, in a way, nourish each other for me.

Speaking of dwelling in questions. In a past lecture you hosted on Emmanuel Levinas, you stated that the two questions the French philosopher attempted to answer in a post-Holocaust world were: where is God, and who is he? Given the uncertainty felt in current times, do you feel many are asking themselves similar questions?

I’m in the States so it’s a different atmosphere here, probably, compared to Australia. But the sense that I am getting from students is that people do not ask questions, people affirm things, dogmatically and with strong conviction. This is the trend: people affirm.

Honestly, the atmosphere is similar in Australia. So perhaps I ought to rephrase my question. On the inside, do you think we’re still asking those big questions? Beyond the veil is caution that keeps so many in the silence?

When I was growing up, I was asking those questions. But the sense I am getting a lot [today] is that, although people are also asking these crucial questions, they tend to answer their own questions too quickly. A lot of students certainly ask “where is God”, but they then jump to the conclusion that God cannot possibly exist when their expectations of who God supposedly should be and do are not met. I think it is becoming more and more important to ask the question, “who is He?” Because we tend to make judgements based on who we think God should be and if he does not fit that concept, therefore he must not exist. We rarely allow God to reveal Himself on His own terms.

In the digital age, where so much is manipulated and augmented to suit individual desires, I guess high expectations can extend even to the heavens.

I wish we would be more curious. As in: okay well God doesn’t fit what I thought he was supposed to be, so who is he? I love how Levinas puts it: God, in a way, is not this magician that’s supposed to be doing things for us, God moves through us. The reason there is such an absence, an eclipse, of God is that we’re not allowing God’s love, light, and wisdom to flow through us into the world. In a sense, God is absent from the world because we are bad vessels.

“Faith is not a question of the existence or non-existence of God,” Levinas himself once put it. “It is believing that love without reward is valuable.”

If we see God more as an energy, or a love whose hands are tied unless we open up to that influence, then we understand that it’s not God here who is the issue, it’s us. How open are we to receiving this love? We need to redefine God in that way to be able to then see our part and responsibility in the tragedies of the world. We need to move away from the idea of God as this guy in the sky who is trying to fix our problems.

Shifting from the sky back to earthside. As a woman who identifies as a second wave feminist, how do you feel about the ways in which men and women co-exist in the West today? I ask, as a lot of people seem uncomfortable talking about sex and gender at present, but I don’t think we should be afraid of that discomfort. I think we ought to explore these relationships together. I mean, why are we even so afraid of talking about it?

Yeah, I agree. We are at war. Men and women are at war. As women, we’ve made a lot of progress in terms of becoming ourselves. Feminism has brought us very far. But now that we’ve individuated and become strong independent women, we need to move back into relationship, and that’s the difficulty. We have learned to take care of ourselves, without the help of man, and this was an important first step. How might we now learn to care for, nurture our relationships? How can this new woman that has emerged now help create new templates of relating with man?

Contemporary culture doesn’t seem to be providing us with healthy examples, either. As perhaps mythology, literature, and scriptures did for men and women once upon a time.

Well, the movie Barbie is extremely insightful when it comes to painting a picture of where we are today. Personally, I loved the movie, but I was appalled at its blatant and explicit misandry.

I must say, I’m not sure I’ll be able to sit through it myself. Sitting through the trailer alone was, for me at least, a challenge.

I sat through the movie and the main issue for me was not that woman was a barbie, it was the way men were depicted. The men in the movie were systematically either predators or idiots. Yes, it’s true that men have, for centuries, cast us as either the castrating woman or the dumb blonde. But why reverse it? That’s the question I would ask my feminine contemporaries. How is reversing the sexism we have had to endure for centuries moving anything forward?

It feels a bit lazy to just flip it. Right?

Right, how is this progress? That is the question. I personally deeply believe that we [men and women] need each other to blossom, we need each other to grow and be all that we can be. So, I was really disturbed by the movie.

French philosopher Michel de Montaigne once wrote: ‘Women are not entirely wrong when they reject the moral rules proclaimed in society, since it is we men alone who have made them.’ At risk of inviting you to generalise, who do you feel makes the moral rules proclaimed in society today?

I think we have a tension today between the father’s house and the mother’s house, but in the public realm, not just in the bible. So, we do have strong patriarchal voices, obviously. But now we have a new voice, which is the matriarchal voice which is more inclusive, more open, more tolerant. And they are fighting to the death! I personally think that both voices need to be heard. We need the conservative voices of the father’s house to refrain ourselves from acting and passing legislation too hastily. But we also need the more liberal and inclusive voices of the mother’s house to bring awareness to the plight and demands of hereto unheard populations.

I’d tend to agree. I often think of the two complementary principles of Chinese philosophy. Yin is feminine and Yang masculine, and it’s their interaction that is thought to maintain the harmony of the universe.

I remember a text from the proverbs which says: listen to your father and do not forget your mother’s teachings. Both masculine and feminine voices have excesses, and both have a degree of truth and meaning. I tend to believe that there should be a dialogue. The problem right now is that each one thinks that they are right and that the other one is wrong.

There is a huge polarisation happening today, I feel. It’s all very black and white.

Exactly.

Absolutely. In her essay ‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: on the divinity of love’, Luce Irigaray writes: ‘During the period when there were goddesses, female sexual organs always appear in the representation of the bodies of women, particularly goddesses, and not merely in the form of the triangle indicating the womb, but also in the form of the labia, an inscription which will later be erased.’

Recently, there has been a trend in the medical industry towards ‘de-sexing’ language around female body parts and their corresponding functions, with one example being women referred to as “menstruators” by Planned Parenthood. It seems, in my opinion, that we’ve swung from one extreme to the other, from representing women as merely the sum of their reproductive parts to stripping them of the right to claim ownership to certain sacred female parts, and their functions, completely.

Do you feel, as some do, concerned about the relabelling of the female body in some contemporary medical and cultural paradigms?

I get where they are coming from, this idea of going beyond gender. The woman’s body has been interpreted for centuries as the source of women’s inferiority—from Aristotelian philosophy which interpreted the woman’s body as needing to be dominated by many patriarchal assumptions today about women having to submit to men. As such, our gendered body can be seen as the direct cause of our oppression. The solution: get rid of gender, get rid of femininity!

It just seems like a strange approach to me, at risk of eradicating much of the sacred feminine experience.

I think that it’s a medicalised approach which is very militaristic. What I love about Irigaray is that she reclaims the female body. She is aware of the fact that it has been a source of oppression, but she reclaims it and makes it a source of empowerment. She takes it and she says: actually, this gives me my specific wisdom as a woman. And I agree with her 100%, we need to reclaim our female bodies while at the same time giving them new meanings.

Reinterpret ourselves away from the patriarchal lens, if you will, I suppose.

Exactly, we women should be giving meaning to our embodied experience, not men. The problem is not not that we have our specific, gendered bodies, it’s the way these bodies have been interpreted. So, we need to give new interpretations, we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bath water, let’s just throw out the interpretations and keep the bodies, that would be my take. I get where they are coming from [relabelling the female body], but I think we’d be missing out on everything we could explore about ourselves by embracing our bodies [if we continue to do so].

Further to the topic of the female body, in 1973, while speaking at the West Coast Lesbian Conference, American poet and feminist Robin Morgan said:

‘I will not call a male “she”; thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title “woman”; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister.’

Some feminists today—women often labelled as trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERFs) seem to feel the same, while others preach that trans women are real women. Do you feel this conflict of opinions between feminists risks disconcerting women trying to define themselves in this chaotic cultural landscape?

I love that question. So, I can’t personally comment on the trans journey because I am not trans, obviously. But, for me, an individual’s journey to self-individuation is sacred ground. And I know that the journey of many trans men and trans women is coming from a deep sense of pain and feeling limited and asphyxiated in a given body. So, I deeply respect anybody’s journey towards themselves. And I don’t feel threatened by this journey. I appreciate somebody who honours what it means to be feminine and who wants to embody it. I find that person to be an ally more than an enemy.

Many women who have been labelled as trans-exclusionary by the media do actually have respect for trans individuals, too. I think their concern is related to biologically male persons gaining access to the historically female-only categories (and spaces) that so many feminists before us fought to create and protect for grown women and girls. Opting into becoming female with the simple tick of a different box on a form, so to speak.

I do have a question that I’ve longed to ask the trans community. In life, we will often feel like we are somehow inhabiting, or have been “thrown” in the wrong spaces—this could be finding oneself in the “wrong” religion, or race, or political affiliation. But does this discomfort necessarily mean that we are somehow not meant to be there? Might there not be a task to accomplish from this very sense of not belonging in a given space?

So, my question would be: Does feeling like one is in the “wrong” body necessarily mean that we ought to abandon that body? Is there not a particular way that my discomfort with my body might invite me to engage with it creatively, imaginatively in a way that might expand what it means to be a man or a woman?

Germaine Greer once said: ‘It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along.’ Perhaps the same could be applied to the design of one’s own gender expression, without necessarily denying the physical body.

It’s interesting, because in the Biblical texts there is a lot of gender fluidity. Sexual difference remains intact, they do not mess with that. But you have women embodying male roles and males embodying female roles all of the time. You have women propositioning marriage, you have women fighting war and so forth. 

So, although the Biblical text does not compromise on [biological] sexual difference, it is also radically gender fluid. Sexual difference remains, but the way that I can inhabit my sex is really up to me and can look very unique and subversive.

The above quote by Morgan was first published by the New Yorker in the piece ‘What is a woman?’ by Michelle Goldberg. How do you answer this question?

I take issue with the question because “what” implies it’s a rigid thing that is there and that cannot change. “What” immediately means you’re talking about an object. 

I’d never even thought about that; my heart just had a little explosion. Because you’re right, the wording to that question is so wildly problematic in itself. 

A woman is a being that is in constant evolution. So, I think we should remain women and men should remain men, but I think we should evolve what it means to be a man and woman. We are evolving our genitals [medically], but we’re not evolving our definitions, whereas I sometimes wonder whether we shouldn't consider evolving our definitions rather than our genitals. I think it would be much more interesting to see what happens if we had to evolve intellectually, so we can survive. In a way, even though I criticise her a lot, I think that Simone de Beauvoir had it down when she said…

One is not born a woman, but becomes one?

Yes, exactly. 

I’ve been guilty of critiquing Simone de Beauvoir myself, but I have always loved those words by her. 

It’s a good quote. So we can’t really ask “what” is a woman, really. It’s laden and dangerous, because, too often, the answer ends up being a rigid and fixed definition which ends up asphyxiating and imprisoning women. Too often this kind of question degenerates into what a woman “should” be.

“Should” is one of my least favourite words. 

Exactly. So, behind that question there is a big shadow looming, telling us who we should be and how we should act. For this reason, I tend to prefer to abstain from even asking this question. 

I’m inspired by the lens you’ve applied to your interpretation of this question. Speaking of the way you look at the world: in your alternate reading of one the Hebrew Bible’s most famous verses in your paper ‘The Woman’s Curse: A Redemptive Reading of Genesis 3:16’, you write:

‘Such is the power of the woman, able to swap her egotism for the exigencies of love. Such is the power of the man, capable of listening to, and being influenced by the loving intentions of the woman by his side. When both the man and the woman work together in this way, the de-creation process inaugurated by the fall can be reversed, and redemption can begin to find its way into the world. The lost balance of the universe and the ensuing chaos can be interrupted, paving the way to the renewal of the cosmos.’

Given the fraught nature of gender politics playing out in today’s cultural landscape, what do you think it will take for men and women to rectify the lost balance of the universe?

First of all, we have to acknowledge that true civilisation needs this balance—yin and yang. Irigaray speaks of the need for man and woman to begin “sharing the world” if we are ever to become truly civilised. But for this, we need to learn to relate to each other. And we need to understand why relating to each other is necessary? I deeply believe, along with Buber and Levinas, that it is in relationship that we truly blossom as human beings. Once we understand that we grow and mature as individuals only in relationship, it gives us an incentive to reach out to the other. True empowerment as women comes in our relationships to men and likewise, empowerment for men comes in relationship to women. The beauty of Genesis 3:16, once it’s read through a redemptive lens, is that the man and the woman empower each other. You have this beautiful moment when Eve has just precipitated the end of the cosmos…

No big deal, right?

(Laughter). God has just come onto the scene and punished everyone, ending with Adam’s final return to dust at the moment of his death. And at that moment, Adam turns around and looks at Eve, who bears the weight of the imminent destruction of the world and tells her: you, you who have just ushered death into the world, from now on you will be called the mother of the living. So, not only is he contradicting God’s final words about death, he single-handedly redeems the woman and gives her a new identity as the source of life rather than of death. 

It’s almost like he’s saying “it’s okay honey”, if you want to spin it into colloquial language. 

Exactly, and he gives her a completely new identity. She who was supposed to be the seductress and the one who has fallen. It’s so strange that commentators have stayed on that perception of Eve, because Adam had already overturned it. He has already said “no you are not that, you are the mother of life, you are the creator of life”. So he powerfully renames her and gives her a new identity, gives her a new horizon. And of course the woman does this repeatedly, too, the woman gives the man a new orientation. So, I really think that once we understand that the contact with the other gender can empower us, we will have an incentive to reach out to them and to try to create something with them. 

If you had one piece of advice to give to women finding their way in the world today, what would it be?

It’s very simple. Everything you do, you do it out of love, not out of fear. You can do anything, pretty much, as long as it’s dictated by love and not by fear. Ask yourself before you decide anything: Am I doing this out of love or out of fear? Am I leaving this relationship out of love or out of fear? Am I staying in this relationship out of love or out of fear? Love, in a way, guides you. Fear will never guide you to life, fear guides us to death. Fear stunts our lives and love expands our lives. 

As Rumi teaches us: ‘let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.' It sounds like a cliche, but it radiates such a high vibration, love. 

And it’s very difficult, actually. It’s very hard to get to a place of love, because sometimes you want to be angry. But once you’re there, in that place of love, the rest arrives by itself, what is needed to be done becomes very clear.

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once spoke to how man spends his whole life “in striving after something that he thinks will make him so.” And I think if what we’re striving towards is living from a place of love, well, I think that’s certainly worth reaching for. 

Absolutely, yes. 

fin

You can read more of Kathryn’s writing here.

If you want to explore Abi Doukhan’s work, you can listen to her lectures on YouTube.

This conversation was first published in JANE PRIVÉE