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"...dwelling in tents" Genesis 25:27
Artist’s statement:
The pictograms on the tent are copies of
Karankawan sand drawings believed
to have been first reproduced from memory by Marie Madeleine Talon with interpretations noted in Arabic
by the Sor Juana around 1690 to convey the counter intuitive revelation in
Genesis 25:27 - 31:43:
that
technological breakthroughs in the productivity of one party contractually
obligated to fair trade (exchanges of different forms but equivalent amounts of
labor time) accrued to the other’s benefit and prompted the exploited to embrace patriarchy.
I copied them under the supervision of
librarians at 8 Rue Ferou, Paris, in the fall of 2005. They were in a box with
notes on their provenance. The earliest note dated 1829 is signed
Berlandier. It indicates the box,
containing papers, drawings and an Arabic book taken during the anti cleric
raid on Sor Juana’s convent, was a present to Jean Louis Berlandier (botanist)
and Rafael Chowell (geologist).
Berlandier noted “...Chowell wanted the nun’s Arabic book”. The Berlandier-Chowell report on Texas for the new
Mexican government included a Karankawan word list.
In 1685, the Talons, having borne 4
children in New France (Canada), were returning with LaSalle to settle at the
mouth of the Mississippi, the headwaters of which La Salle “discovered” in
1682. Louis XIV had awarded
LaSalle the monopoly to trade slaves in any area he opened. They landed instead on the Texas
coast where my great grandfather did 150 years later and where I now live in a
cottage beside a fine arte deco sculpture of LaSalle. LaSalle was killed by his crew; the Talon parents by
Karankawas, with whom the children lived until Spanish soldiers found them and
took them to Mexico. There, Marie
Madeleine (15, completely tatooed, hymen intact) lived with the viceroy’s wife,
whose mentor was Sor Juana. The
poet nun, although born illegitimate and in Mexico, had -- in the tradition of
Wallada and Fatima of Cordoba, Spain -- the largest library then in the New World
and whose corresponded with al chemists
whose translations between Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Sanskrit,
invited leaps of divine intervention, poetic additions, deletions, and
renaissance science.
The text may have been added or edited
after the box reached Frances Wright.
Her long note dated 1833, Paris, includes ...“if Champollion [Egyptologist who died in 1832] hadn’t
died on us, I could have done something with this. At least we had the pleasure of seeing why Leonardo wrote
backward” It could have been
added or edited between Wright and the last note (1945) signed Martha:
“Other -- furious Simone not
interested in the Frances Wright box Comrade Matilde’s granmere saved”... and
ends “Do Not Trash.” Or even later.
“Other” is what Martha Gellhorn called Ernest Hemingway who had lived at 8 Rue Ferou as had
Frances Wright 100 years before.
Peggy
Powell Dobbins
Indianola,
Texas
In addition to all contributors listed in Kin
to Class, 1981, “…dwelling in tents” came to be thanks to
Katherine Thompson, Jack Zylman, Kevin Sipp, Basel and Mokihles Saati, Gunter
Dreyer, Mike Dobbins, Sawsan and Abdullah Kanawati, Anne Arrasmith, Celeste
Miller, Peter Prinz, Diane Woodbury, David Griffin, Kathy Barrett, and Dr.
Patricia Fernos, Sor Juana authority and co-author of Fatole Women's Fatwa.
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