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The wild poet sows seeds. She is a creatrix of the mind, of the multidimensional world folded like a fractal. The wild poet takes craft seriously. She comes to it late having had to live before she could write. There are experiences to have, languages to learn, fears to overcome, loves to be made. She goes bush and sits still as the moon sets and the sun rises. She watches the heron fishing at dusk, silent but not quite still. She rushes through the day, trying not to pamper her email, her facebook, her tweets. They enthrall and distract her.
Wild politics, a subject that grabbed me and would not let me go. I first embarked on this journey almost twenty years ago. I travelled to Bangladesh for a conference at the end of 1993. The conference was organised by Farida Akhter of UBINIG (Policy Research for Development Alternative). Sixty-four women talking through the days. I forget precisely how many days, but it must have five or seven. In the small groups were women from every continent. Women known in their community, women whose names are known around the world.
We were there to talk about "population control." How the women of Bangladesh are targeted with dangerous contraceptives with the end of "depopulating Bangladesh" as Farida writes, while on the other hand women in the western world are targeted with reproductive technologies, with the dual purpose of perfection and consumerism. We heard about how girl babies are aborted in massive numbers and how all these policies are connected to economic reform through Structural Adjustment Programs. Rebelling against these policies was about cheering for wild children, children bom without all the interventions being put forward by the technodocs. Wild reproduction engages women in purposeful resistance to the commodification of women's bodies.
What finally grabbed me was the understanding that my radical feminist politics was even broader than I had thought. It hit me that the analysis of power that I had been writing about applied to peoples all around the world. At some earlier time I had already made the connection to land and ecology, but here I was realising that I needed to know more about economics. I needed to know more about SAPs, TRIPS...