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“A Woman is not Without Honour…” The Prophetic Voice of Christa Wolf's ‘Cassandra’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Extract
This woman whose voices drive her into exile.
(Exile, exile.)...
This woman/ the heart of the matter.
Heart of the law/ heart of the prophets.
Prophets and poets make difficult stable companions and they share the ability to unsettle or subvert the norms of their societies. Because of this they are often silenced or killed. They both, in different ways, offer to the individual or community a two way ‘glass’ in which the individual or community then has to face the truth about themselves. One side of this glass acts as a mirror from which is reflected the breaking of communities; the injustice, the impoverishment, the godlessness, from which our laws and systems normally shield us. The other side of the glass is the window, through which, creative and energising, the prophet/poet offers us a new and radical vision of an alternative future, a place of possibility and change. Change however is always unsettling and never easy, it is usually simpler to shut our eyes. In Cassandra, Christa Wolf turns the mirror/glass onto a society being broken down by war, and through the Scamander Caves, offers a window on an alternate way of being, visioned by women.
Walter Brueggemann discusses Israel’s turning away from being a prophetic people to being a people of worldly Kingship. He suggests that we are so enmeshed by our present reality that any other way of being is virtually unthinkable. Moreover, that this present history is one of “briefcases and limousines and press conferences and quotas and new weaponry systems.
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- Copyright © 1998 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
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