The texts we’ve been reading throughout the semester, while occupying different places in history, all share some noteworthy common themes. Topics such as an overreaching government, reproductive rights, and women’s autonomy in general have all been magnified for us. One lesson that can surely be taken away from Cane, Meridian, and Zulus is that many women are a long way off from taking this autonomy for granted. The dialogue on equality is an ongoing one that unfortunately continues being debated instead of being quashed once and for all.
Zulus offers an exceptionally powerful narrative following Alice’s frustrating relationship with a cold, oppressive government. The society she lives in during the start of the book presents its fair share of human rights violations, including regulating the fertility of its women and discriminating against people based on their physical appearance. Once she becomes pregnant and reaches out to Theodore Theodore for help to escape, the society of rebels he brings her to doesn’t turn out to be the utopia that she hopes. The rebels slowly start to encroach and give her a strange feeling until she realizes something truly bizarre is going on. It soon becomes clear that she is viewed as a type of commodity who the rebels want to sacrifice. This new society turned out to have its own share of problems and her body was subject to the whims of people who had no place telling her how to live her life. Her old and new environments were not all that different after all.
Recent events have made the themes Everett discusses in Zulus all the more relevant. Page 122 of Interdisciplinarity reads, “(Foucault) argues that power, in order to be established and constituted, requires the production of a discourse in order to make sense of and justify it.” The current power structures in our country didn’t just appear one day and demand to be respected; a conscious movement took place and enough people processed the information they heard, considered it, and concluded that it was acceptable. As scary and confounding as it is accept, we did this as a whole. Our nation, by way of polarization or direct action, established and justified an unsettling kind of power that could have been left a mere relic of a nasty election season.
Now we have the responsibility to make ourselves as well equipped as possible for an uncertain future. As students we owe it to ourselves and to those without the same opportunities as us to be well read, skeptical, and able to detect the rumblings of an injustice in any form. Odds are we’ll have experienced it before, if only in the pages of a book.