It is the end of fall semester. Today I finished my last paper for Anthropocene course. I loved it and I have realised that I am so naive about seriousness of climate change.
My final paper was about Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.The novel is about Genly Ai who is sent from Terra as an envoy to an alien planet Gethen known as Winter. He seeks to gain Winter’s acceptance to join Ekumen, a collective of many planets seek to engage in a growing interplanetary relationship. Meanwhile, during his journey he faces many obstacles. Gethen planet is very cold and has only one season: winter.
The imagery and descriptions in this novel are unique, but chilling. I felt hardships that Genly is facing because I am reading it when it is really cold here in Nebraska. Sometimes it snows a lot then in the following day I have to walk on ice. I walk like penguins and I feel really jealous when I see Nebraska people can walk as if walking on carpet! I know they are well trained for it. May be next year I can dance on ice, who knws!
Here is a chilling excerpt from The Left Hand of Darkness as I am looking through the freezing window :
I went to the window and looked out. The snow had thinned a little… All at once I was utterly downcast and homesick. Two years I had spent on this damned planet, and the third winter had begun before autumn was underway—months and months of unrelenting cold, sleet, ice, wind, rain, snow, cold, cold inside, cold outside, cold to the bone and the marrow of the bone. And all that time on my own, alien and isolate, without a soul I could trust. (109)
These scenes are really mind blowing. I do not like the cold. I do not like the snow but it is beautiful. My professors keep asking me if I am coping with the cold. I think snow makes me sad because of my childhood struggles with snow. Snow takes some freezing memories back to me, not happy ones.
I remember it was snowing a lot in the years after the Kurdish uprising in 1991. We were very young still at primary school and we did not have good shoes to keep our feet warm. No matter how many times we fell down, we kept walking. I keep walking on snow, on ice and think about those days. Some times I slip, I fall, I walk slow; but it does not matter. I know I shuld keep walking.
Sarwa,
Lincoln, Nebraska
Just Words: Echoes of Kurdish Women 