Abstract
In this chapter, Emily Colgan considers a biblical text that evokes images of gender violence during warfare: Jer. 6:1–8. Drawing upon the ecological principles of suspicion and retrieval, she performs a close reading of this text, focusing in particular on the sexual codifications present therein from the perspective of the Land as city, personified as a woman. Because all knowledge is materially situated, she supplements this reading with an intertextual exploration of the role that texts such as Jer. 6:1–8 play in the discursive formation of individuals and society in her native land of Aotearoa New Zealand. Specifically, she uses a literary critical lens to explores the poem by Māori poet Hone Tuwhare, “Not by wind ravaged,” as a means of analysing the degree to which the violent sexual logic of Jer. 6:1–8 continues to shape the social imaginary of this country.
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Notes
- 1.
Throughout this chapter, I focus on the Land as a character in the text. By using the term “Land,” I recognize the inherent risk of homogenizing what is an incomprehensibly vast and complex phenomenon. Indeed, the focus on “Land”—as opposed to the more comprehensive term “Earth”—reflects an attempt to reduce such homogenization. Thus, in the context of this chapter, “Land” will refer to the solid surface of the Earth. Although it will not always be possible to articulate the complex diversity of this realm, it will be understood as implied that “Land” encompasses a multitude of distinct ecosystems which constitute terrestrial existence.
- 2.
This part of the chapter draws heavily on my previous work in Colgan (2015). I am grateful to Sheffield Phoenix Press for allowing its republication here.
- 3.
Aotearoa is the most widely used Māori name for New Zealand, and often precedes its English counterpart when the country is written or spoken about.
- 4.
2 Kgs 19:21 = Isa . 37:22; Isa. 1:8; 10:32; 16:1; 52:2; 62:11 ; Mic. 1:13 ; 4:8, 10, 13; Zeph. 3:14; Jer . 4:31; 6:2, 23; Lam . 1:6; 2:1, 4, 8, 10, 13, 18 ; 4:22 ; Zech. 2:14 [Eng . 2:10]; 9:9; Ps. 9:15 [Eng . 9:14].
- 5.
The third entry for bat in BDB (p. 123) reads “with name of city, land, or people, poetic personification of that city or inhabitants, etc.,” and includes Jer . 6:2 as an example of this understanding.
- 6.
Most recently, Floyd (2008) has argued strongly for this translation. The AVS, KJV, NIV and RSV also adhere to this translation.
- 7.
Kartveit (2004, p. 36) affirms Stinespring’s translation, although she understands bat in the sense of “dear” or “beloved” (“dear Zion,” “beloved Zion”).
- 8.
“Zion” appears frequently in Hebrew poetry and may be regarded as a synonymous term for Jerusalem. See Maier (2008a, p. 106).
- 9.
Not until Jer . 20:4–6 is the foe from the north referred to as a historical reality and Jerusalem’s enemy is revealed as Babylon.
- 10.
Brownmiller (1975, p. 18) describes rape as “if a woman chooses not to have intercourse with a specific man and the man chooses to proceed against her will, that is a criminal act of rape.” More recently, Magdalene (1995, p. 328) defines sexual abuse as “any act with a sexual connotation or result that is used in order to objectify, dominate, hurt, or humiliate an individual.” In the context of my analysis, however, these definitions must be deemed inadequate in their gynocentric (Brownmiller) and anthropocentric (Magdalene) focus. I have purposefully opted for this broad definition as it allows the experience of the Land to be named in these terms.
- 11.
This verb is most commonly used either to refer to YHWH “looking down” from above (Exod . 14:24; Deut . 26:15; Pss 14:2; 53:2; 102:19; Lam . 3:50), or to a person peering down out of a window (Judg . 5:28; 2 Sam . 6:16; 2 Kgs 9:30; Prov . 7:6).
- 12.
Gen . 16:2; 19:34; 29:21; 30:3; 38:2; Deut. 21:13; 25:5; 2 Sam. 16:21 . The verb bô’ (to come) is also used euphemistically in Jer. 13:20, as a foreshadowing of sexual abuse by YHWH.
- 13.
- 14.
I read the final heh of ‘ēṣāh as a mappiq denoting a feminine suffix, which renders the term “her trees” (see also LXX, NRSV, RSV). Although some translations treat this term as a collective noun meaning “many trees” (ASV, KJV, NIV), this is not an adequate interpretation in light of the figure of the Land/city that has emerged thus far.
- 15.
Baumann (2003, p. 80) quotes Weippert (1987, p. 140) as observing the difference in status being expressed in clothing. Referring to an ivory plate from Megiddo, Weippert notes the naked slaves, the soldiers in only loincloths, the servants in robes, and the king clothed extensively from head to foot.
- 16.
Similarities can be seen in Lam . 1:8 where nakedness and shame are closely connected, and in Hos. 2:11–12 [Eng . 9–10] where YHWH intends to deprive the Land of clothes and expose her shame.
- 17.
See also Hos. 2:5 [Eng . 2:3] where YHWH threatens to strip the woman, expose her, and make her “like a wilderness … like a desert.”
- 18.
Jer . 6:12 lists houses, Land, and women together as property that shall be given over to others. See also Jer . 8:10. Women are explicitly listed as the property of a man’s house in Exod . 20:17 and in Deut . 5:21.
- 19.
I employ Code’s definition of social imaginaries as “often-implicit but nonetheless effective systems of images, meanings, metaphors, and interlocking explanations-expectations within which people, in specific time periods and geographical-cultural climates, enact their knowledge and subjectivities and craft their self-understandings” (2006, p. 29). This imaginary, writes Code, is “an instituted social-epistemic imaginary that holds in place complexes of socially informing beliefs, sustains the authority of institutions, knowledge, patterns of expertise, and perpetuates a hierarchically arranged social order” (p. 123).
- 20.
In delimiting the bounds of this research, I have chosen to focus on New Zealand poetry as the medium through which I gain insight into the perceptions of Land within the social imaginary of Aotearoa. This focus means that I have had to bracket out the insights gleaned from New Zealand art, music, and literature in its broader sense.
- 21.
I have previously detailed this intertextual approach in Colgan (2017).
- 22.
In Māori tradition, Papa-tū-ā-nuku is the female personification of the Land. She is portrayed as a mother figure who provides the physical and spiritual basis for all life.
- 23.
The indigenous people of Aotearoa.
- 24.
Non-Māori New Zealanders. Often used to describe New Zealanders of “European” descent.
- 25.
- 26.
In McNeish’s novel Mackenzie, for example, the author has a settler character say, “I would not be a surveyor if I did not believe in thrashing nature. Why else are we here? … Nature’s disorganized, chaotic, cruel, we must thrash it” (1970, p. 190).
- 27.
Alessio (1997, pp. 239–70) suggests that New Zealand was not unique in the way in which the Land was personified. Female allegories have played an important role in white settler societies generally.
- 28.
Sexual overtones, for example, can be detected in the description of George Angus exploring a “chaste” and “secret” cave in all its virgin “purity.” He found delight in knowing that “ours were the first human eyes to behold this resplendent saloon [which] hid in the bowels of the earth.” Quoted in Shepard (1969, p. 76).
- 29.
Wallace, for instance, laments the “soul of the earth, raped by greed and enterprise…” (1981, p. 47).
- 30.
Copyright prohibits the inclusion of this poem in its entirety. It is, however, able to be viewed online at http://nzpoems.blogspot.co.nz/2011/07/not-by-wind-ravaged-hone-tuwhare.html. Accessed on 17 October 2017. Tuwhare (1922–2008) was of Ngā Puhi descent and was an outspoken advocate of Māori self-determination.
- 31.
The image of Land as a woman raped appears elsewhere in poems by Tuwhare . In his outspoken poem entitled “Warawara, Pureora, Okarito,” the voice of the poem angrily tells “Guvment Agencies” and wealthy private enterprises to “Stop your raping of the land./Fuck off” (Tuwhare 1978, p. 35).
- 32.
The exclamatory “O” is used in Jeremiah to invoke a broad range of subjects from cities (4:14; 13:27 ; 15:5) and countries (46:11 ; 48:46; 50:24 ), to the heavens (2:12) and the Land itself (6:19).
- 33.
Tuwhare is said to have loved the structure, rhymes, and cadences of the King James translation of the Bible, which, as child, he read with his father. He is quoted as saying that his work is infused with the “smell of the old Bible.” See Hunt (1998, p. 32).
- 34.
Hinewirangi Kohu draws a connection between deforestation and the rape of the Land in her poem “Papatūānuku (1993, pp. 53–54). British colonists are described by Kohu as “stripping Papatūānuku bare” and “raping the belly of Papa.”
- 35.
Similar imagery is used by William Pember Reeves to describe the violent destruction of the Land. In his poem “Aorangi,” Reeves describes “the war and waste of Nature,” which includes “Stripping the ridges naked, to the bone” (2000). Similarly, in her poem “Otago Landscape,” Patricia Glensor describes the “stripped and servile” Land crushed by the weight of human oppression and forced to “kneel/and feed us” (1986, p. 286).
- 36.
Tuwhare’s poetic depiction of these settlers is supported by firsthand accounts that make reference to the aggressive colonial process in New Zealand. In 1843, the British naturalist John Richardson observed that the colonists of this country sought “the overthrow of native forests, with a view to their replacement by farmhouses, verdant pastures, [and] rich crops of the cerelea [cereals]” (cited in Star 2009, p. 51).
- 37.
Irigaray (1974, p. 134) suggests that women are the obedient body-matter used by men as a springboard to leap higher in pursuit of those things deemed important by the master.
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Colgan, E. (2018). Reinscribing Rape: Tracing Connections Between the Experience of Women and Land in Biblical and Contemporary Texts. In: Blyth, C., Colgan, E., Edwards, K. (eds) Rape Culture, Gender Violence, and Religion. Religion and Radicalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72224-5_10
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