Just a few days ago I spoke and did a little tribute to my friends on these pages. I spoke of my particular witches, capable of jumping the pyre and laughing at their sorrows. I was then reading Silvia Federici’s last book, on witchs – what they wanted to turn into witches – and women, on the patriarchal and capitalist hunt of economic, vital, emotional, sexual differences. The witch was feared to the extent that she was popular in her community.
Silvia Federici remembers with the word ‘gossip’, that in Castilian we could translate as gossip, in its beginnings. Explains how the ‘gossip’ had always been understood as a space of solidarity and intimacy between women. A powerful union. Those witches, my friends, that I would place around a table to talk about anything. That ‘gossip’, like the witches, was also feared: by force, by its empowering capacity, by hope … because it wove alliances where the market and the capitalist system, barely organizing themselves, could not reach. Little by little that gossip mutated and today the ‘gossip’ could be translated, and in fact it is the usual translation, like gossip. Gossiping women, those who criticize, those who waste time with banalities they were better accepted by the society of that time than midwives. Because gossip does not have an uncontrollable force, and because gossip is not a threat. They are no alternative to the relationships established by the status quo. Who can feel threatened by ladies who do nothing but gossip?
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And then I think about how the words were taken from us, too. And in how the daughters, the granddaughters, the heiresses of that ‘gossip’ have wanted to flee from a word that belonged to us: the ‘gossip’, the gossip. Now we call it sisterhood, but it amounts to the same thing. I close this year and this month, December 2021, with this song of solidarity, gossip, and camaraderie that is not listed. Thanking the sisters who enlighten us so that we do not get lost and we can weave our own alternative: we have always had it here.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com