The Great Dilemma

I have been reading the autobiography of the English novelist Emmanuelle Wallerstein, and she writes about a dilemma that she was facing during the last five years of her life before she was killed in a car crash in Tokyo. Here are some excerpts from her autobiography published posthumously :

'I was born in London of the late 1960s, a heady period especially with all those violent winds blowing in from the other side of the English channel. My family, however, managed to shelter me from them, and I grew up blissfully on a diet of McDonald's, Burger King, and Starbucks every evening, and with a collection from all the chic labels from the High Streets of London...

'It was in 1994 that I met Angela for the first time, and she impressed upon me that I should stop going to Starbucks for my coffee. She told that this coffee-chain exploited millions of poor coffee-bean growers in parts of Latin America, and bought their coffee without paying them a fair deal in return. I was so astonished on hearing this that I forthwith decided to stop going to Starbucks, and instead started making my own coffee from the next day with the world's favourite coffee, Nescafe. Three months later, however, when I met Angela again, she told me that I should not buy that either since it was produced by a multi-national giant called Nestle. Consequently, I stopped drinking coffee altogether, for I was unable to find any coffee on the market that was not a product of some corporate body or the other...

'Soon I began to realise that I would have to change my life drastically. Firstly, I would not be able to shop anymore in the supermarkets, since all of them were but small links in gigantic global chains which exploited or oppressed people in some part of the world or the other. Everyone of us was complicit in these bonds , and we were all mutually implicated in ever-expanding circles of shared responsibility for what we had done to our planet. Secondly, I realised that I would not be able to have any babies either. Not that I ever had any fondness for them (I have always been indifferent to babies), but this time the truth hit me straight in the face. If I were to have a baby, I would have to buy medicines from some multi-national corporation, and even baby-food is produced by one of these international rings. Not only that, my baby would be using up resources that were already scarce, and by bringing another human being into this world I would only be augmenting the problem of global hunger and magnifying the current levels of economic disparity...

'It was around this time that I read about a man called Henry David Thoreau, and I decided to start living like him in a wooden hut in a village far away from civilisation. There I lived with no electricity, no radios, no TVs, and indeed no mode of communication with the external world. I grew my own food on the patch of land behind my hut, and drank water from the natural streams in the hills nearby. I would weave my own cloth from cotton that I grew along with my potatoes, carrots, radishes, and lettuces. Every morning, I woke up to the delightful songs of the birds to see the Hunter of the Morning, the Sun, shooting His mighty rays into the distant horizons and dispelling to the furthest corners the abominable forces of Darkness. Every day, I blissfully communed with Mother Nature from whose bosom I had been violently estranged by the demoniacal forces of the man-made Machine...

'I lived in these placid surroundings for two years, and would probably have continued to do so for the rest of my life had not Angela come to see me one evening in the manner of a sinister cloud slowly creeping into my green valley. Angela was shocked to find me slumbering there so far away from the madding crowd. She accused me of all sorts of terrible things; that I was a coward, an escapist, a dreamer, a romantic, a utopian, and a stargazer. She blamed me for being so utterly morally irresponsible and of shrinking into myself when millions of people out there were dying of hunger, starvation, and such miseries. She urged me to return to the world, the very same world that I had rejected three years ago because I had felt that it was criss-crossed by global chains of callousness, bestiality, and exploitation, chains from which I could never break free. Truly, woman is born in chains, but everywhere she wants to become free...'

So, then, that is all for today; I shall continue to add some more excerpts from her autobiography now and then. Quite a strange journey, I must say : from the world, away from it, and then back to it.