Green Suns — Cindy Rehm

Green Suns is inspired by language and ideas drawn from Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel Les Guérillères. Early in the book Wittig evokes the feminary, a small book that contains women’s private symbols and writing. Green Suns is itself a kind of feminary that contains the symbology of the O—the ring, the cycle, the void, the zone of death. In Les Guérillères, Wittig tells the story of a sect of women and girls who live in and through their bodies in full sensory embodiment. The women inhale primal perfumes, taste ripe fruits, drink magic elixirs, whisper in ears, dance, laugh, scream, and rip out their long hairs at the root. Wittig’s women exist in a liminal space and call forth the power of lost witches, as they chant “Despite all the evils they wished to crush me with/I remain as steady as the three-legged cauldron.”

Blocks of text listing women’s surnames are embedded in the narrative of Les Guérillères. Wittig’s litany of names are spells, that identify and empower the women “like the eye of the cyclops.” These are women who kiss snakes and cast the shadow of the monster as they subject their make oppressors to abject violence and literal devourment. These women take up all forms of portable weapons; knives, poison, they employ their genitals as a mirror to reflect the awesome rays of the sun to blind and burn their enemies. The women foster disorder and chaos in a violent murderous uprising to destroy the language and symbols of the patriarchy. Wittig calls on a female collective to live outside the text of domination, to abolish the old symbols and start again from zero.

Violet Cut collage 42” x 62” 2023