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Bantam hardback, $21.95. ISBN 0-553-09522-6. 1993.
* This was published in the national les/gay book review magazine,
Lambda Book Report, published by Lambda Rising Bookstore in
Washington, DC, in 1993.
Imagine a garden city where no one hungers or thirsts, where
families are multi-generational, multi-racial mixes of relatives,
lovers and friends, where cross-dressers play a ritual divining
role, community policies are set by consensus, and healing is
always free. Starhawk's first novel, The Fifth Sacred Thing,
is set in San Francisco, eighty years since the Summer of Love,
after an Uprising has replaced the blacktop streets with flowing
streams. There are no cars. Bright-colored gondolas ferry people
between the hills. People love without regard to gender - some gay,
some hetero, most bi -- but none of these labels apply, none are
used to divide folk.
Paradise is threatened from the south; LA of course. The
religious right has taken state power and sent a virus north that
kills faster than AIDS. Even worse, as the book opens an army is
massing to advance on San Francisco. Much of the land in between
the two cities is toxic with nuclear waste and crippled mutant life
forms. Speaking Spanish, regarded as the witch's tongue, is
forbidden down south, abortion outlawed, white women and people of color
confined to menial jobs if they can find work at all. With same-sex love
driven underground it is clear how race hatred and woman hatred foster
homo-hatred, how they must be dismantled first, as the base from which violence
stems.
The book's flyleaf compares it to Brave New World and Handmaid's
Tale. I thought more of Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time,
which features two warring societies struggling to prevail, or her new book,
He, She and It, set in a futuristic beseiged "free town" on Cape Cod.
Both writers combine ancient Judaism and neo-paganism, feminism and
environmentalism. Both grapple with difficult moral issues, addressing present
day society about how our choices influence tomorrow, using fantasy as powerful
commentary on current events' forboding trends.
Starhawk is more concerned about teaching and practicing the transformative
power of nonviolence. As Maya, the clan matriarch argues in council for
devising a nonviolent resistance to the armies from the south: "The drive
for power-over is a virus, fighting it changes us to become like it, so it
wins...if we can fight on our own turf, which is the landscape of consciousness
... there, the enemy cannot help but transform."
Far-fetched perhaps, but their imagination, their reverance for the earth,
and their love for each other are the only weapons they have.
As a respite from fighting and as a healing ritual, the central family
in the book sometimes makes love. "They were linked, each in contact with
the rest and as they matched their breathing, they began to sink into the
deeper link, into the point where each was part of the whole that was them
all, until the energy opened, each of them a velvet petal unfolding from
a bud with a common heart, and they began to move together, in a dance of
hands, lips, breasts, cocks, vulvas, an interweaving of energies that sounded
high notes and deep notes and syncopated rhythms of pleasure ... "
If you can imagine lovers worth defending with your life, if you wonder how we'll ever melt the hatred, fear and ignorance of the Right, if you believe that "the earth is a living conscious being," that "air, fire, water and earth are sacred," that "only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish," then read this fierce, gentle book.
Loraine Hutchins