Men Explain Things To Me

Solnit uses Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged sexual assault of Nafissatou Diallo as a metaphor for colonial and neo-colonial violence and exploitation committed by Western governments and institutions like the IMF. Before discussing the incident, she opens the essay with a question—“How can I tell a story we already know too well?”—before declaring: “Her name was Africa. His was France. He colonized her, exploited her, silenced her” (41). Here, she draws distinct parallels between Strauss-Kahn, who is French, and Diallo, who is from Guinea, and French imperialism in Africa. She makes this connection even more explicit by implicating the IMF, declaring: “Her name was Africa. His name was IMF. He set her up to be pillaged, to go without health care, to starve. He laid waste to her to enrich his friends. Her name was Global South” (45). Again, the comparison Solnit draws is clear, so much so that she even asks: “Who would ever write a fable as obvious, as heavy-handed as the story we’ve just been given?” (42). However, she also reverses the analogy so that Diallo’s initial refusal to be silenced by Strauss-Kahn’s power and privilege becomes a metaphor for resistance to Western exploitation and the “struggles for justice of an undocumented housekeeper and an immigrant hotel maid are microcosms of the great world war of our time” (53). In this reworking: “His name was privilege, but hers was possibility […] the possibility of changing a story that remains unfinished” (53).

Solnit opens Essay 5 with an analysis of a painting by Ana Teresa Fernandez. Although untitled, the painting comes from a series called “Telarañ. Spiderweb” (81). Solnit uses this as a jumping off point to explore the symbolic meanings of spiders’ webs as they relate to key themes from her essay. Initially, she looks at it in relation to the series of paintings, presenting the web as the “spiderweb of gender and history in which the painted woman is caught” and “the spiderweb of her own power that she is weaving in this painting dominated by a sheet that was woven” (81). She alludes briefly to stories from Ancient Greece and several Native American nations before looking at how it can be seen as an inclusive pattern, a way of telling forgotten or erased stories, and an alternative to the single-narrative stories of patrilineal families. Ultimately, for Solnit, the spider’s web comes to symbolize “the many directions in which something might go, the many sources for it; of the grandmothers as well as the strings of begats” (81).

Solnit uses the symbol of darkness to explore the theme of embracing the unknown. She takes it initially from a journal entry by Virginia Woolf in which she observes: “The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think” (85). Solnit takes this “celebration of darkness” to mean that “the unknown need not be turned into the known” (86) but instead can be a rich source of discovery and a fertile site for exploration. After all, she observes, “the night in which distinctions and definitions cannot be readily made is the same night in which love is made, in which things merge, change, become enchanted, aroused, impregnated, possessed, released, renewed” (86). She continues to explore this symbolic meaning through her discussion of writers’ roles in society, suggesting that it is “the job of writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to preconception, to go into the dark with their eyes open” (87). For Solnit, as for Woolf, the darkness or the unknown can be a source of hope because “you don’t know if your actions are futile […] the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and […] in the end, we always act in the dark” (93). In line with this, she asserts that the “grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next […] And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have” (94).