Dear You, 

Self-mutilation. What a word!
I always love the way it rolls on my tongue. It is almost godly. Try it yourself…..selfffmuuutiiilaaationnn.

But, by godly, I don’t mean the Abrahamic kinds… those are with a capital G.

I mean the tribal ones who resemble Nature.
Nature with a capital N -
constantly evolving by destroying the old.
They have different names in varied religions & philosophies: 

Gaia, Shakti, Tara, Ishtar….
all goddesses, constantly mutilating, themselves;
and the many worlds they maintain and balance.

They do that, by being both -
compassionate and merciless,
benign and wrathful,
haven and hell,
barren and green,
chaos and calm,
oppressed and the oppressor. 

I recently saw the depiction of Goddess Ishtar in Akram Khan’s new work - Outwitting the Devil. And, I cringed through most of it. 

Outwitting the Devil was inspired by the Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates back to ancient Mesopotamia. In it, the king Gilgamesh is punished by the gods for destroying the legendary cedar forest and killing its guardian. The goddess in her wrath takes away from him, his friend Enkidu, a wild man he has tamed.

The goddess Ishtar is played by an Indian-origin Bharatnatyam dancer in a pastel yellow-saffron-ish saree, while the king - young and then old - played by two caucasian men; and the wild beast and his two alter-egos (I suppose) by young Southeast-Asian performers.
  
I cringed because as his piece muddily talks about the human as the custodian of this ecological catastrophe, it continues to reaffirms the oriental stereotypes of colonial imagination documented through essentialist images of the East that are both - wild & servile.

The ones we are still subject to.
Yes, you and metoo.

Yours faithfully, Me