"Ursula K. LeGuin - A Woman's Liberation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

Ursula K. Le Guin

A Woman's Liberation




1. Shomeke

My dear friend has asked me to write the story of my life, thinking it might
be of interest to people of other worlds and times. I am an ordinary woman,
but I have lived in years of mighty changes and have been advantaged to know
with my very flesh the nature of servitude and the nature of freedom.
I did not learn to read or write until I was a grown woman, which is all the
excuse I will make for the faults of my narrative.
I was born a slave on the planet Werel. As a child I was called Shomekes'
Radosse Rakam. That is, Property of the Shomeke Family, Granddaughter of
Dosse, Granddaughter of Kamye. The Shomeke family owned an estate on the
eastern coast of Voe Deo. Dosse was my grandmother. Kamye is the Lord God.
The Shomekes possessed over four hundred assets, mostly used to cultivate the
fields of gede, to herd the salt-grass cattle, in the mills, and as domestics
in the House. The Shomeke family had been great in history. Our Owner was an
important man politically, often away in the capital.
Assets took their name from their grandmother because it was the grandmother
that raised the child. The mother worked all day, and there was no father.
Women were always bred to more than one man. Even if a man knew his child he
could not care for it. He might be sold or traded away at any time. Young men
were seldom kept long on the estates. If they were valuable they were traded
to other estates or sold to the factories. If they were worthless they were
worked to death.
Women were not often sold. The young ones were kept for work and breeding, the
old ones to raise the young and keep the compound in order. On some estates
women bore a baby a year till they died, but on ours most had only two or
three children. The Shomekes valued women as workers. They did not want the
men always getting at the women. The grandmothers agreed with them and guarded
the young women closely.
I say men, women, children, but you are to understand that we were not called
men, women, children. Only our owners were called so. We assets or slaves were
called bondsmen, bondswomen, and pups or young. I will use these words, though
I have not heard or spoken them for many years, and never before on this
blessed world.
The bondsmen's part of the compound, the gateside, was ruled by the Bosses,
who were men, some relations of the Shomeke family, others hired by them. On
the inside the young and the bondswomen lived. There two cutfrees, castrated
bondsmen, were the Bosses in name, but the grandmothers ruled. Indeed nothing
in the compound happened without the grandmothers' knowledge.
If the grandmothers said an asset was too sick to work, the Bosses would let
that one stay home. Sometimes the grandmothers could save a bondsman

from being sold away, sometimes they could protect a girl from being bred by