Growing Her Hands Back – a contemporary rite of passage
Senior School’s literary inspiration this term began with Martin Shaw’s version of The Handless Maiden* reframed as “growing your hands back”.
We have delved into the symbolism of how an individual functions within harm and betrayal, how awe is awakened even in the midst of suffering, and how we heal not as some kind of personal heroic conquest but in the companionship of generosity and care.
How do we grow our hands back? How do we become the one who never gave up? Using prompts from the text, we created an extended creative composition that is a kind of rite of passage.
We now broaden the metaphor to the world around us, asking how is nature “growing her hands back” and how can we be the “wood sisters and brothers” in whose company this can happen? We are investigating Chennai in south India, a rich and vibrant metropolis for some, that for others is a place of immense poverty. It is a city built over waterways, and in the words of Yuvan Aves, “the river had to be killed for the city to live”. The incredible rivers and marshlands have been filled in to accomodate expanding human occupancy, and contaminated by red alert factories, so that the waterways that still flow have been declared incapable of sustaining life.
Amidst this, are inspiring young people who are leading the way in restoring rivers, holding government to account, and doing this in ways that address the harms to the poorest and marginalised. They are helping nature to grow her hands back.
To be part of restorative work, in the generous company of others, isn’t this a rite of passage for our times?
*Shaw Martin, Smokehole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass
