God's Gift to Man

Bessie Harvey searched for a way to convert the traditionally masculine connotations of the root into something newly feminine, as the truncated stump God's Gift to Man attests, with its labial red opening growing, like a root graft (or indeed like the Genesis account of woman's creation), from the riven trunk. Ameliorating—healing—two jarringly dissociated texts: the Bible that told her that Woman was made of Man and meant to serve Man; and lived experience, especially her childhood, when she was sexually violated.