Children of Light, Children of Darkness

Anonymous The title of this blog makes me think of binary opposites. Binaries make me think of my Spanish capstone class and literary theory and if I remember correctly, the structuralists and deconstructionists. This is a little fuzzy, but I think if I understood binary opposites correctly, one thing is defined by not being the other. Example: I am woman because I am not man. This can be problematic, because there must always be something on the other side of the binary, and therefore less privileged and lesser. Some popular binaries that I can think of are Pure/Impure, Rational/Emotional, White/Black, Good/Evil and of course... Light/Darkness.

But we're always doing it; we define ourselves in opposition to another thing, especially when we think about identity. The children of light are the favored, the good, the desirable, the pure, and the children of darkness are everything that the children of light are not. The Israelites wanted to destroy their previous Canaanite identity completely, to separate themselves. What's interesting is that in this case, and adds another level of complication, is that the children of light (the people of Qumran) are not the dominant culture and still the favored side of the binary.

Usually this binary system is problematic, and the mere reversal of the binary doesn't serve us. Just putting darkness on the other side of the slash mark doesn't cut it, we're still operating in the same power structure. But what happens if that binary is undermined and subverted? What would that look like? Children of... ?

Then I ask myself, why do the children have to be of the light or of the darkness? What if they were "of the twilight"?