Tag Archives: Gloria Anzaldúa

Drawing Blood on the Page: Women of Color, Risk, Great Literature

“How do you punch the reader in the gut? How will you take stabs at your idols? What’s the best way of setting down literary land mines?”

Rashaan Alexis Meneses has a great post today, over at Ruelle Electrique, about destroying your idols (Immediately, I am reminded of Rupert Estanislao’s “Kill All Idols” poems, which I will have to write about another time). Rashaan discusses admitting our literary idols’ “artistic weaknesses that rupture fissures within the art itself,” and hence, jettisoning those things which (could) have “negatively” affected our own art. I love her post, because it’s as necessary to think about and articulate what not to do, what we wish to avoid in our writing — just as much as it’s necessary to know what we DO want to do.

Here’s this:

[E.M.] Forster’s work embodies compassion, which is inspiring for life, but everyday life does not make great literature.

If you’re going to spill blood, you might as well do it on the page, that’s what its for.

Indeed, my own life is not so remarkable, so when I write an “I,” it’s rarely ever me. This is what gives me the freedom to write, ignoring autobiographical details and “fact,” and to think about “truth” in different ways.

I understand there’s a danger in falling into abstraction, given what I’ve just written about myself. How then, to “keep it real?” Or is that even a true goal for me? There’s a lot of talk about taking risk as writers, how and why we must risk in order to grow, but there’s a stronger (social) draw towards our safety, as Rashaan says, “we don’t like conflict in real life.” Literature isn’t real life though, and even as I talk to folks about documenting our lives and stories on the page, surely, there is art and risk involved in that documentation. Some writers tell me they want (need) to remain faithful to autobiographical details, even though this is precisely what is weighing down the work, preventing the work from soaring.

When I was in college, I was so intimidated by the women of color who edited and published in the woman of color journal, smell this. The poetry was so raw, so open, so faithful to real life. I had never read poetry like that before, and part of my feeling so intimidated was due to the kind of strength and boldness these women emanated, so unapologetically. And there I was in my English literature classes, reading Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Browning (it seemed Professor Ralph Rader was obsessed with Browning), ashamed to admit that I actually enjoyed reading Hopkins and Browning. I was also afraid to admit that as an emerging poet, I could actually learn something from them.

I read the poetry in smell this, and I attended some of their poetry readings; I was the little shy goth chick from the suburbs (barely 100 pounds, lots of white face powder and black shit on my eyes), standing in the back of the room, avoiding making eye contact with any of those fierce women poets. I was afraid to admit publicly that there was a lot of poetry in the journal, and that I heard at the readings, that really wasn’t very good poetry. A lot of it was more so journal entry than poem, or over-expository, cluttered, proselytizing, filled to the hilt with Ethnic Studies jargon and cliché. I was afraid my judgment was too rigid, that I was one of those whitewashed, bourgie poetry snobs.

So I tried to write poetry like theirs — indignant, undisciplined, raw, emotional, in your face, roaring at spoken word events. I rejected editing and craft, because everything I committed to the page was the truth, and it was not going to be tempered, or rendered “safe.” This suited me for a while, got the crowds at spoken word artists of color gatherings snapping their fingers and calling me a bad ass, got the well-bred Pinays to be fearful of me. And then I stagnated. For nearly all of my 20′s, I was writing the same three or four poems for years, because I found so much safety in that spoken word artists of color community.

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I hear folks also throw that term around, “safe,” as in “those writers are safe,” and this is understood to be a bad thing. But “safe,” in the contexts I’ve heard the term used, is rarely expounded upon. It usually means institutionally accepted, or widely published, or nationally recognized, or borne out of MFA workshop. Gloria Anzaldúa’s “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers,” certainly takes on the contradiction of being lettered, degreed, published, and negotiating that against the kinds of historical and ongoing Western institutional suppression, erasure, and violation suffered by women of color, by diasporic, multilingual, Third World people.

So then, (how) is it different for women of color, we whom Audre Lorde writes, “were never meant to survive,” or for the women of Alice Walker’s “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” who were prevented from putting the pen to the page, whose modes of expression and creativity were thus limited to domesticity — gardens, quilting, home cooked meals. What is our criteria for great literature, that which we create to resist silence and erasure? We risk when we commit our words to the page, but today, what’s really at risk?

Please do read Rashaan’s entire post. She’s definitely got my gears turning this morning.

WOC in Publishing: Some Thoughts and Questions

[Minor edits below.]

Continuing on from yesterday’s post, and the conversation Rachelle Cruz and I are having in that post’s comments section, I wanted to think about publishing venues for women of color. I also want to think about publishing venues by women of color for women of color. Rachelle brought up Aunt Lute, the multicultural women’s press, not specifically a WOC venue, nor is it run by WOC. BUT. Aunt Lute gave us Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, and I can’t imagine this world without this volume in it. Aunt Lute and Gloria Anzaldúa also gave us Making Face, Making Soul, and I am wondering about the current viability of a volume of creative and critical WOC perspectives.

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Some Beginning Thoughts on Women of Color Writers and Nationalism

Some things I’ve been thinking lately.

I finished Suheir Hammad’s breaking poems a while back, and while I was reading her ruptured texts, ruptured and sutured by English Arabic Hip-Hop code switching, I kept flashing back to my own work with all of those broken syntaxes in Poeta. I was afraid this was a matter of my ego’s need to constantly be self-referential, hence, my need to remain relevant, so I thought about it again, Hammad’s barrages of word word word word with all of the “connective tissue” dissolved, word word word spilling onto the next line as if the only thing stopping the barrage is the page. And if her poems lived outside of, transcendent of the page, then nothing but the poet’s own breath could stop the barrage. If I may be so bold as to say that something I think I have in common with Hammad is the poetic speaker who is a young brown woman, a young brown multilingual, transnational woman fighting to (re)define self, to survive both bodily and spiritually, in a continuum of war against women’s bodies and against homelands, against the disenfranchised denizens of city.

This brings me to this recent and ongoing wave of renewed American nationalism post-Barack Obama presidential win. I do love that our fellow Americans are proud to be American once again. Through a literary and poetic lens, we can view such nation-building, both praising and critical, and straight up acerbic nation self-defining texts by Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes (“Let America Be America Again,” “I, Too, Sing America”), Claude McKay (“White City,” “White House,” “America”), and José Martí’s “Nuestra America,”/”Our America,” Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart, and “I Want the Wide American Earth.” There is Joseph Lease’s Broken World, and K. Silem Mohammad’s Deer Head Nation. I can even count Lee A. Tonouchi’s Living Pidgin among these nation-building American writers, for his insistence on Pidgin being a viable American culture, language, way of life (I wonder if Tonouchi would count Braddah Barack among Pidgin speakers; Tonouchi counts Senator Dan Inouye and former Hawai’i governor Ben Cayetano among them). These are only a few examples of national identity being forwarded in American literature. I am especially interested in men of color writing an America that includes them.

My point here is that as I’ve recently read both Suheir Hammad, and then Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (my write-up here), the more convinced I am that American women authors, and particularly American women of color authors who have not consented to being hemmed in uncritically by their domesticity such that national identity is not their province or only in supporting roles to primarily male nation builders, are still too busy defending our bodies from nation builders, still fighting for our bodies’ humanity against objectification, that we are not tackling nation building in our own work. Sarah Jones’ “Your Revolution,” anyone?

In addition to Hammad, Lorde, and Jones, when thinking of resistance to bodily objectification through literary production, think also of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, in her mestizaje consciousness, likening the US/Mexico border to una herida abierta, a wounded body unable to heal, and calling the reader in to see the complexities of the border cultures. Anzaldúa I’d always read as a response to the white masculinism of frontier culture. Think also of Harryette Mullen’s S*PeRM**K*T and Trimmings, the many ways in which a woman’s body is packaged and marketed for Western consumption. Think of Evie Shockley’s a half red sea, which I think I can safely say Shockley wrote in order to give voice, substance, and humanity to her woman ancestors and forebears after generations of violently imposed American institutional silences.

So then there is Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution, and there is Bruna Mori’s Dérive, both of which are well worth revisiting for me, as I am very interested in these two women poets who are API, of my generation, with whom I feel much poetic kinship. I am interested in their appearing to focus elsewhere not the body, and into the bigger world of city and nationality. Even here, the concerns of the poetic speakers are complicated, and involve many layers of interaction with the dominant culture, if not altogether decentering it.

Another thing the above mentioned works have in common I think is telescoping.

Here, perhaps Allen Ginsberg’s Howl is another text I ought to revisit. Again, another male author, but still, I am interested in women of color authors whose works are large in scope, whose works take on nation in critical and confrontational ways. I realized in my search for nationalist poetry in this time of great national pride, I want to write my own large in scope work on America and Americanism. And I want to have American women of color poet role models here.

Book Project: More Thoughts 2

Actually, the more apt question, rather than, “What does the Pinay version of these two monumental texts, Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera look like?” I think the question is, if Lorde and Anzaldúa were alive today, and blogging today, if they were writing e-books, or columns for online progressive periodicals, what would these look like?” So then it is part writer’s “diary,” and then it is also critically written op-ed, as Oscar has suggested.

I’ve been in some good conversations this past weekend about this project. Javier tells us that the main text of Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, that is, what we know as Borderlands/La Frontera, was written after the poems, as an introduction to the poems, and that Anzaldúa’s introduction, which she wrote in order to provide us with the geographical, historical, gender, and linguistic contexts in which to read and understand the poetry, it’s this introduction that is no longer an introduction but rather, the meat of the book.

As well, I’ve been taking for granted the many different ways that writing changes when it moves from the paper page to e-world. Again, the post box with html and RSS feed. How also do our brains change, how do we process meaningfully the ideas we mean to write about in said post box with html and RSS feed. How do our interactions with readers change here, not only in terms of how quickly information is transmitted, but how ideas are exchanged, discussed, built upon, amended.

I thought about this too: if Herb Caen were alive and if his columns were posted online in real time, what would happen to his interactions and hence, relationship with his readership? In the past, there were folks who sat down at their desks and thoughtfully drafted letters to the editor, and these days, in shooting off an email, something happens. We oftentimes think this is bad, our spur of the moment, first reaction best reaction hotheadedness and partially formed irresponsible responses. But I also think something in the way our brains process critical response has sped up, no?

So I think about (again), what would happen to Anzaldúa and Lorde in this kind of e-forum? And what of our sense of responsibility to one another and to our critical thinking in this e-forum?And what kinds of critical bodies of work could arise from this?

Nothing new what I am saying here, but I am thinking again of the format of this potential book project, that all of my raw material is publicly archived and can indeed be dredged via “search this blog” tools, what keywords, or what time periods. This tells me something about the possibilities for organization as well.

And my friends, this has been your Monday morning brain dump. On with the day.

Addendum: And of course this project still has a Pinay focus, because I am Pinay, and because of  our stereotypical reticence. And also because of this: we constantly lament the dearth of critical writing featuring our work. We lament that American letters is not paying attention. Here’s the link to this great letter that Patrick Rosal wrote to Poets and Writers back in 2004. And of course, as the dearth of critical attention to our work is legitimate to lament, I wonder why we don’t hold “our own” critics and academics to the same standards. In the meantime, here is our community, existing in a state of reticence, or not publicly looking for opportunities to correct this dearth.

Current Reading: Very quick thoughts on Juan Felipe Herrera and Andres Montoya

187reasons.gif(1) I finished Juan Felipe Herrera’s 187 Reasons Why Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border: Undocuments 1971-2007, and I am thinking about what I wrote earlier about sprawl. First of all, this volume is a collection of a lifetime thus far of work. I was born in 1971, so that’s some perspective, in terms of range. I think what’s effective about this collection is its not being in chronological order. It starts with more recent times’ (early 1990′s) pressing issues. I hope California voters remember Proposition 187, which was on the ballot in 1994, because that’s what he’s referencing in his book’s title.

What Oscar and I were talking about this morning (again, how much do I love that my husband poet and I get to talk poetics during morning commute), was that Herrera’s taken what I believe has become truism and trope in Chicano poetry, “We didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us,” and he’s done something not just interesting with it. He’s gone deep into it, exposing the continuity of American and California history in drawing, enforcing, and policing borders. Herrera challenges these enforcements, depicting them in absurd ways. This reminds me so much of the sentiment and agenda of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, in such fine examination of the US/Mexico border, of the concept of border, of the people defined by border.

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