#anzaldua

There is no need for words to fester in our minds. They germinate in the open mouth of the barefoot child in the middle of restive crowds. They wither in ivory towers and in college classrooms. Throw away abstractions and the academic learning, the rules, the map and compass. Feel your way without blinders. To touch more people, the personal realities and the social must be evoked--not through rhetoric, but through blood and pus and sweat. Write with your eyes like painters, with your ears like musicians, with your feet like dancers. you are the truthsayer with quill and torch. Write with your tongues of fire. Don't let the pen banish you from yourself. Don't let the ink coagulate in your pens. Don't let the censor snuff out the spark, nor the gags muffle your voice. Put your shit on the paper.

“Nobody’s going to save you. No one’s going to cut you down, cut the thorns thick around you. No one’s going to storm the castle walls nor kiss awake your birth, climb down your hair, nor mount you onto the white steed. There is no one who will feed the yearning. Face it. You will have to do, do it yourself.”

We all know that women read as men and women write as men, because that’s how we were taught. We were trained to read as men. Little girls read the books that boys read, but the boys never read the books with little girl heroines, and so women are taught to read westerns and spy novels and mysteries, and the ‘serious’ literature, but we also read ‘women’s literature,’ watch soap operas, read romances, read women’s mysteries. But men aren’t taught to read women. How and why do we break with this gender socialization? Isn’t the departure as significant as establishing the criteria? Reading affects the development of female and male identity. I, for one, define my life and construct my identities through the process of reading and writing—dyke detective novels, cultural theory, Latin American fiction.

Where You From?

Part 1- Gloria Anzaldua