She walked brusquely into the classroom, heels clicking, hair in perfect formation. She immediately was one of those teachers that students learned to recognize as early as elementary school as someone who meant business. Moments later Prof. Micheaux introduced Natasha Behl. Her dark eyes flashed excitedly over the class. If there was such a thing as rolling up ones sleeves within the brain, its effect was certainly making an impact upon all of us awaiting the start of our discussion for the day.
The topic? Writing as a tool of resistance, and what it means for women within the transnational feminist framework.
Our discussion was focused on Women Writing Resistance, a collection works composed by mujeres de color addressing the way in which women are subjugated to the power structures of the status quo...and how they are fighting such oppression. From Gloria Anzaldua, to Aurora Morales, Ruth Irupe Sanabria, and the Combahee River Collective Statement, women have found language - in all its forms and voices - to be the crux of not only resistance, but empowerment.
Language, and those who use it to construct various realities, is inherently tied to status. The divide between those who are educated and uneducated alienates voices from the "narrative" (or at least the narrative heard by privileged white women) of the sisterhood. Having learned how to express themselves within the confines of stuffy academia, writers like Gloria Anzaldua express incredible frustration about the consequential limitations. "I have not yet unlearned the esoteric bullshit and pseudo-intellectualizing that school brainwashed into my writing," (79) wrote Gloria Anzaldua in her piece, Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers. "We speak in tongues like the outcast and the insane. Because white eyes do not want to know us, they do not bother to learn our language, the language which reflects us, our culture, our spirit" (80). And so, in an act of rebellion, Anzaldua and the other female writers mentioned above begin to place their "wild," and "native" tongues into their writing; writing against white privilege and white systems, but also traditional forms of feminism that fail to take into account the diversity of stories untold. The result are short, sharp, shrewd, sassy essays of spanglish syntax.
"i ain't denying nothing
i'm a contradiction
in its self
an' this
is how I SPEAK so listen y escuchalo bien
cuz you know how I be feelin'
'bout repitiendome
tu ve, es que
this is what I have become..." (Sanabria 95)
But don't get too comfortable yet.
Sanabria, in "Las aeious" relates a story where her professor refused to accept a paper, claiming that Sanabria must have plagiarized the assignment because her written "voice" didn't match her latina slang...apparently not sounding "barrio enough" (92) And so, a "defense against the racist silencing and shaming of our voices in American society," began and united the Black woman writing from a New York tenement, the Indian woman walking to work lamenting the lack of time, and the Chicana fanning away mosquitoes, the hot air, and the embers of her penciled words.
And so we again begin to witness the intersectionality of race, class, and privilege in constructing gender identities. Interestingly enough however, the sisterhood is sustained by solidarity found through writing.
This new language, the language of "the borderlands," builds greater intimacy within the spectrum of experiences. An invitation to hear an unaltered voice, such language demonstrates a hybrid of identities, yet also places responsibility on those who listen or read, to act! Language is political. By meeting halfway, borderland language represents a desire to negotiate, to understand both sides of the border, and ultimately construct a new consciousness.
The limits of language, limits one's world. These female resistance writers are reminding us to try navigating by other voices.
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