some fragmented thoughts/reflections after CantoMundo 2012…
I read bell hooks’ Remembered Rapture more than a decade ago…RR isn’t my favorite of her books, I’d be much more likely to recommend Teaching to Transgress, Killing Rage, Wounds of Passion, Talking Back and so on… but there was a line that stopped me in my tracks. Apparently, I was the only one hit this hard by it cause I can’t find it anywhere online, even after scouring through a hundred of bell hooks’ quotes…
With apologies for my very rough paraphrasing, she wrote that someday literary work by women of color would not be revolutionary solely because it was written by women of color…but because of what they were writing…
We have had revolutionary women of color writers: Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Leslie Marmon Silko, Maxine Hong Kingston, Theresa Hak Kung Cha, Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga are just a few of the names that come to mind—all writers who blew me away when I was in college and changed the parameters of my world.
Don’t get me wrong—I am very happy about the explosion of women of color writers everywhere—happy there are those writing Chica-Lit. And I’m glad there are people of color writing novels that the publishing world considers more ‘mainstream. ’ It’s great that those presses are willing to publish and promote those works. A part of me always rejoices to see Latino/Asian surnames or to see photos of writers of color on fliers for readings, posters for conferences, etc. I know that every publication, every presence was fought for by the writers that came before us.
But I can’t help it that I want more…I want more revolution, I want more challenge, I want more power and rage and re-creation…
Recently, at CantoMundo 2012, our keynote speaker, E. Ethelbert Miller, spoke about the Black Arts Movement and how critics had removed/erased its revolutionary component…which left me wondering about Chican@/Latin@ literary work–it was also born in the heat of revolution…in the heat of protest against injustices…and in the revolutionary act of loving/claiming ourselves and our heritage(s).
What is our relation to revolution? And by “our” I mean those of us who are the next couple waves of writers—from age 22 to those writers in their 30’s and 40’s who are still labeled ‘emerging’ and those who are newly arrived at ‘established.’ Can POC/Latin@ literary work exist without revolution?
I want to support all Latin@ poetry, all work by writers of color—but I have to acknowledge that different writers and their work have a different relation to revolution. In a recent conversation with a non-CantoMundo friend, we talked about an inclination for work that ‘spoke to power,’ that critiqued/dismantled the dominant society and all forms of injustice.
I find it difficult to unilaterally support work that casts Latin@s as passive victims in the world, work that ‘re-inscribes the dominant paradigm’ (I can’t help the quotes—but I can’t find any other way to say this), and work with problematic power relations that objectify/exoticize Latin@s as the (powerless) Other. Sometimes it seems to me that there are more areas of sympathy and overlap between writers who write in close relationship to revolution and power than there are among writers of a specific racial/ethnic group…
But I also want to bring up another thought that has been heavily on my mind since CantoMundo:
Also about a decade ago, I read a P&W interview with Li-Young Lee. This is also roughly paraphrased—Lee said that one of the things that oppression threatened was our connection to the divine. What I took away from that was that it could be an act of revolution/rebellion/freedom to insist and cultivate that connection—to write from that connection to the divine and thereby resist historical and contemporary oppression.
And in the years since, I’ve come to think that this applies to many other areas as well….that oppression has threatened our connection to our emotions, our own healing, our own stories, our own aesthetics.
There was something I heard at CantoMundo and that I’ve heard echoed in many places by many women of color—an anguish I don’t hear voiced by any other group—that I wanted to speak to…our fear that our poetry, our aesthetics, our desarollo (our development as poets), will take us to a place where we are not connected to our non-poet communities…and perhaps, not easily & identifiably tied to revolution?
We are always pushing ourselves as poets/writers, as women of color—but isn’t it the work of freedom, the responsibility of freedom— to cultivate those connections that oppression has always threatened? What does resistance look like? What does freedom look like? More importantly, what does it sound like?
