International Women's Day: Author Rec Post
Mar. 8th, 2009 10:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
harborshoreIn honor of RaceFail 2009 (if you don’t know what this is about, the link goes to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rydra_wong’s time line, which includes a link to a summary post), I’m making a rec post for my favorite WOC writers. They are all extraordinary and they are all brilliant, and their work differs widely from one another. That last part matters, because as Junot Díaz says, definitions like "immigrant authors" will never not be simplifying, even when they're technically correct.
I’ve tried to post about this debate so many times since I got my LJ (incidentally, right as the whole thing took off), but I kept failing at saying anything worthwhile. A lot of other brilliant people have said it better. Instead I’m going to do this, do my job as a graduate student doing research on translations of some of these authors and as a bilingual writer who loves every single one of these women and the way they write. Their work is far more important than anything I could ever hope to say about racism.
I will say this, though: one kind of oppression is not like another, and listening is sadly underrated. For the love of all that is holy, look up intersectionality somewhere.
Here, then, under the cuts are seven authors. I don't think I do them justice here, but I've tried. Clicking on their names in the short information section will take you to their wikipedia entries, and I’m going to edit in links to pages where you can buy their work, because I strongly, strongly urge you to support them so they can continue to write.
Julia Alvarez
Julia Alvarez is a Dominican-American poet, novelist, essayist and academic who blends the personal and the political, and who writes about the duality of being bilingual and bicultural; about how you create your home out of language and culture, even when the world tells you coming home means settling for where you came from or where you ended up.
I kept quiet, knowing our differences
in point of view could snap the fragile thread
that held us there and sour the evening
I needed to take back with me. A word
could snuff the stars that seemed more luminous
in skies left over from my childhood.
From “Last Night at Tía’s," Homecoming.
Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi is a Puerto Rican poet and novelist who writes in English and Spanish both, creating a language sometimes called Spanglish (her novel YO-YO BOING! is seen as the first Spanglish novel). She is brilliant, political, and sometimes viciously funny.
Sure, it's true. Questions can't change the truth. But they give it motion. They focus my truth from another angle. And you said: We're cleaning up the truth. We must clarify certain things.
You never tell the truth and your jacket eventually comes back made of another material, and your shoes say sure!, and run back to you telling my truth. Even if it's raining now, your truth may be that it's not raining inside like it's raining outside. Even if I'm not talking, you may be saying what I'm thinking when you weren't talking.
From "Sure, it’s true," originally published in The Prose Poem: an International Journal. Translated from the original Spanish by Tess O'Dwyer.
Tsitsi Dangarembga
When Tsitsi Dangarembga tried to get her first novel published, she was told it didn’t embody the experience of an African woman. Thankfully other publishers realized that was a bit of a silly idea, given that she is an African woman, and Nervous Conditions, a partially autobiographical account of her childhood in Zimbabwe was published. It’s a work of tragedy and grace and humour.
I was not sorry when my brother died. Nor am I apologising for my callousness, as you may define it, my lack of feeling. For it is not that at all. I feel many things these days, much more than I was able to feel in the days when I was young and my brother died, and there are reasons for this more than the mere consequence of age. Therefore I shall not apologise at all…
From Nervous Conditions.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri often writes about the experience of Indian immigrants to the United States, and she herself says "When I first started writing I was not conscious that my subject was the Indian-American experience. What drew me to my craft was the desire to force the two worlds I occupied to mingle on the page as I was not brave enough, or mature enough, to allow in life."
Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.
From "The Third and Final Continent," Interpreter of Maladies.
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrisson, I hope, needs no introduction. She writes about gender and race and pain and loss and love; about how history continues to come back and continues to matter, but also about how to create new stories in the wake of tragedy.
In Jazz, she writes about violence, racial and not, and about how making a new life is sometimes impossible but sometimes can be managed, even after the worst has happened. The following quote is from there.
But I can’t say that aloud; I can’t tell anyone that I have been waiting for this all of my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.
Alicia Partnoy
Alicia Partnoy is a human rights activist, a poet, and a translator. She was imprisoned for two and a half years, three months of which she spent blindfolded at The Little School, an Argentinian camp for political dissidents, and she has testified many times about what she had to endure there. She wrote about it in The Little School, which should be mandatory reading for everyone.
The day we took our third shower – I had already been here for almost two months – a guard was bringing me back from the bathroom; my long hair was wet under the white blindfold, my dress still torn from the leap over the backyard wall, my hands tied, my bones sticking out of my cheeks and elbows…I suddenly heard a guard singing a folk tune.
"Should treacherous Death
harness me to her hitching post
please use two horse whips to make me
a cross for my headboard.
Should treacherous Death…"
Since that moment they have called me Death. Maybe that is why every day, when I wake up, I say to myself that I, Alicia Partnoy, is still alive.
Shailja Patel
Shailja Patel is an award-winning poet, playwright, theatre artist, and creator of Migritude. She is an active member of Kenyans for Peace, Truth and Justice, which works towards a just and equitable democracy in Kenya, and she works with women’s collectives in Kenya. She is irreverent, funny, and as viciously political sometimes as Giannina Braschi can be.
She requests that people don’t cut and paste her work, so here are some of her poems. On the same site you can also watch videos of her performing, which, do it, do it, do it. She is amazing, and I don’t say that lightly.
Happy International Women’s Day. I love you all.
rydra_wong’s time line, which includes a link to a summary post), I’m making a rec post for my favorite WOC writers. They are all extraordinary and they are all brilliant, and their work differs widely from one another. That last part matters, because as Junot Díaz says, definitions like "immigrant authors" will never not be simplifying, even when they're technically correct.I’ve tried to post about this debate so many times since I got my LJ (incidentally, right as the whole thing took off), but I kept failing at saying anything worthwhile. A lot of other brilliant people have said it better. Instead I’m going to do this, do my job as a graduate student doing research on translations of some of these authors and as a bilingual writer who loves every single one of these women and the way they write. Their work is far more important than anything I could ever hope to say about racism.
I will say this, though: one kind of oppression is not like another, and listening is sadly underrated. For the love of all that is holy, look up intersectionality somewhere.
Here, then, under the cuts are seven authors. I don't think I do them justice here, but I've tried. Clicking on their names in the short information section will take you to their wikipedia entries, and I’m going to edit in links to pages where you can buy their work, because I strongly, strongly urge you to support them so they can continue to write.
Julia Alvarez
Julia Alvarez is a Dominican-American poet, novelist, essayist and academic who blends the personal and the political, and who writes about the duality of being bilingual and bicultural; about how you create your home out of language and culture, even when the world tells you coming home means settling for where you came from or where you ended up.
I kept quiet, knowing our differences
in point of view could snap the fragile thread
that held us there and sour the evening
I needed to take back with me. A word
could snuff the stars that seemed more luminous
in skies left over from my childhood.
From “Last Night at Tía’s," Homecoming.
Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi is a Puerto Rican poet and novelist who writes in English and Spanish both, creating a language sometimes called Spanglish (her novel YO-YO BOING! is seen as the first Spanglish novel). She is brilliant, political, and sometimes viciously funny.
Sure, it's true. Questions can't change the truth. But they give it motion. They focus my truth from another angle. And you said: We're cleaning up the truth. We must clarify certain things.
You never tell the truth and your jacket eventually comes back made of another material, and your shoes say sure!, and run back to you telling my truth. Even if it's raining now, your truth may be that it's not raining inside like it's raining outside. Even if I'm not talking, you may be saying what I'm thinking when you weren't talking.
From "Sure, it’s true," originally published in The Prose Poem: an International Journal. Translated from the original Spanish by Tess O'Dwyer.
Tsitsi Dangarembga
When Tsitsi Dangarembga tried to get her first novel published, she was told it didn’t embody the experience of an African woman. Thankfully other publishers realized that was a bit of a silly idea, given that she is an African woman, and Nervous Conditions, a partially autobiographical account of her childhood in Zimbabwe was published. It’s a work of tragedy and grace and humour.
I was not sorry when my brother died. Nor am I apologising for my callousness, as you may define it, my lack of feeling. For it is not that at all. I feel many things these days, much more than I was able to feel in the days when I was young and my brother died, and there are reasons for this more than the mere consequence of age. Therefore I shall not apologise at all…
From Nervous Conditions.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri often writes about the experience of Indian immigrants to the United States, and she herself says "When I first started writing I was not conscious that my subject was the Indian-American experience. What drew me to my craft was the desire to force the two worlds I occupied to mingle on the page as I was not brave enough, or mature enough, to allow in life."
Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.
From "The Third and Final Continent," Interpreter of Maladies.
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrisson, I hope, needs no introduction. She writes about gender and race and pain and loss and love; about how history continues to come back and continues to matter, but also about how to create new stories in the wake of tragedy.
In Jazz, she writes about violence, racial and not, and about how making a new life is sometimes impossible but sometimes can be managed, even after the worst has happened. The following quote is from there.
But I can’t say that aloud; I can’t tell anyone that I have been waiting for this all of my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.
Alicia Partnoy
Alicia Partnoy is a human rights activist, a poet, and a translator. She was imprisoned for two and a half years, three months of which she spent blindfolded at The Little School, an Argentinian camp for political dissidents, and she has testified many times about what she had to endure there. She wrote about it in The Little School, which should be mandatory reading for everyone.
The day we took our third shower – I had already been here for almost two months – a guard was bringing me back from the bathroom; my long hair was wet under the white blindfold, my dress still torn from the leap over the backyard wall, my hands tied, my bones sticking out of my cheeks and elbows…I suddenly heard a guard singing a folk tune.
"Should treacherous Death
harness me to her hitching post
please use two horse whips to make me
a cross for my headboard.
Should treacherous Death…"
Since that moment they have called me Death. Maybe that is why every day, when I wake up, I say to myself that I, Alicia Partnoy, is still alive.
Shailja Patel
Shailja Patel is an award-winning poet, playwright, theatre artist, and creator of Migritude. She is an active member of Kenyans for Peace, Truth and Justice, which works towards a just and equitable democracy in Kenya, and she works with women’s collectives in Kenya. She is irreverent, funny, and as viciously political sometimes as Giannina Braschi can be.
She requests that people don’t cut and paste her work, so here are some of her poems. On the same site you can also watch videos of her performing, which, do it, do it, do it. She is amazing, and I don’t say that lightly.
Happy International Women’s Day. I love you all.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-08 10:12 pm (UTC)Also, if you're interested in writing on race, I read Aria: a Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood by Richard Rodriguez recently and it was fantastic. It's a pretty short piece that touches on a lot of themes (immigration and the use of language among them) and if you get a chance you should definitely read it.
I keep trying to follow RaceFail '09 and it gives me headaches. So. Many. Posts. And at various points it devolved into sexism wank and pseudonymity wank and ftlog can we all just stop wanking already? THIS is why we can't have nice things!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-08 11:18 pm (UTC)Oh, that sounds fascinating, I totally will!
The summary post is pretty thorough, if you want somewhere to start from--I completely understand being overwhelmed, there is just so much there, it's ridiculous.
Oh, and, hmm, I would maybe not call it wank? With the pseudonymity, what happened was two medium-name scifi authors (who were being kind of obnoxiously racist during the discussion) decided it wasn't fair that one of their critics was "hiding" behind a livejournal (because it's their decision who gets to be anonymous on the internet) and decided to out her. And that (and a lot of other things in this debate) kind of goes beyond wank--I just hate that word a lot, because it carries a connotation of silly, you know? I do wholeheartedly agree that people should stop being idiots, I really wish people were better listeners. It makes me sad. Hence this whole post, because these writers are more important than those assholes. Even if posting this is an exercise in preaching to the choir, because my flist is awesome. ♥
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-09 01:13 am (UTC)It really makes me angry when people are outed to their family/friends who don't know about their slashfiction/fanart/whatever. FFS, there is a line.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-09 01:39 am (UTC)YES. And there are professional implications as well, obviously. Augh, ASSHOLES.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-09 01:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-09 07:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-08 11:26 pm (UTC)This is a gross simplification, but it's some of what happened. There's been a lot of awesome posts about co-opting culture and taking it back, but there's also been crazy, crazy things said by professionals in the publishing industry and big-name authors in the scifi field. The original posts aren't that controversial, it's in Bear's comments that it gets bad and then sprawls out.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-09 12:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-09 01:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-09 07:03 am (UTC)