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L I B R E R A

TALLE R LI T E R AT U R A
*CONTEMPORARY USA LITERATURE
2 de julio 6 de agosto 2016 / 3pm 5pm
Coordinador: Reygar Bernal

4ta SESIN: FEMINIST POEMS: A SELECTION

1.- Emily Dickinson (1830 1886)

Im Nobody

Im nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?
Then theres a pair of us dont tell!
Theyd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

2.- Adrienne Rich

Aunt Jennifers Tigers

Aunt Jennifers tigers prance across a screen,

Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifers fingers fluttering through her wool

Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncles wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifers hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hand will lie

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Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid

Afterward

Now that your hopes are shamed, you stand

At last believing and resigned,
And none of us who touch your hand
Know how to give you back in kind
The words you flung when hopes were proud:
Being born to happiness
Above the asking of the crowd,
You would not take a finger less.
We who know limits now give room
To one who grows to fit her1 doom.
An Unsaid Word

She who has power to call her man

From that estranged intensity
Where his mind forages alone,
Yet keeps her peace and leaves him free,
And when his thoughts to her return
Stands where he left her, still his own,
Knows this the hardest thing to learn.

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

1.

You, once a belle in Shreveport,

with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,
still have your dresses copied from that time,
and play a Chopin2 prelude
called by Cortot:3 Delicious recollections
float like perfume through the memory.4

1 When the poem appeared in A Change of World, the phrase read his doom. Amending the
phrase in Poems: Selected and New the poet noted: I have altered the [pronoun] not simply as a
matter of fact but because [it alters], for me, the dimensions of the poem.
2 Frederic Francoise Chopin (1810-49), Polish composer and pianist who settled n Paris in 1831.
3 Alfred Cortot (1877-1962), famous French pianist.

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Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake,
heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

Nervy, glowering, your daughter

wipes the teaspoons, grows another way.

2.

Banging the coffee-pot into the sink

she hears the angels chiding, and looks out
past the raked gardens to the sloppy sky.
Only a week since They said: Have no patience.

The next time it was: Be insatiable.

Then: Save yourself; others you cannot save.
Sometimes shes let the tapstream scald her arm,
a match burn to her thumbnail,
or held her hand above the kettles snout
right in the woolly steam. They are probably angels,
since nothing hurts her anymore, except
each mornings grit blowing into her eyes.

3.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

The beak that grips her, she becomes. And Nature,
that sprung-lidded, still commodious
steamer-trunk of tempora and mores5
gets stuffed with it all: the mildewed orange-flowers,
6
the female pills, the terrible breasts
of Boadicea7 beneath flat foxes heads and orchids.

Two handsome women, gripped in argument,

4 Cortots notation for Prelude No. 7, Andantino, A Major, in the prefatory remarks of his
Chopn: 24 Preludes (Paris, 1930).
5 Literally, times and customs, alluding perhaps to Ciceros phrase O Tempora! O Mores! in
Pro Rege Deiotaro 2.31 (Alas! For the degeneracy of our times and the low standard of our
morals!).
6 Remedies for menstrual pain.
7 British queen in the time of the Emperor Nero who lead her people in a large though finally
unsuccessful revolt against Roman rule.

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each proud, acute, subtle, I hear scream
across the cut glass and majolica
like Furies8 cornered from their prey:
The argument ad feminam,9 all the old knives
that have rusted in my back, I drive in yours,
ma semblable, ma soeur!10

4.

Knowing themselves too well in one another:

their gifts no pure fruition, but a thorn,
the prick filed sharp against a hint of scorn . . .
reading while waiting
for the iron to heat,
writing, My Life had stooda Loaded Gun11
in that Amherst12 pantrywhile the jellies boil and scum,
or, more often,
iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird,
dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life.
5.

Dulce ridens, dulce loquens,13

she shaves her legs until they gleam
like petrified mammoth-tusk.

6.

When to her lute Corinna sings14

neither words nor music are her own;
only the long hair dipping
over her cheek, only the song

8 Greek goddesses of vengeance.

9 Feminine version of the phrase ad hominem, referring to an argument that appeals to
personal interests, prejudices, or emotions rather than to reason or justice.
10 The last line of the poem Au Lecteur by Charles Baudelaire addresses Hypocrite lecteur!
mon semblable,mon frre!: Hypocrite reader, like me, my brothernot as here, my
sister.
11 Poem 754 in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson.
12 The Massachusetts town in which Emily Dickinson lived (1830-86)
13 Latin for sweetly laughing, sweetly speaking. Hirace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Ode 22,
Integer vitae.
14 First line of a poem by Thomas Campion (1567-1620).

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of silk against her knees
and these
adjusted in reflections of an eye.

Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, before

an unlocked door, that cage of cages,
tell us, you bird, you tragical machine
is this fertilisante douleur?15 Pinned down
by love, for you the only natural action,
are you edged more keen
to prise the secrets of the vault? has Nature shown
her household books to you, daughter-in-law,
that her sons never saw?

7.

To have in this uncertain world some stay

which cannot be undermined, is
of the utmost consequence.16
Thus wrote
a woman, partly brave and partly good,
who fought with what she partly understood.
Few men about her would or could do more,
Hence she was labeled harpy, shrew and whore.

8.

You all die at fifteen, said Diderot,17

and turn part legend, part convention.
Still, eyes inaccurately dream
behind closed windows blankening with steam.
Deliciously, all that we werefire, tears,
wit, taste, martyred ambition
stirs like the memory of refused adultery
the drained and flagging bosom of our middle years.

9.

15 French for fertilizing or life-giving sorrow.

16 From Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts of the Education of Daughters, London, 1787 [Richs
note].
17 Denis Diderot (1713-84), French philosopher, encyclopedist, playwright, and critic. You all
die at fifteen: Vous mourez toutes a quinze ans, from the Lettres Sophie Volland, quoted by
Simone de Beauvoir in Le Deuxime Sexe, Vol. II, pp. 123-24 [Richs note].

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Not that it is done well, but
that it is done at all?18 Yes, think
of the odds! or shrugs them off forever.
This luxury of the precocious child,
Times precious chronic invalid,
would we, darlings, resign it if we could?
Our blight has been our sinecure:
mere talent was enough for us
glitter in fragments and rough drafts.

Sigh no more, ladies.

Time is male
and in his cups drinks to the fair.
Bemused by gallantry, we hear
our mediocrities over-praised,
indolence read as abnegation,
slattern thought styled intuition,
every lapse forgiven, our crime
only to cast too bold a shadow
or smash the mold straight off.

For that, solitary confinement,

Tear gas, attrition shelling.
Few applicants for that honor.

10.

Well,
shes long about her coming, who must be
more merciless to herself than history.
Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge
breasted and glancing through the currents,
taking the light upon her
at least as beautiful as any boy
or helicopter,19
poised, still coming,
her fine blades making the air wince

18 An allusion to Samuel Johnsons remark to Boswell: Sir, a womans preaching is like a dogs
walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all (July
31, 1763, Boswells Life of Johnson.
19 She comes from the remoteness of ages, from Thebes, from Crete, from Chichn-Itz; and
she is also the totem set deep in the African jungle; she is a helicopter and she is a bird; and there
is this, the greatest wonder of all: under her tinted hair the forest murmur becomes a thought, and
words issue from her breasts (Simone de Beauvoir, The second sex).

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but her cargo
no promise then:
delivered
palpable
ours.

1958-1960

Planetarium
Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848)
Astronomer, sister of William;20 and others

A woman in the shape of a monster

a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them

A woman in the snow

among the Clocks and instruments
of measuring the ground with poles

in her 98 years to discover

8 comets

she whom the moon ruled

like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there

doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled
in those spaces of the mind

An eye,

20 In helping her brother, William (1738-1822), the discoverer of Uranus, Caroline Herschel
became a superb astronomer in her own right.

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 virile, precise and absolutely certain21
from the mad webs of Uranusborg

encountering the NOVA22
every impulse of light exploding
from the core
as life flies out of us

Tycho whispering at last

Let me not seem to have lived in vain23

What we see, we see

and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain

and leaves a man alive24

Heartbeat of the pulsar25

heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse

pouring in from Taurus26

I am bombarded yet I stand

I have been standing all my life in the

direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe

21 Phrase used by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) to describe his own
observations, but also applicable to the work of Caroline Herschel.
22 Uranienborg, castle in the sky, was the name of the observatory built in 1576 by Brahe. On
November 11, 1573, Brahe discovered the famous New Star in Cassiopeia.
23 Brahes last words.
24 Alludes to 7.144 of the Quran: And when his Lord manifested Himself on the mountain, He
broke it into pieces and Moses fell down unconscious.
25 Celestial object emitting pulses of radio waves, generally thought to be a remnant of a
supernova, or exploding star.
26 The constellation in the Northern Hemisphere near Orion and Aries, also Richs astrological
sign.

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I am a galactic27 cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind. 1968

The stranger

Looking as Ive looked before, straight down the heart

of the street to the river
walking the rivers of the avenues
feeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphalt
watching the lights turn on in the towers
walking as Ive walked before
like a man, like a woman, in the city
my visionary anger cleansing my sight
and the detailed perceptions of mercy
flowering from that anger

if I come into a room out of the sharp misty light

and hear them talking a dead language
if they ask me my identity
what can I say but
I am the androgyne28
I am the living mind you fail to describe
in your dead language
the lost noun, the verb surviving
only in the infinitive
the letters of my name are written under the lids
of the new born child
1972

Re-forming the Crystal

I am trying to imagine
how it feels to you
to want a woman

27 Of, pertaining to, occurring in, or originating in the Milky Way.

28 One who has male and female characteristics physically or, as intended here, psychologically.

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 trying to hallucinate
desire
centered in a cock
focused like a burning-glass

desire without discrimination:

to want a woman like a fix

Desire: yes: the sudden knowledge, like coming out of flu, that the body is sexual. Walking in
the streets with that knowledge. That evening in the plane from Pittsburgh, fantasizing going to
meet you. Walking through the airport blazing with energy and joy. But knowing all along that
you were not the source of that energy and joy; you were a man, a stranger, a name, a voice on
the telephone, a friend; this desire was mine, this energy my energy; it could be used a hundred
ways, and going to meet you could be one of them.

Tonight is a different kind of night.

I sit in the car, racing the engine,
calculating the thinness of the ice,
In my head I am already threading the beltways
that rim this city,
all the old roads that used to wander the country
having been lost.
Tonight I understand
my photo on the license is not me,
my
name on the marriage-contract was not mine.
If I remind you of my fathers favorite daughter,
look again. The woman
I needed to call my mother
was silenced before I was born.

Tonight if the battery charges I want to take the car out on sheet-ice. I want to understand my
fear both of the machine and of the accidents of nature. My desire for you is not trivial; I can
compare it with the greatest of those accidents. But the energy it draws on might lead to racing a
cold engine, cracking the frozen spiderweb, parachuting into the field of a poem wired with
danger, or to a trip through gorges and canyons, into the cratered night of female memory, where
delicately and with intense care the chieftainess inscribes upon the ribs of the volcano the name
of the one she has chosen.
1973

Power

Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth

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one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie29

she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying

her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power
1974

The Phenomenology of Anger (2 Fragments)

4. White light splits the room.

Table. Window. Lampshade. You.

My hands, sticky in a new way.

Menstrual blood
seeming to leek from your side.

Will the judges try to tell me

which was the blood of whom?

9. The only real love I have ever felt

was for children and other women.
Everything else was lust, pity,
self-hatred, pity, lust.
This is a womans confession.
Now, look again at the face

29 Polish-born chemist and physicist (1864-1934) who, after coming to France and marrying
Pierre Curie, did pioneering research on radioactivity. The Curies discovered radium and isolated
it from pitchblende. Marie Curie was the first person to be awarded the Nobel Prize twice.

11
of Botticellis Venus,30 Kali,31
the Judith of Chartres32
with her so called smile.

3.- Harryette Mullen

Tree Tall Woman

Tree tall woman

who made herself
from wind and earth

Her feet keep the soil together

Her arms surround the sky

A woman whose toes

hold on to the earth
combing her hair with a cloud

This woman who hears secrets

whispered among the leaves
walking with butterflies
fluttering at her fingertips 1981

Heritage

In the third grade I looked like a little dark Olive Oyl

with my pigtail and my navy blue Buster brown shirt
and skirt with white piping near the hem.

Then one day I looked behind me and discovered

Id inherited my grandmothers big butt after all. 1981

30 The reference is to The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli (1447?-1510); the painting is now
in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.
31 Hindu goddess, wife of Shiva, often depicted dancing triumphantly on his body.
32 On the north portal of Chartres cathedral is a series of scenes depicting Judiths decapitation
of the Assyrian general Holofernes (Book of Judith 8-13).

12
 Eyes in the Back of Her Head

Im your momma, and I could always tell when

youre doin something you aint got no business.
Hell, I know you: I birthed you.
Saw you before you saw yourself.
Watched you climb a chair to the
kitchens highest shelf and steal
a sip of whiskey,
just to know how it felt going down your throat.
You choked, but I beat you for it anyway,
cause the stuff aint made for kids to waste.
Sides, was too early for you to get to
likin that taste.

Yeah, Im your momma, got eyes in the back of my head.

I guessed what youd do before you did it.
I knew your secret before you thought,
and hid it.
And, hey, you better look down, child,
dont roll your eyes at me.
you can aim those bullets but
you cant shoot em.
I mean, your young eyes aint no
Match for mine.
Or for the minefields you got to walk through blind
cause you wont let my old sight
see you through.

Now I want to close

those mommas extra eyes,
since you cant see what they see,
or let them see for you.
Since they wont keep me smug against
the things that hurt me once,
that will hurt me twice.

Im your momma (she always said).

Yeah, Ive got eyes in the back of my head.
Eyes that see where youre goin,
where Ive been. 1981

My Grandmother

White men

13
opening doors
for her
was liberation 1981

From Trimmings (1991)

Becoming, for a song. A belt becomes such a small waist. Snakes around her, wrapping. Add
waist to any figure, subtract, divide. Accessories multiply a look. Just the thing, a handy belt
suggests embrace. Sucks her in. She buckles. Smiles, tighter. Quick to spot a bulge below the
belt.

Lips, clasped together. Old leather fastened with a little snap. Strapped, broke. Quick snatch, in a
clutch, chased the lady with the alligator purse. Green thief, off relief, got into her pocketbook by
hook or crook.

Tender white kid, off-white tan. Snug black leather, second skin. Fits like a love, an utter other
uttered. Bag of tricks, slight hand preserved, a dainty. A solid color covers while rubber is
protection. Tight is tender, softness cored. Alive and warm, some animal hides. Ghosts wear
fingers, delicate wrists.

The color nude, a flesh tone. Whose flesh unfolds barely, appealing tan. Shelf life of stacked
goods. Body stalking software inventories summer stock. Thin-skinned Godiva with a wig on
horseback, body cast in a sit calm.

Bare skin almost, underworn. Warm stitched-together soft torn toy. Stuffed and laced voluptuous
imaginary mammal made of lovely lumps. Dear plump-cheeked plaything taken to bed and
hugged in the dark.

Of a girl, in white, between the lines, in the spaces where nothing is written. Her starched
petticoats, giving him the slip. Loose lips, a telltale spot, where she was kissed, and told. Who
would believe her, lying still between the sheets. The pillow cases, the dirty laundry laundered.
Pillow talk-show on a leather couch, slips in and out of dreams. Without permission, slips out the
door. A name adores a Freudian slip.

From Muse & Drudge (1995)

Sapphires lyre styles

plucked eyebrows
bow lips and legs

14
whose lives are lonely too

my last nerves lucid music

sure chewed up the juicy fruit
you must dont like my peaches
theres some left on the tree

youve had my thrills

a reefer a tub of gin
dont mess with me Im evil
Im in your sin

clipped bird eclipsed moon

soon no memory of you
no drive or desire survives
you flutter invisible still

keep your powder dry

your knees together
your dress down
your drawers shut

a picture perfect
twisted her limbs
lovely as a tree
for arts sake

muse of the world picks

out stark melodies
her raspy fabric
tickling the ebonies

you can sing their songs

with words your way
put it over to the people
know what you doing

Dim Lady

My honeybunchs peepers are nothing like neon. Todays special at Red Lobster is redder than
her kisser. If Liquid Paper is white, her racks are institutional beige. If her mop were Slinkys,
dishwater Slinkys would grow on her noggin. I have seen tablecloths in Shakeys Pizza Parlors,
reed and white, but no such picnic colors do I see in her mug. And in some minty-fresh

15
mouthwashes there is more sweetness than in the garlic breeze my main squeeze wheezes. I love
to hear her rap, yet Im aware that Muzak has a hipper beat. I dont know any Marilyn Monroes.
My ball and chain is plain from head to toe. And yet, by gosh, my scrumptious Twinkie has as
much sex appeal for me as any lanky model or platinum movie idol whos hyped beyond belief.
2002

4.- Margaret Atwood (Canadian)

Gertrude Talks Back

I always thought it was a mistake, calling you Hamlet. I mean, what kind of a name is that for a
young boy? It was your fathers idea. Nothing would do but that you had to be called after him.
Selfish. The other kids at school used to tease the life out of you. The nick-names! And those
terrible jokes about pork.

I wanted to call you George.

I am not wringing my hands. Im drying my nails.

Darling, please stop fidgeting with my mirror. Thatll be the third one youve broken.

Yes, Ive seen those pictures, thank you very much. I know your father was handsomer than
Claudius. High brow, aquiline nose and so on, looked great in uniform. But handsome isnt
everything, especially in a man, and far be it from me to speak ill of the dead, but I think its
about time I pointed out to you that your Dad just wasnt a whole lot of fun. Noble, sure, I grant
you. But Claudius, well, he likes a drink now and then. He appreciates a decent meal. He enjoys
a laugh, know what I mean? You dont always have to be tiptoeing around because of some
holier-than-thou principle or something.

By the way, darling, I wish you wouldnt call your stepdad the bloat king. He does have a slight
weight-problem, and it hurts his feelings.

The rank sweat of a what? My bed is certainly not enseamed, whatever that might be! A nasty
sty, indeed! Not that its any of your business, but I change those sheets twice a week, which is
more than you do, judging from that student slum pigpen in Wittenberg. Ill certainly never visit
you there again without prior warning! I see that laundry of yours when you bring it home, and
not often enough either, by a long shot! Only when you run out of black socks.

And let me tell you, everyone sweats at a time like that, as youd find out very soon if you ever
gave it a try. A real girlfriend would do you a heap of good. Not like that pasty-faced whats-her-
name, all trussed up like a prize turkey in those touch-me-not corsets of hers. If you ask me
theres something off about that girl. Borderline. Any little shock could push her right over the
edge.

16
Go get yourself someone more down-to-earth. Have a nice roll in the hay. Then you can talk to
me about nasty sties.

No, darling, I am not mad at you. But I must say youre an awful prig sometimes. Just like your
Dad. The Flesh, hed say. Youd think it was dog dirt. You can excuse that in a young person,
they are always intolerant, but in someone his age it was getting, well, very hard to live with, and
thats the understatement of the year.

Some days I think it would have been better for both of us if you hadnt been an only child. But
you realize who you have to thank for that. You have no idea what I used to put up with. And
every time I felt like a little, you know, just to warm up my ageing bones, it was like Id
suggested murder.

Oh! You think what? You think Claudius murdered your Dad? Well, no wonder youve been so
rude to him at the dinner table!

If Id known that, I could have put you straight in no time flat.

It wasnt Claudius, darling.

It was me. 1992

5.- Gloria Anzalda

To live in the Borderlands means you

are neither hispana india negra espaola

ni gabacha33, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breed
caught in the crossfire between camps
while carrying all five races on your back
not knowing which side to turn to, run from;

To live in the Borderlands means knowing

that the india in you, betrayed for 500 years,
is no longer speaking to you,
that mexicanas call you rajetas34,

33 Gabacha: a Chicano term for a white woman

34 Rajetas: literally, split, that is, having betrayed your word

17
 that denying the Anglo inside you
is as bad as having denied the Indian or Black;

Cuando vives in la frontera

people walk through you, the wind steals your voice,
youre a burra, buey, scapegoat,
forerunner of a new race,
half and halfboth woman and man, neither
a new gender;

To live in the Borderlands means to

put chile in the borscht,
eat whole wheat tortillas,
speak Tex-Mex with a Brooklyn accent;
be stopped by la migra at the border checkpoints;

Living in the Borderlands means you fight hard to

resist the gold elixir beckoning from the bottle,
the pull of the gun barrel,
the rope crushing the hollow of your throat;

In the Borderlands
you are the battleground
where enemies are kin to each other;
you are at home, a stranger,
the border disputes have been settled
the volley of shots have shattered the truce
you are wounded, lost in action
dead, fighting back;

To live in the Borderlands means

the mill with the razor white teeth wants to shred off
your olive-red skin, crush out the kernel, your heart
pound you pinch you roll you out
smelling like white bread but dead;

To survive the Borderlands

you must live sin fronteras
be a crossroads.

Don't Give In Chicanita

(para Missy Anzaldua)

Dont give in mi prietita

Tighten your belt, endure.

18
Your lineage is ancient,
your roots like those of the mesquite,
firmly planted, digging underground
toward that current,the soul of tierra madre
your origin.

Yes, mijita, your people were raised en los ranchos

here in the valley near the Rio Grande
you descended from the first cowboy, the vaquero,
right smack in the border
in the age before the Gringo when Texas was Mexico
over en los ranches los Vergeles y Jess Mara
Dvila land.
Strong women reared you:
my sister, your mom, my mother and I.

And yes, theyve taken our lands.

Not even the cemetery is our now
where they buried Don Urbano
your great-great-grandfather.
Hard times like fodder we carry
with curved backs we walk.

But they will never take that pride

of being mexicana-Chicana-tejana
nor our Indian womans spirit.
And when the Gringos are gone
see how they kill one another
here well still be like the horned toad and the lizard
relics of an earlier age
survivors of the First Fire Ageel Quinto Sol.

Perhaps well be dying of hunger as usual

but well be members of a new species
skin tone between black and bronze
second eyelid under the first
with the power to look at the sun through naked eyes.
And alive mijita, very much alive.

Yes, in a few years or centuries

la Raza will rise up, tongue intact
carrying the best of all the cultures.
That sleeping serpent,
rebellion-(r)evolution, will spring up.
Like old skin will fall the slave ways of
obedience, acceptance, silence.

19
Like serpent lightning well move, little woman.
Youll see.

Translated from the Spanish by the author Gloria Anzalda

How to Tame a Wild Tongue

"We're going to have to control your tongue,"

the dentist says, pulling out all the metal from my mouth. Silver bits plop and tinkle into the
basin. My mouth is a motherlode.
The dentist is cleaning out my roots. I get a
whiff of the stench when I gasp. "I can't cap that tooth yet, you're still draining," he says.
"We're going to have to do something about
your tongue," I hear the anger rising in his voice. My tongue keeps pushing out the wads of
cotton, pushing back the drills, the long thin needles. I've never seen anything as strong or as
stubborn," he says. And I think, how do you tame a wild tongue, train it to be quiet, how do you
bridle and saddle it? How do you make it lie down?

"Who is to say that robbing a people of

its language is less violent than war?"
- Ray Gwyn Smith

I remember being caught speaking Spanish at recess that was good for three licks on the
knuckles with a sharp ruler. I remember being sent to the comer of the classroom for "talking
back" to the Anglo teacher when all I was trying to do was tell her how to pronounce my name.
"If you want to be American, speak 'American.' If you don't like it, go back to Mexico where you
belong."
"I want you to speak English. Pa' hallar buen trabajo tienes que saber hablar el ingls
bien. Qu vale toda tu educacin si todava hablas ingls con un 'accent:" my mother would say,
mortified that I spoke English like a Mexican. At Pan American University, I and all Chicano
students were required to take two speech classes. Their purpose: to get rid of our accents.
Attacks on one's form of expression with the intent to censor are a violation of the First
Amendment. El Anglo con cara de inocente nos arranc la lengua. Wild tongues can't be tamed,
they can only be cut out.

Overcoming the Tradition of Silence

Ahogadas, escupimos el oscuro.

Peleando con nuestra propia sombra
el silencio nos sepulta.

En boca cerrada no entran moscas. "Flies don't enter a closed mouth" is a saying I kept
hearing when I was a child. Ser habladora was to be a gossip and a liar, to talk too much.
Muchachitas bien criadas, well-bred girls don't answer back. Es una falta de respeto to talk back
to one's mother or father. I remember one of the sins I'd recite to the priest in the confession box

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the few times I went to confession: talking back to my mother, hablar pa' 'tras, repelar.
Hocicona, repelona, chismosa, having a big mouth, questioning, carrying tales are all signs of
being mal criada. In my culture they are all words that are derogatory if applied to womenI've
never heard them applied to men.

The first time I heard two women, a Puerto Rican and a Cuban, say the word "nosotras,"
I was shocked. I had not known the word existed. Chicanas use nosotros whether we're male or
female. We are robbed of our female being by the masculine plural. Language is a male
discourse.

And our tongues have become

dry the wilderness has
dried out our tongues and
we have forgotten speech.
- Irena Klepflsz

Even our own people, other Spanish speakers nos quieren poner candados en la boca.
They would hold us back with their bag of reglas de academia.

Oye como ladra:

El lenguaje de la frontera

Quien tiene boca se equivoca.

- Mexican saying

"Pocho, cultural traitor, you're speaking the oppressor's language by speaking English,
you're ruining the Spanish language," I have been accused by various Latinos and Latinas.
Chicano Spanish is considered by the purist and by most Latinos deficient, a mutilation of
Spanish.
But Chicano Spanish is a border tongue which developed naturally. Change, evolucin,
enriquecimiento de palabras nuevas por invencin o adopcin have created variants of Chicano
Spanish, un nuevo lenguaje. Un lenguaje que corresponde a un modo de vivir. Chicano Spanish
is not incorrect, it is a living language.
For a people who are neither Spanish nor live in a country in which Spanish is the first
language; for a people who live in a country in which English is the reigning tongue but who are
not Anglo; for a people who cannot entirely identify with either standard (formal, Castillian)
Spanish nor standard English, what recourse is left to them but to create their own language? A
language which they can connect their identity to, one capable of communicating the realities
and values true to themselvesa language with terms that are neither espaol ni ingls, but noth.
We speak a patois, a forked tongue, a variation of two languages.
[]

Linguistic Terrorism

Deslenguadas. Somos los del espaol deficiente. We are your linguistic

nightmare. your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestisaje, the subject
of your burla. Because we speak with tongues of fire we are culturally

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 crucified. Racially, culturally, and linguistically somos hurfanoswe
speak an orphan Longue.

Chicanas who grew up speaking Chicano Spanish have internalized the belief that we
speak poor Spanish. It is illegitimate, a bastard language. And because we internalize how our
language has been used against us by the dominant culture, we use our language differences
against each other.
Chicana feminists often skirt around each other with suspicion and hesitation. For the
longest time I couldn't figure it out. Then it dawned on me. To be close to another Chicana is like
looking into the mirror. We are afraid of what we'll see there. Pena. Shame. Low estimation of
self. In childhood we are told that our language is wrong. Repeated attacks on our native tongue
diminish our sense of self. The attacks continue throughout our lives.
Chicanas feel uncomfortable talking in Spanish to Latinas, afraid of their censure. Their
language was not outlawed in their countries. They had a whole lifetime of being immersed in
their native tongue; generations, centuries in which Spanish was a first language, taught in
school, heard on radio and TV, and read in the newspaper.
If a person, Chicana or Latina, has a low estimation of my native tongue, she also has a
low estimation of me. Often with mexicanas y latinas we'll speak English as a neutral language.
Even among Chicanas we tend to speak English at parties or conferences. Yet, at the same time,
we're afraid the other will think we're agringadas because we don't speak Chicano Spanish. We
oppress each other trying to out-Chicano each other, vying to be the "real" Chicanas, to speak
like Chicanos. There is no one Chicano language just as there is no one Chicano experience. A
monolingual Chicana whose first language is English or Spanish is just as much a Chicana as one
who speaks several variants of Spanish. A Chicana from Michigan or Chicago or Detroit is just
as much a Chicana as one from the Southwest. Chicano Spanish is as diverse linguistically as it
is regionally.
By the end of this century, Spanish speakers will comprise the biggest minority group in
the United States, a country where students in high schools and colleges are encouraged to take
French classes because French is considered more "cultured." But for a language to remain alive
it must be used. By the end of this century English, and not Spanish, will be the mother tongue of
most Chicanos and Latinos.

So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin
skin to linguistic identityI am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot
take pride in myself. Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex, and all
the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself. Until I am free to write
bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak
English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate
the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate.
I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian,
Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tonguemy woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's
voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.

My fingers
move sly against your palm
Like women everywhere, we speak in code . . . .
- Melanie Kave/Kantrowitz

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 Si le preguntas a mi mam, "Qu eres?"

"Identity is the essential core of who

we are as individuals, the conscious
experience of the self inside."
- Gershen Kaufman

Nosotros los Chicanos straddle the borderlands. On one side of us, we are constantly
exposed to the Spanish of the Mexicans, on the other side we hear the Anglos' incessant
clamoring so that we forget our language. Among ourselves we don't say nosotros los
americanos, a nosotros los espaoles, a nosotros los hispanos. We say nosotros los mexicanos
(by mexicanos we do not mean citizens of Mexico; we do not mean a national identity, but a
racial one). We distinguish between mexicanos del otro lado and mexicanos de este lado. Deep in
our hearts we believe that being Mexican has nothing to do with which country one lives in.
Being Mexican is a state of soulnot one of mind, not one of citizenship. Neither eagle nor
serpent, but both. And like the ocean, neither animal respects borders.

Dime con quin andas y le dir quin eres.

(Tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you who you are.)
- Mexican saying

Si le preguntas a mi mam, "Qu eres?" te dir, "Soy mexicana." My brothers and sister
say the same. I sometimes will answer "soy mexicana" and at others will say "soy Chicana" o
"soy tejana." But I identified as "Raza" before I ever identified as "mexicana" or "Chicana."
As a culture, we call ourselves Spanish when referring to ourselves as a linguistic group
and when copping out. It is then that we forget our predominant Indian genes. We are 70-80
percent Indian. We call ourselves Hispanic" or Spanish-American or Latin American or Latin
when linking ourselves to other Spanish speaking peoples of the Western hemisphere and when
copping out. We call ourselves Mexican-American to signify we are neither Mexican nor
American, but more the noun "American" than the adjective "Mexican" (and when copping out).
Chicanos and other people of color suffer economically for not acculturating. This
voluntary (yet forced) alienation makes for psychological conflict, a kind of dual identitywe
don't identify with the Anglo-American cultural values and we don't totally identify with the
Mexican cultural values. We are a synergy of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness
or Angloness. I have so internalized the borderland conflict that sometimes I feel like one cancels
out the other and we are zero, nothing, no one. A veces no soy nada ni nadie. Pero hasta cuando
no lo soy, lo soy.
When not copping out, when we know we are more than nothing, we call ourselves
Mexican, referring to race and ancestry; mestizo when affirming both our Indian and Spanish
(but we hardly ever own our Black) ancestry; Chicano when referring to a politically aware
people born and/or raised in the United States.; Raza when referring to Chicanos; tejanos when
we are Chicanos from Texas.
Chicanos did not know we were a people until 1965 when Cesar Chavez and the
farmworkers united and I Am Joaquin was published and la Raza Unida party was formed in
Texas. With that recognition, we became a distinct people. Something momentous happened to
the Chicano soulwe became aware of our reality and acquired a name and a language (Chicano

23
Spanish) that reflected that reality. Now that we had a name, some of the fragmented pieces
began to fall togetherwho we were, what we were, how we had evolved. We began to get
glimpses of what we might eventually become.
Yet the struggle of identities continues, the struggle of borders is our reality still. One day
the inner struggle will cease and a true integration take place. In the meantime, tenemos que
hacer la lucha. Quin est protegiendo los ranchos de mi gente? Quin est tratando de
cerrar la fisura entre la india y el blanco en nuestra sangre? EI Chicano, s, el Chicano que
anda como un ladrn en su propia casa.

Los Chicanos, how patient we seem, how very patient. There is the quiet of the Indian
about us. We know how to survive. When other races have given up their tongue, we've kept
ours. We know what it is to live under the hammer blow of the dominant norteamericano culture.
But more than we count the blows, we count the days the weeks the years the centuries the eons
until the white laws and commerce and customs will rot in the deserts they've created, lie
bleached. Humildes yet proud, quietos yet wild, nosotros los mexicanos-Chicanos will walk by
the crumbling ashes as we go about our business. Stubborn, persevering, impenetrable as stone,
yet possessing a malleability that renders us unbreakable, we, the mestizas and mestizos, will
remain.

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