Blog Post #2

I just finished reading Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers and I feel like a lot of the ideals that we have been reading up until this point were turned on their heads. Yes, Gloria Anzaldua writes about writing yourself and writing life similar to what Cixous writes but she also points out a lot of faults in all of the mostly white, feminist women writers we have been reading. Those women, in their need to find women's voices are excluding and silencing other voices. They are so exuberant and excited about their ideas that they forget that life presents itself differently to everyone and that means that not everyone, particularly women of color are not going to connect and relate directly to those proposed feminist ideals. Woolf, according to Azaldua is forgetting the key ideals ot women writing which is life. She is forgetting about time too. She forgets that the inspiration to write comes from our “distractions.”And as a women writer this makes sense. What else is life without distractions? Life is made up of distractions; that is what life is. And as Anzaldua says, writing is life; it is the spit up, the tears, the screams, the laughter of life.I also found it interesting how she spoke about the corruption and distortion schooling and education has done to her writing. It has fitted her into an agenda. “I have not yet un-learned the esoteric bullshit and pseudo-intellectualizing that school brainwashed into my writing.” How can someone who doesn't fit into the normal be taught to write? How can anyone who isn't us and hasn't lived our lives teach us to write? And when someone does teach us, they more than often are teaching us “wrong.” They teach us what they know. But writing, as living is, necessary. “I write to record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you.” How can we write what we need to say if we are only writing what we have been taught? We cannot.