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4: Gloria Anzald
- Utah State University Press
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4 g L O R I A A N z A L D ú A Borderlands and Fences; Literacy and rhetoric Why am I compelled to write? Because writing saves me from this complacency I fear. Because I have no choice. Because I must keep the spirit of my revolt and myself alive. Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and hunger. I write to record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you. To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. Anzaldúa, 1981 We are used to thinking that we can be responsible only for that which we have done, that which can be traced to our intentions, our deeds. Butler, 2005 Here Gloria Anzaldúa suggests that writing is more than communicating , that it is about the creation and negotiation of identity that challenges the pejorative ways American society defined her and about filling in and filling out the gaps dominant culture created. Her words remind me that until my mother’s second cancer surgery, I did not write anything that mattered. Although there were a few articles and book chapters on my vita by that point, none of those were things I was compelled to write—things that were necessary for my survival, for articulating myself to a society that had marginalized and erased my sexual identity and improverished my life. I was closeted and voiceless in a leftover Leave-It-to-Beaver family/world that provided a kind of safety at the cost of incompleteness—a tradeoff that seemed sufficient until cancer threatened to take my mother, to pull the lynchpin and send me spinning off, rolling like a loose hubcap along the side of the road, moving but no longer attached to a vehicle that could bring me to a destination. Gloria Anzaldúa 119 As I write this brief account of the first real trauma of my life, I realize now that it is suffused with privilege I must tease out, that my whiteness , my happy mostly middle-class home life, and my academic successes insulated me from real pain for the first twenty-seven years of my life, and that although there were costs to such an existence for me, I enjoyed a kind of safety and privilege not offered to all in American society. I come to this understanding both because of the arguments Anzaldúa makes about the need to reconsider the functions of literacy, writing, discourse, and rhetoric in American culture and because she situates these arguments concretely in her life and her experiences with dominant culture in a substantive enough way for me to do the same. From the standpoint of Butler’s argument about the opacity of self-knowledge I introduced in chapter one, the lesson Anzaldúa helps me learn is that I am responsible not just for my deeds—for what I have consciously intended—but also because I have participated in a system in which I experience marginalization but also enjoy considerable privilege . As I have argued in this book, as both individuals and as a discipline , we must account for our positions and their attendant responsibilities if we are to transform our theory, practice, and pedagogy of rhetoric to attend to difference in ways that substantively address the inequities that plague our society. In short, my most basic argument in this chapter is that Anzaldúa shows in rhetorical practice Butler’s theoretical point— that responsibility obtains on the basis of our relationships with others in addition to our direct actions. Anzaldúa can easily be read as calling for the expansion of the usual neo-Aristotelian rhetorical canon because she mixes not only narrative, descriptive, and expository genres but also code-switches among multiple languages and dialects. However, beyond this, Anzaldúa’s work provides a much more explicit and sweeping call for the unsettling of dominant cultural values than did the work of Grimké or Douglass. Indeed, an emerging body of work in rhetoric and composition has begun exploring how Anzaldúa’s work provides the basis for a Mestiza rhetoric, and, more generally, how her work can be seen as part of...