Risk, Courage, and Women: Contemporary Voices in Prose and Poetry

the courage of choice

115 the courage of choice Not to choose is to have already chosen. –jean-paul sartre As we hear from our authors’ voices, courage has a cacophony of sounds. While not bold in its immediacy, the courage to choose a path or action may demonstrate a considered willingness to move forth despite one’s fears. Many of these authors considered their decisions carefully and over time before acting . In accepting societal responses ranging from ostracism to punishment and incarceration, our writers in this chapter choose to move forward in the face of overwhelming obstacles. In “Fire Walk,” as an activist in the Humane movement, Amy Freeman Lee prepares to address a hostile national audience of animal laboratory scientists. Her profound belief that it is morally, ethically, and spiritually wrong to use animals in experiments demanded that she accept the invitation. She writes, “I have never worked harder on a speech in my whole life.” It wasn’t physical danger that she was concerned about, but “the risk to the mind and spirit in the form of ridicule and false accusations.” While also having strong beliefs, Catherine Kasper had to put them aside. She had always wanted to go to graduate school, but gave up her dream to take care of her parents. For fifteen years “there was no time to think about other choices, and no one to offer them.” Then her father died. She writes, “I could work at a meaningless job until I died, like my father. Or I could learn how to live…. I chose the latter.” In “Begin Again,” Kasper chooses to follow her dream. Despite negativity and a lack of others’ belief in her, she risked applying to doctoral programs. Afterwards, nothing else seemed as daunting. She writes, “The price of risk varies, but the ability to take one opens up a world of new possibilities.” Both Catherine Kasper and Demetrice Anntía Worley found both struggle and fulfillment in their writing. In Worley’s poem, “The Dark and Gray of Morning Light,” the voice asks “From where comes strength to lift the veil, to dream, to write?” Carl Sandburg notes, “Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” In Worley’s room, candles burn despite the dark light, consuming 116 Risk, Courage, and Women another’s power over her. Buoyed by prayer, she is now ready to “dance.” Her strength to write returns, along with her dreams. Isaura Barrera is also alone in a mainstream culture that opposes so many of the values of her home. In “Sacred Space, Stage Setters, and Miracle Makers,” she writes that courage is the journey. It is “primarily about the path that we walk and only secondarily about the places where the path may take us.” She looks at her parents and sees that they had a courage that wasn’t reflected in her school curriculum, but a courage “rooted in the heart” that was linked to their “deepest longings and most cherished dreams.” Suffering for years with the “disjuncture between the paths of my lived-in ‘home’ world and those I read in my ‘academic’ world,” she was forced to devalue this courage of heart in favor of an unfamiliar, majority view. In the process, she learns that “claiming and expressing one’s self, one who is ‘at heart,’ takes courage at any age.” The voice in Mitsuye Yamada’s poem suffered as well. In “The Club,” the abusive husband pits his ideal woman against his real, and therefore less perfect , woman. She was never to touch “this prized / wooden statue,” but after a succession of beatings she found the courage to hold this weapon. She placed it “between my clothes in my packed suitcase.” Overcoming one’s fear of “the dark” is also a theme in Joan Loveridge-Sanbonmatsu’s poem, “Night Is My Friend.” A soothing melody emanating from nature allows her to move forth. She reminds us both of our childhood when night was full of frightening objects and also of our adulthood when we still seek the courage to move into the unknown. But some authors gave up their own freedom to insure justice for others. In her essay, “The Edge: Across Borders, Over the Line, Through Prison Gates,” Doris Sage describes how her experiences in El Salvador gave her the courage to find her voice and actively participate in demonstrations to close down the School of the Americas. She chose a path where she paid for her beliefs by going to...