1
The Other: Poetic Reflections on Third World Feminist Literature
Leah Knowles WMS 530 Global Women's Issues March 31, 2010
2 When I chose poetry as a medium to explore the various concepts affecting global women, I knew it would be a challenge. I have studied poetry, I have written poetry, and I have been critiqued as a poet and as a poetic interpreter. For me, poetry is almost entirely an aggravation. I've always faced obstacles with the genre, even as I appreciate the raw emotional muscle that infuses the poetic form. In aiming to create poetry which centers around my personal connection to the plight of the “Third World” woman, I realized my task was impossible. There is no homogenized collective of women from the so-called Global South. I have never felt the emotions one feels after witnessing the savage rape and murder of family members. I have never known what it is to be utterly, unfathomable alone. To be abandoned. Dispensable. I have never been denied education; I have never truly appreciated the worth of literacy. Still, I have known what it means to have my body stolen from me. I have felt the immense loss of agency. Perhaps there is some universality in that. Perhaps the billions of people looking into the center from the margins will realize their power. We've got them surrounded. In the poems above, I strove for honesty and unity. I struggled to define concepts like globalization, colonization, identity, Third World feminism, collective memory, the “Other,” and connected subordination. I have discussed these issues with friends, colleagues, and family and I hope I have learned in the process. I cannot claim definitive conclusions, but I did learn. I am more hopeful for collaborative efforts. I foresee humility and understanding in future global feminist praxis. One of the most significant lessons I took from this project is the value of process over a final, polished product. To live in the present is to find enlightenment along the way. Maybe the means justifies the end. I am far from certain about any of these ideas, but the journey was valuable and poignant. For me and the heterogeneous women of the Third World, “poetry is not a luxury” (Feminist Theory 15). The first poem, entitled “Between,” was born out of a personal belief as well as concepts we have discussed in class. In using a character with a mental illness (in this case, “schizo”), I attempted to invoke one of my earliest methods of “othering” myself. Since I was young, I have always felt something beyond pity for individuals with mental disabilities. Whether their conditions were caused by heredity, advanced age, or environmental factors, I considered the mentally ill with a sense of awe and respect. I was uncomfortable with the way they were treated as if they were helpless, dependent, and inept. I realized their illnesses could cause harm, but I felt the isolation from society developed from their inability to assimilate with the rest of civilized society. They were an embarrassment like
3 other minorities, and therefore must be hidden away. I am reminded of “Mad Bertha's” character in Elizabeth Nunez's Beyond the Limbo Silence. Another observation I have made about the mentally handicapped is the fact that many of them are gifted with tremendous mental ability. Take for example those with autism, Asperger's syndrome, or even those we do not consider to be mentally unstable (those incredibly intelligent people who have trouble fitting in socially). They are misunderstood and ostracized because they are above normal. I use the word above because I have always felt there was a systemic societal envy of their abilities. In a society where assimilation is prized above abnormally talented individuals, the mentally disabled do not fit in the center. The problem of defining the boundary between intellect and insanity is at the heart of this poem. There exists a hegemony among interdisciplinary academia, and those in power make the decisions about what is intelligent and what is not. Quite often, those in positions of power share common traits. They are frequently white, male, upper-class, and heterosexual. If we take the concept of “passing” as it pertains to race and apply it to intellect, who passes? Is it the lower-class Latina with Asperger's or the quirky, anti-social doctoral student who also happens to be a white male? In any society, social location heavily influences who receives an education, and in western societies it is far from equal distribution among the oppressors and the oppressed. Although many marginalized peoples may be quite intelligent, their lack of literacy combined with the cryptic rhetoric of the intellectuals will continue to widen the gap between them. Gloria Anzaldúa speaks against this privileging of jargon and language: “I have not yet unlearned the esoteric bullshit and pseudo-intellectualizing that school brainwashed into my writing” (Women Writing Resistance 79). Much like the camouflaged talents of the mentally ill, Anzaldúa challenges feminists to remember the gifts of uneducated women of color. “...many of us women of color who have strung degrees, credentials, and published books around our necks like pearls that we hand onto for dear life are in danger of contributing to the invisibility of our sister-writers” (Women Writing Resistance 82). She also reflects on the elitism and closed-mindedness of academics when she writes: “Many who have words and tongue have no ear, they cannot listen and they will not hear” (Women Writing Resistance 89). The privilege of education is taken for granted by the powerful, and it is vital that even as we learn, we do not forget the wisdom of subaltern knowledges.
4 In her essay “Under Western Eyes,” Chandra Mohanty also acknowledges the oppression of knowledge. “...western feminist writing on women in the Third World must be considered in the context of the global hegemony of western scholarship” (Mohanty 21). Nawal El Saadawi also writes on the hierarchy of knowledge and our responsibility to practice inclusion in our activism. “They [the global powers] want to separate the intellectuals and the peoples who resist at home” (Saadawi 132). In her essay on “dissidence and creativity,” El Saadawi critiques western academics for their inaccessibility: “These scholars drowned in abstract theories and words taken out of context” (Saadawi 164). Krik? Krak! By Edwidge Danticat also supports the necessity for marginalized knowledge bases present in my poem. The grandmother reminds her grand-daughter that “intelligence is not only in reading and writing” (Danticat 107). Unfortunately, literacy is valued above other forms of wisdom in the intellectual power dynamic. As we can see in Nervous Conditions, literacy is only granted to a select few. Tambudzai recalls her anger at her brother over his gloating. She reflects: “If he had not insisted that there were other criteria that disqualified me at the outset, I might have been happy for him. But he did insist, and I was very angry indeed” (Dangarembga 50). Dangarembga also shows the unique dialectic women face in their pursuit of education. “I was an intelligent girl but I had also to develop into a good woman, he said, stressing both qualities equally and not seeing any contradiction in this” (89). While my poem “Between” uses the example of the paranoid schizophrenic, the principle of including marginalized intelligence can be readily applied to the conditions of Third World women as well. My second poem is called “Spectrum” and reflects my love of the variety of brilliant colors which are found in this world. I often feel if I was born in a tropical climate my love of bright colors would be more socially accepted. I don't understand why earth tones only include browns and greens when every color exists naturally on the earth somewhere or another. “It is custom, however, not chromosomes, that leads us to choose scarlet over pink... older sisters and mothers who had grown up on a tropical island where the natural environment was a riot of primary colors, where showing your skin was one way to keep cool as well as to look sexy” (Women Writing Resistance 111). Colors symbolize and represent culture. In our society, for example, pink represents female children and blue is the designated color for little boys. This poem expresses my dissatisfaction with the vanilla landscape of western culture and my craving for the colors and flavors of different cultures. Assisted by much of our reading, I have
5 realized that in this way I crave the exotic mystery these tropical nations inhabit, and in this way I establish their otherness and my own centrality. Even if I feel their courage to decorate and surround themselves with bold brilliance is a more positive and cheerful view of the world compared to our drab environment, we are still the normal ones. How does one appreciate cultures which are different from her own without making them exotic? This is a conflict which still presents a challenge for me. How does exoticism affect the people of these lands? We can see that Angela's character in Beyond the Limbo Silence succumbs to her image as the exotic, and it reduces her person down to an historically inaccurate, objectified cliché. In othering colorful cultures, even if I reject the drab lack of color in my own, I support western cultural dominance. The color white in my poem represents the literal, quite depressing color of a New Haven overcast sky, but it also symbolizes white supremacy. As ugly as I feel the white and beige we wear on our bodies and slap on our walls and houses is, it doesn't negate the fact that we are still the center of the spectrum. Bright colors are not “in” over here; that's something poor folks do over there. As much as I love the rainbow, white remains at the top. I also found as I wrote this poem that I need to acknowledge the brightness that does exist in western culture. There is a danger in homogenizing “our” and “we” just as there is with Third World women. There are those (although they are most often minorities to some extent) who are not afraid to wear primary colors and proudly display the richness of their culture. While many immigrants have become assimilated in American society, many also retain cultural traditions from their homelands (for example, the “Puerto Rican girls” in Cofer's essay). This poem was most heavily influenced by Elizabeth Nunez's use of color symbolism in Beyond the Limbo Silence. For the author, colors symbolize different concepts as her narrator crosses from one culture to an entirely different one. When I ask the proverbial “other” in my poem about the color of her rain, I am referring to the Nunez's description of September in Trinidad. “Like April in the country I would soon journey to, September ushered in new life from the destruction of the old... The flamboyant spread out its thick brown arms and sprouted flames of fire, red and yellow, from its branches” (Nunez 35). We first see color symbolism used on page fifty-one, when protagonist Sarah Edgehill finds a new kind of blue in the eyes of an American. “I didn't think blue could be so hard. Blue, I saw in the soft sky in Trinidad. Blue, in the warm turquoise sea” (Nunez). She also becomes overwhelmed by her new white surroundings (the white
6 supremacy found in my poem): “...white steam rising from mounds of fluffy white mashed potatoes topped with a pat of pale melting butter, white baked fish covered in a white sauce and slices of white bread served on white plates on top of a white linen tablecloth” (Nunez 54). Green represents her colored connections between life and death; between Trinidad and New York. “In New York, these colors had reminded me of death, green having been the only color I had associated with life” (Nunez 67). Sarah is also reminded of the sea in the green eyes of the head nun, but when she learns the symbolic cost of her scholarship, the loses the connection. “There was no sea left in her eyes. Only green. Hard as emeralds and shining” (Nunez 212). Nunez uses colors to demonstrate the painful crossing from one cultural identity to another, and this reflects the ideas I attempted to convey in my poem “Spectrum.” I knew very little about the African diaspora and the countless tragedies of the Wide Sargasso Sea before I began this course on global women's issues. My third poem, called “Shipwreck,” combines the need to remember this mass sacrifice and also my own struggle to suppress a painful past. This poem was my attempt to connect the personal and the political, while I fully acknowledge the magnitude of loss during the African diaspora. The voyage was motivated by domination, slavery, and colonization. In the end of the poem I challenge the reader to face her personal battles head on—to fight for her right to individual autonomy and freedom from heteropatriarchal abuse. I also commission society at large to face the horrors of the past and right the wrongs we directly or inadvertently support in the present. “Shipwreck” was largely conceptualized through reading the stories of Caribbean women in Beyond the Limbo Silence and Krik? Krak! In “Children of the Sea,” Edwidge Danticat expresses the feeling of helplessness displacement associated with the sea when she writes, “there are no borderlines on the sea. The whole thing look likes one” (Danticat 6). The same emotions are present on the ship after dark. “At night, the sky and the sea are one” (Danticat 9). I feel a sense of despair in the loss and uncertainty facing the boy on the ship. Danticat also calls us to remember this history because the souls who drowned in that ocean will never forget. “I know that my memory of you will live even there as I too become a child of the sea” (Danticat 28). Nunez opens her book with the death of Sarah's relative in the tumultuous, unforgiving sea. She takes this further, however, comparing the sea to the way America treats people of color. Sarah's grandmother warns her: “America is like the sea. ...when you're not looking, not thinking about it, America can drown you like the sea”
7 (Nunez 16-17). It is powerful literature like this which inspired my poetry and my exploration of global consciousness. Because it is the most structured of my poems, the fourth one called “Caribbean” can best be described stanza by stanza. The first part symbolizes Caribbean peoples under western feet. Whether through their experience as immigrants in American or through the exploitation of their islands for tourism, these cultures have been colonized and subordinated by Eurocentric oppressors. The second segment is reminiscent of the infants and women of Danticat's Haiti. “In the city, I hear they throw out whole entire children” (Danticat 93). They have been treated as disposable, worthless bodies as a result of the war and poverty inflicted on their nation by those to which they're indebted. The third stanza reflects again the idea that the souls lost to the sea will never forget their pain. It also asks how long will the run-off from age old atrocities continue to cause pain for their future generations who now feel the consequences of colonization. The final stanza reflects the white girls' attitude toward the Caribbean students in Beyond the Limbo Silence. They have false and stereotypical ideas about the various cultures of the islands, and they are surprised by the assimilation in Sarah and Angela as a result of colonization. The last stanza represents a western perspective on the colonization of language, names, and culture. In my attempts to connect my experience with Third World women, I have othered them again by my own ignorance of western influence in their countries. In her book Pedagogies of Crossing, Jacqui Alexander writes a chilling and poignant line regarding the lost souls of the Wide Sargasso Sea: “The dead do not like to be forgotten” (290). If her people do forget, Alexander admonishes them. “There is a cost associated with taking refuge in the borrowed gifts of alienation that cultivate the practice of forgetting, the refusal to pull on the ancestral cord, denying ourselves life source” (319). “Caribbean” seeks not only to remind, but to educate those who never had the responsibility to remember. Like “Spectrum,” my fifth poem, entitled “Crocus,” reflects on natural and seasonal differences between regions of the globe. It is a simple curiosity seeking understanding and connection in the reliable observance of seasonal transition. I feel this poem paints a picture of simplicity in unifying women all over the world. In something as elemental and mundane as vegetation, perhaps we can reach and communal spirit in the way we perceive our natural surroundings. Again, this is influenced by September in Trinidad and also the rainy seasons written of in
8 Krik? Krak! and Nervous Conditions. On a deeper level, spring flowers encompass our need to classify and organize our world unequally. Although the rose may be considered the most popular flower in western traditions, marigolds, lotuses, or gardenias may hold special significance in others. On the surface, floral growth schedules are not meaningful. It is humans who ascribe meaning and value to the world, and it is never distributed equally or fairly. My sixth poem, “Arab,” was written in response to our class discussions about western representation of the Third World and the presupposition that feminism is a western invention which has yet to reach the “developing” world. The waterfall motif symbolizes the ancient beauty and quiet power embodied in Arab women. While it rejects the assumption that these women are automatically oppressed by Islam and therefore cannot be feminist, I recognize their fight is far from over. As we learned from Nawal El Saadawi, we cannot blame Islam for the condition of Arab women. This does not mean, however, that many Arab nations are not exceedingly patriarchal and oppressive to women. It is because of this treatment that women in these societies have begun to reject sexist traditions and the hegemonic injustice in their cultures. At the same time, western feminists have created a kind of monopoly on women's rights and assumed all women from developing countries are in need of rescue. The women of former Rhodesia in Nervous Conditions would not accept their being denied education and equality with the men of their community. Lucia's character is especially fierce and rebellious without having any western feminist show her how it's done. It is high time we stop thinking of women in the Global South as passive and helpless. They are equal, and we should unify in revolution with a mutual reverence and understanding. As I mentioned above, Nawal El Saadawi's chapters on Islam and Arab women are incarnate in this poem. She gives us a history of the pre-Islamic Middle East in which women were more equal to men and favored in society. Her research on the fiery courage of the Prophet's wives inspired the phrase “Muhammad's warrior wives.” She also writes about Arab women's role in politics and instead of simply educating the reader to make her aware of Arab feminism, she speaks directly to the feminists of the Middle East. She challenges them to reclaim and reinterpret their history rather than mimic western feminist practice and theory. If our histories, cultures, and goals are distinct from each other, our politics cannot and should not be identical. She asks them to examine their lives on a local and global level.
9 Assia Djebar's The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry also raises the important problem of the dispensable female body. In “Woman in Pieces,” many events take place after the woman has already been murdered; after she's been silenced. The men in the story have all the agency, while she remains an object rather than a valued human being lost to a tragic end. “The body of the woman in pieces rests near the room where the caliph hears his counsel. Unburied. Unmourned” (Djebar 113). Like the eyes of the women in my poem, Djebar finds autonomy in the voice of the woman in pieces, or rather, through its silence. “The body, the head. But the voice? Where has Atyka's voice taken refuge?” (125). The teacher, who spoke for women, has been severed in many ways. There is a danger in the voices of Arab women. The oppressor knows this and seeks to silence them and hide them behind veils. Although Conquest by Andrea Smith mainly sheds light on the oppression of American Indian women, she also critiques the hero mentality of white feminists. “Again, even within feminist circles, the colonial logic prevails that women of color, indigenous women, and women from Global South countries are only victims of oppression rather than organizers in their own right” (25). There is a great legacy of strong Arab women fighting for their rights as equal humans. Despite the ignorance of many western feminists, the warrior spirit of Muhammad's wives “still dwells within.” The seventh installment (“Old Seminole Woman”) is largely an exploration of my own cultural and ethnic identity. I found out as an adult that I am 1/16th Seminole Indian, a discovery which meant a lot to me. The social demographics one identifies with affect the formation of identity, and also one's place in the social hierarchy. I have struggled throughout my life as I learned more about my German heritage and the atrocities which are woven into the history of that nationality. As an American, I find less and less reasons to be patriotic. I care about the injustice suffered by marginalized peoples. I care, which is why it has always been difficult for me to relate to the oppressor. It was almost a relief to discover some ancestors who lived at the margins. In my discussions with colleagues, some expressed a sense of envy of my Seminole heritage. I am still somewhat reticent to claim my Seminole blood, which is displayed through the brackets surrounding the word “my” in my poem. In some ways it is easier to identify with the colonized because they represent innocence and goodness. It is the whites, the rich, the men who have acted wrongly and taken advantage of their power to exploit the poor and women of color. On the other hand, it is tempting to accept one's privilege and be grateful for one's lot in life. Indeed, many who have even a small amount
10 of privilege are encouraged to deny the fact that they are discriminated against and be thankful for what they have. How much of who I am is in my ethnic heritage? How much does socialization represent? Are power/subordinate positions arbitrary or is there a reason history repeats itself ? How much more must mixed-race and those with multiple cultural identities struggle with these issues? These questions have remained by my side through this poetic journey and they will change me even if I am never satisfied with the answers. The main piece of literature which helped me through my exploration of my Seminole heritage is Andrea Smith's Conquest. I have mentioned that my goal in this project is to connect my experience as a woman with that of the Third World woman, but Smith gives me a major obstacle in that endeavor. “Women of color do not just face quantitatively more issues when they suffer violence... but their experience is qualitatively different from that of white women” (8). Simply because a small part of my ethnic heritage is Seminole does not mean I was socialized in their culture or felt what it means to be discriminated against as an indigenous woman. I am still white, as much as I care about the Seminole nation. I will never fully relate to them. At the same time, I am very proud to be even loosely connected to a Native American tribe. Many indigenous nations have a long history of equality and peace between the sexes, which makes it truly unfortunate that their colonizers sought to destroy such a positive quality in the name of assimilation. When writing about boarding school abuse of Native children, Smith writes: “The primary role of this education for Indian girls was to inculcate patriarchal norms into Native communities so that women would lose their place of leadership in Native communities” (37). Not only am I undeniably white, but I was also socialized as an Evangelical Christian. My aunt and uncle are missionaries in Karachi, Pakistan and my reading has made me conscious of some problems underlying the mission of the Christian church. The church has been associated with power since Constantine adopted Christianity as the official religion of the imperialist Roman empire. Through mission work, the biblical message is not only given to indigenous peoples throughout the world, it is imposed upon them. There is a link between the church's history and a legacy of white, heteropatriarchal oppression. Smith recognizes this connection. “This project also highlights the importance of analyzing the interrelatedness of white supremacy and Christian imperialism” (52). This presents another challenge for my identity. I find it difficult to reconcile my goal to work with and for women of the Third World and support the church in its hegemonic goals. Although I was raised to accept the Christian faith, this is not
11 a mandatory aspect of my social identity. I cannot help the sex or race I occupy, but I can change my association with certain institutions if I feel their tenets conflict with the principles of others. After exploring this issue thus far, I feel I should work within the church to change the imperialist practices, especially in regards to mission work. I do not expect to be a catalyst for total revolution in an institution that has been established for almost two thousand years, but I plan to raise awareness and challenge my local church family. Otherwise I would find it difficult to reconcile my connection with the church and feminist praxis. “The Mark,” the eighth and final poem in my series, is an attempt to connect the residual violence left on all women's bodies. By using the word “we,” the poem becomes a plea for unity in surviving the abuses of the dominant society. As I have discussed above, there is a danger in homogenizing “we” and I feel an intersectional approach to our relations works to combat this assumption. At the same time though, I thirst for solidarity among the women of the world. We differ immensely and we need to understand the local condition, but surely there are commonalities there too. As Nawal El Saadawi writes, “our humanity is common but it takes many forms” (126). Specifically, Part I combines the abusive environment systemic military violence can create for Third World women and my own experience of physical violence. Both instances incorporate a long shaft-like weapon (a vaguely phallic symbol) and a colorful bruise left on the violated woman. Just as I emphasized the possessive “my” in “Old Seminole Woman,” I single out “willing” in this poem. This is meant to show that although no woman wishes to be abused, she is constricted by shock, anger, fear, and even feminine propriety at the traumatic moment. This phenomenon has often been used to blame the victim for her role in the abuse. Also, using the all encompassing “we” at the end of the poem connects the two women and acknowledges the institutional violence committed against all women and minorities throughout the history of the world. Part II documents my emotional journey as I intentionally chose to painfully mark my body as a reminder of the struggle of the people at the margins. The image of the rifle is borrowed from a part in Krik? Krak! On pages 118 and 119, a guard in military controlled Haiti uses his gun to intimidate an woman looking for her mother in a mass grave. He is brazen and insensitive to the potential violence he could inflict with such a weapon as he points it at her head and orders her to leave the premises. In his mind, she should be grateful if the rifle only leaves a mark. Conquest influenced Part II of the poem in a general sense. Smith is careful not to homogenize Native peoples, and she includes stories of violence
12 from many different tribes. Part II shows my appreciation of Indian culture (particularly Northwest Indian painting) before it was tainted by the colonizers' imposed assimilation. To achieve my mark, I had to endure pain. Although my pain was incomparable to that which all American Indian tribes have suffered, it was a significant aspect of my reminder. The mark represents a permanent accountability that I must keep working with those who have the courage to challenge the great powers of society. At the end of this process, it is difficult to say whether I succeeded in my endeavor to connect the personal with the global. I have admitted my shortcomings and my tendency to homogenize and act as representative for Third World women. Although I may feel I have failed in some ways or simply maintained the status quo in others, I gained insight in my own search for identity and in the lives of Third World women. I have discovered a connection in the quest for cultural heritage, the anger inherent in suffering centuries of patriarchal violence, and in the appreciation of beauty in both nature and culture. Still, I am educated. I was given the gift of literacy and it's still the voice of the western feminist you are hearing. I conclude this project in the hope that I will listen ever more earnestly to the voices of the women to whom I have devoted these pages.
13 Alexander, Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and
the Sacred. Duke
University Press, 2006. Print.
Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions: A Novel. New York: Seal Press, 2004. Print.
Danticat, Edwidge. Krik? Krak! 1st ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Print.
Djebar, Assia. The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry: Stories. Seven Stories Pr, 2006. Print.
Feminist Theory: A Reader. 2nd ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2005. Print.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Print.
Nunez, Elizabeth. Beyond the Limbo Silence. 1st ed. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003. Print.
Saadawi, Nawal. The Nawal El Saadawi Reader. London: Zed Books, 1997. Print.
Smith, Andrea. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005. Print.
Women Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean. Cambridge, Mass: South End Press, 2003. Print.