Coming Into Play: An Interview with Gloria Anzaldta Ann E. Reuman Trinity College Contemporary Chicana poet, writer, and theorist, Gloria E. Anzaldtia, was born in Texas in 1942. She is coeditor, with promi- nent Chicana feminist Cherrie Moraga, of the groundbreaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) and editor of Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras (1990). A published author of poetry and prose, a university instructor of Chicano studies, feminist studies, and creative writing, and a political activist, Anzaldia is an important voice in the literary world today, Her best known collection of writings is Borderlands/La Frontera) The New Mestiza (/987), which was chosen as one of the 38 Best Books of 1987 by Library Journal. in 1986 This Bridge Called My Back received the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. In 1991 Anzaldia received a National Endowment for the Arts award for fiction. She currently lives in Santa Cruz, where she is working on several projects, including a collection of theoretical essays, a manuscript of fiction, a children's book, and a novel. This interview is an edited transcription of a telephone interview conducted on Febru- ary 17, 1995. Interviewer: Looking at Borderlands,La Frontera nearly ten years after its publication, is there anything you view differently? Were you to revise and republish it today, is there anything you would change? Anzaldiia: Well, first of all, [ think 1 would get a reader to proof the Spanish because at the time Aunt Lute didn’t have the staff that MELUS, Volume 25, Number 2 (Summer 2000)4 ANN E. REUMAN could deal with the code-switching. So every time I read passages from Borderlands | see typos and spelling mistakes. My other concern was that Chapter Six, on writing and art, was put together really fast. In fact, all of the seven chapters were written after the book had already gone into production and | was trying to write an introduction. They were already typesetting the poetry, and the introduction became the seven essays. And [Chapters] Five and Six, the one on language and the one on art and writing, were the last to go in, and they were the roughest. And especially Chapter Six I felt like I was still regurgitating and sitting on some of the ideas and I hadn’t done enough revisions and I didn’t have enough time to unravel the ideas fully. I think that Chapter Six especially is an extension of “Speaking in Tongues” in This Bridge, and that what I’m writing now in Lloronas, some of the concepts that I’m working with of which one is nepantla, is kind of a continuation of these other two. [ think my writing is always in revision, so that Borderlands built on “La Prieta” and some aspects of “Speaking in Tongues”; and the other theoretical work, Lloronas, is building on all of those that came before. If I had to do it differently, I think that | would distinguish a little bit more between the kind of historical, rational language of high theory and another kind of language which is the poetic language of myths and of collective self-expression. And maybe unravel some of the spirituality aspects in my work a little bit more. I think that between the times when you conceive of work and you have a deadline and before it gets too unwieldy you have to cut it off. And in terms of this historical, rational, logical, argumentative writing that is what is privileged right now in the academy, there is this other non-rational identity that | dwell in about three-quarters of the time. Three-quarters of the time I’m asleep, dreaming. Another eight hours I’m probably working in my head with words and images, and writing and making fiction, and kind of dreaming the stories into being. And then the rest of the time—I guess, what is left? Another eight hours?—probably out of that, half of the time I’m dealing with this historical, everyday life. And the other, Pm still in my thoughts, like I might be driving along and I might be thinking about other. . . . So it’s like the “I” that I didn’t deal with as much in these earlier works would come into prominence a little bit more in the subsequent work. And |INTERVIEW: ANZALDUA 5 think besides the everyday, historical self that is positioned in race, class, ethnicity, sexual preference, age, profession—all the social positions—I would also concentrate—~and this is what I’m doing in Lloronas. and in La Prieta--is the “I” who writes, the “I” who is in the text, and then the “I” who reads what is in the text and reflects on it, and even puts that reflection in the text. So those, I think, have a lot to do with the self that is out of bounds. It is the imagi- nal! self, it’s the dreaming self, the fictive self. The other works pick up this aspect of identity as a fictive construction a little bit more, along with being grounded in the real historical time. Interviewer: Did you have any surprises in Borderlands/La Frontera in terms of what you thought it would be and what it became? Anzaldiia: Yes, I did. You know when I conceived the idea of doing This Bridge and then | asked Cherrie [Moraga] to help me with it, | knew it was going to change things. I knew it was going to be this drop in the ocean that would set off ripples. And with Borderlands, what surprised me the most was that the metaphor of the borderlands speaks to its time much more than I thought it would. So that it’s being taken up by a lot of different people who are in different disciplines, who are in different countries. And even from Japan I got a call, these people who wanted me to expound on this metaphor. Interviewer: Does that frustrate you in any way? Do you feel that your borderlands metaphor has been appropriated or misunder- stood? Anzaldia: No. I don’t think so. I think what it does is it thrills me, and it validates me as a writer that people can take my images or ideas and work them out in their own way and write their own theories and their own books. Once in a while | do feel a little bit of a frustration in that people who are doing this work have very short memories and they do not credit what came before. It’s as though they invented it. It’s as though all these women, all of us who are working on these issues of being between cultures and crossing from one world to the other, and there are many of us—I6 ANN E. REUMAN just happened to get the right metaphor for it—that they do not cite .... | have seen lots and lots of people speak about concepts like this and they don’t cite me, and some of the stuff is taken almost verbatim. But that is not a big issue with me. What I’m thrilled about is that people have seen themselves reflected in my work enough so that they can then get in dialogue with themselves. And 1 think that’s one of the highest compliments that a writer can be paid. Interviewer: Well, | think that many people do feel a powerful connection to what you wrote. And it says a great deal about how you said it, that it has this effect on people. Anzaldia: I think what’s probably one of the riskier things that I did in Borderlands/La Frontera was to open up the concept of mestizaje, of the new mestiza and hybridity, to be non-exclusive, to be inclusive of white people and people from other communities. And the risk was in having again Euro-Americans take over the space. And I don’t think that’s happened very much. I think it has happened with these people with the short-term memory who forget to cite, but [ think most of the critics and the readers have been very generous with me. Interviewer: Do you feel there have been any critics who have misread you? Who do you feel have been your harshest critics? Anzaldiia: My harshest critics have been Chicanas, and Chicanos; but they have also been my strongest supporters. They’ve been harsh in that I think they feel possessive about Chicanitas and Mexicanitas and they’re territorial about certain things, and they often feel because they’re in the margins that there is a scarcity of positions of recognition. I think it stems from insecurity and jealousy. And, so those are some of the Chicanas and they will look at certain aspects of my work that they feel are essentialist— which | don’t feel are. And the Chicanos have also been my strongest supporters and also my least supportive people. | think the younger Chicanos, the gay Chicanos, are very interested in these concepts and are very open about my work. The older Chicanos | think are in the same place as the Chicanas who don’tINTERVIEW: ANZALDUA 7 support my work as much, in that they’re the old guard, and here comes this Chicana dyke, feminist dyke and they don’t know quite how to react. I think out of all the different communities, academic communities, and individuals who have reflected on my work, the Chicanos are the ones that just marginalize me further by putting me ina footnote, or they don’t really deal fully with my work. But the younger ones do. There’s Hector Torres from the University of Albuquerque who is doing a linguistic work, and there have been other Chicanos as well. And then the white women and the women of color have been very generous, especially the women of color, and some of the white women who teach women’s studies and who are feminist anthropologists, who are breaking new ground—the feminist geographers, the feminist architects—in all the disci- plines, there’s always a small percentage of scholars who are breaking new ground, and they look to me as a. . . a support beam that they can build their platform on top of. | mean, along with other supporting beams: mine is not the only one. Interviewer: But you’re one of the earlier ones, | think. Are there particular reviews that have influenced your thinking or writing? Anzaldua: | think so, after the fact. When Bridge came out and Borderlands and some of these other things that | had published before, I didn’t have the language for high theory, and I just kind of stated things poetically. But after the fact, I try and get copies of reviews and copies of papers that are given, and conferences about my work and people who are working on theses or dissertations, and so | have a lot of these papers in my file. And I think that for the most part what was missed in their reviews and interpretations was the spiritual/mystical/poetic aspects of my writing. I think that, in particular—-anything that’s ahistorical or that’s transcultural or that seems to be transcultural—makes them uncomfortable. So very few people will lecture on the spiritual aspects. Very few people. Some people will look at race and racism and that makes them uncomfortable, so they don’t spend classroom time discuss- ing that. And then the younger readers, and some of these younger readers—-not scholarly reviewers or interpreters but just readers of my work who respond in a feeling kind of way—I think that some of them catch the spirit of what ['m saying much more than the8 ANN E. REUMAN letter. And they see themselves reflected in my writing. But something makes them uncomfortable, and I think what makes them uncomfortable is that I’m practicing what I’m preaching and they have all their lives been taught to read and write in a certain way and here I come with my text, with collage, code-switching, genre-switching, and [I’m actually practicing what I preach, and they're not used to that. Interviewer: They're on shifting grounds. Anzaldia: Yes. And it makes them think; and if it makes them think, it doesn’t really matter whether they miss the point or not because eventually they get it! Interviewer: What you’re saying reminds me a great deal of Paula Gunn Allen’s novel, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, that also treats very deeply many of these issues of spiritual reality. Not “magical realism”; the spirit world is a reality in her writing. Anzaldia: Yes. It’s reality. Yes, yes. She’s one of the people that I fecl is close to my view of the world. But I want to go back to your question about reviews that have influenced my thinking or writing. After the fact, there’s this woman named Clough, and her hit on my work was that it was post-colonial, and I think that other people had mentioned this, but she based a whole chapter on this aspect of my work. And Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who is from the University of Texas, has written about my work and how it’s journalistic but also how it is part of a tradition that she starts with Du Bois and Dos Passos and I don’t remember what other literary greats—I felt, “Wow! She’s putting me with those people!” Interviewer: Or putting those people with you. Anzaldia: Yes. And then Carolyn Woodward’s anthology, Changing Our Power: An Introduction to Women’s Studies. She puts me in another tradition with Virginia Woolf. And there’s a woman who’s finished a book on some of the spiritual aspects of my work, Paula Gunn Allen’s work, Audre Lorde’s work—lI think it’s just the three of us—and her name is AnnLouise Keating. AndINTERVIEW: ANZALDUA 9 then just recently at the lowa conference on, the Inquiry confer- ence, I ran into a gay man, Robert McRuer, and there’s a chapter in his dissertation called “Unlimited Access? Queer Theory in the Borderlands” where he links queer and mestiza, which is what | also do. But he is comparing me and Jack Kerouac as border- crossers, and the differences between this white guy as a border- crosser person who goes into Mexico and me as a border-crosser. Interviewer: What would you like non-Chicana and non-lesbian and non-working-class readers to learn from you? Anzaldia: | think I want them to know that what they consider to be consensual reality is only one reality. And that there’s another way of looking at the world, another perspective, many other perspectives, as well as many other ways of perceiving these realities and of writing about these realities. And that these non- Chicana, these non-lesbian, these non-working-class people are also my people, they’re also my audience. And I feel that because a writer. . . a writer’s always in dialogue with another aspect of herself, or with friends, or with different communities, members of different communities. And in my case, I’m also in dialogue with the natural forces, like I go and talk to the ocean, and the trees, and animals and stuff like that. There’s a way that I can get out of my skin and get into the skin of these others. | think that’s what creative writers do. They occupy this other, and speak from the position of the other, either first person, third person, or in some way dialogue. | think it’s wrong to exclude people from other communities from the dialogue, from being characters in my work, or from being potential audiences for my work. Interviewer: Do you have particular audiences in mind as you write? Has your chosen audience changed over time?. .. Whom do you most want to affect? Anzaldua: | think the audience that | write for depends on the project. For example, | am in the process of completing this children’s story, the second in the series. And it’s called “Prietita Encounters La Llorona.” And so these are children of anywhere from three years old to twelve. And there are even university10 ANN E. REUMAN students who may be taking children’s literature classes who will be exposed to this. And then there are Latinos and Latinas who will buy these books for their children and they'll read them. My most particular audience, | think, are women—are feminists, are lesbians, are Chicanas, are. . . . So that’s my primary audience. But I also am looking to talking with some of the gentler, less mascu- linity-oriented guys. And just people who are opening their minds up, who are exploring things. My audience is always expanding. Some poems if they’re entirely in Spanish, like in Borderlands where there are about eleven poems that I didn’t translate, that I just left in the Spanish—those have particular audiences: you know, Mexican and Chicano, Spanish-speakers, white people who can read Spanish. And the theoretical stuff that I talk about in the universities, that’s more of a scholarly audience. And then | also address women’s crises, rape, battering—those issues I address with different community events, like “Take Back the Night” or “Violence Against Women,” sexual violence against women, domestic violence against women. I think the people that I most want to affect is my home ethnic community, my family. Yet those are the people that do not accept my writing. In Texas people are just getting into using Borderlands in their classes, in the less progressive universities anyway. The more progressive ones were there. But out of all the states that I have lectured in, Texas was one of the lately-come-Johnnies. Interviewer: In Borderlands/La Frontera, you say that you are “male and female,” “two in one body”; and you speak of Coatli- cue, with whom you seem in part to identify, as one who balances dualities, who is as you say a “symbol of the fusion of opposites.” I wonder if these categories (“male,” “female”) and the limitation to two, established as binary opposites, reuses what Audre Lorde refers to as the “master’s tools.” [t is clear from your writing that you see such phrases as part of our colonial legacy and that you constantly struggle with language to create words which challenge constrictive totalizations. If you were to describe your identity today, would you do so in the same way? Anzaldia: | think that | am trying to describe it in a different way in the writings that I’m doing now in La Prieta and in the LloronasINTERVIEW: ANZALDUA NH book. You may be right about the binary opposites, but also in one particular tribe of Indians that is in my bloodstream, which is the Aztec, they did have this binary thing; they did have a figure who was both male and female. And you're right, that my whole struggle has been against the colonial legacy of this language being imposed on me and Chicanos and other marginalized groups. .. . Interviewer: How difficult it is to reinvent language all at once .. . Anzaldta: Yes, and the pressure comes from both directions. It’s like the Chicano, Chicanas, Mexicanas, Mexicanos part of the community wants to insure that it survives. So it very much for the most part is against code-switching and Spanglish and the min- gling of these two different categories, the Chicano and the white, or the Chicano and the European. And the Euro-American, the European wants to keep out anything that disturbs it: languages, whole ideas about reality, about race matters. And so there’s a pressure on their part for us to assimilate, to give up our heritage, our language, our culture. And the Chicano movement was very much about keeping these. What I'm trying to articulate now is kind of a mestizaje, a nos/otras, the nos is us/we/me/the subject; the otras is them/they/the object, and in nos/otras we are them and they are us and we’re contaminated by each other. It’s hard; it’s like a tight-rope that if | allow the Eurocentric part of me too much space it means that I have turned back on my race, the Chicanos and Mexicanos. If | stick too much to this nationalism, then it means I’m not realistic, I’m not being in the late twentieth century, living with these realities because for me it’s not enough to be a Chicana because I’m also a dyke, I am also a writer, I’m a scholar, I have been in school, in white schools all my life, so those are parts of me. And yes, in negotiating the two different nationalities I've come up with this thing that J call the new tribalism. I am attempting to not react to either one of these sides, but to act, to be proactive rather than reactive, and that’s really hard to do, "cause there are no maps. And a lot of times there are no words, and—or if there are words they are implicated in a binary system of English or of Spanish, and especially Spanish where the language is gender-fixed.12 ANN E. REUMAN Interviewer: You speak in your poem “The Coatlicue State” of a “protean being” and throughout Borderlands and other works you speak about the shape-shifting capacity of a writer. At one point you say “My ‘awakened dreams’ are about shifts. Thought shifts, reality shifts, gender shifts... . | am the dialogue between my Self and e/ espiritu del mundo. 1 change myself, | change the world.” Could you elaborate on this? Anzaldia: | think that identity is relational, that it exists in relation to some Other. And so it’s always in this in-between zone, the nepantla or the borderlands. And that in being in this in-between zone it’s saying your fixed categories are permeable. There are aspects that overlap, that break down the categories, through osmosis or through some kind of very elusive, being-in-two-or- three-places-at-once kind of metaphor. And that the same thing happens with the laws of language, that the laws of language say “this is reality, this is possible, this is not possible, up has to have a down,” etcetera. Gender also—you’re a woman, you’re a man, and there’s no in between. And so here come the transsexuals and the drag queens and they say, “Well, identity is enacted, and it’s performed.” And then Judith Butler in her book brings that aspect out. But even before she was dealing with it, | was dealing with it about what takes center stage, which identity takes center stage. If, for example, I’m speaking at home, me the little Chicanita from this campesina background is speaking in Spanglish with my mother and my sister, but Gloria the writer, Gloria the academic, Gloria the person with one foot into the middle-class world, Gloria the feminist is on stage, they’re just behind, they’re not taking the center. But they’re there with me. Then if I’m speaking in an auditorium addressing a conference with a keynote talk, then the academic me, the political talker/speaker comes out, but the other ones are there with me. And, depending on the group, my speech, my cadences change; but yet there’s a basic tone or a style to me, that’s always there no matter who I speak with. So that there’s very little difference between the public me and the private me: what you see is what you get. And in my writing I’m dealing with these shifts in not just realities and not just genders and not just sexual preferences and not just registers of language, but also genres, in using images and poetic metaphors and theorizing something andINTERVIEW: ANZALDUA 13 taking an image that is, that could be wrong to visual art and incorporating it into this discourse on identity or whatever. And that being in between, overlapping spaces is very much my meta- phor for the shape-shifter shaman, which I’m now using instead of using the word “protean,” I’m using the word “nahual.” Which is shaman, a different kind of shaman from maybe some of the Native American shaman or Siberian-Russian shaman, or Japa- nese-Korean shaman, but it’s basica‘ly that ability to travel through worlds, to jump from one locale to the other or one particular identity to the other, and so some of the stories deal with this nepanila state which has different stages, of which the Coatlicue is only one. The Coatlicue is being the dark night of the soul, hiding oneself in the dark cave, reaching the bottom. And in nepantla there are other stations that I did not articulate in Borderlands but that in Lloronas I’m articulating and in La Prieta enacting with different scenes. About me being in dialogue with the natural world, with the wind and the sky and the sea and. . . . Sometimes Pll bump into a chair and I'll say, “Oh, excuse me!”. That seeing that everything that exists is alive. Interviewer: And respected. Anzaldia: And have a love for it. Interviewer: Again, | sce significant connections with Paula Gunn Allen’s writings on American Indian spiritual realities. We have talked somewhat about the juncture and reevaluation of differences and contradictions in your works. Is this what you mean by mestiza juncture, a “place” that is at once transitional, affirmative, often uneasy, and at times immobilizing, but always transformational? Anzaldua: Yes. And there’s a component where part of me wants to stop it, wants to put the brakes on, wants to say it’s too painful, too hard. The rebel in me puts its foot down. And I associate that with depressive states and blocks in my writing. But when it gets too. . . fast, one loses one’s grounding to reality or to some aspect of belonging, and one gets lost. And gets frustrated and it’s very uncomfortable and that’s when you want to put your foot down14 ANN E. REUMAN and say, “Let the train stop, I want to get off.” Or “I’m going to stay in this particular situation, this particular house, | don’t want to move on for a while. I want to rest up and recuperate.” And in the nepantla concept I articulate this idea that the world is moving too fast and it’s too confusing. Interviewer: Can you say something about the title of your forthcoming book, L/oronas, and what it represents to you? Anzaldia: Llorona was about fear and loss and being abandoned. And it’s a central metaphor with Chicanas and Chicanos because Mexico abandoned us, the U.S./Euro-America has forsaken us, and we feel like little orphans. And so in the Llorona story the mother either abandons or loses her children temporarily or permanently by killing them. In the L/oronas I put myself both in the mother— the monster-mother, the dyke-mother—and also in the child. And then I switch around to where the child becomes a little Lloronita who wants to kill the mother. It’s very much connected with finding voice, with speaking, with uttering, with crying. You know, she’s been crying for over five hundred years. And she’s also important in that I deal with these transformative aspects but also in a way that the Chicano/Mexicano collectivity deals with them: through myth, and through stories and through socializing both male children and female children to behave, to be a certain way. And so she’s imposed on us as a socializing weapon, tech- nique, or whatever. But I have taken—and some other Chicanos— have taken that and turned it around and used it against the patriar- chal, oppressive aspects of the Chicano/Mexicano culture. Interviewer: It’s interesting how you pull it together to mean several contradictory things, as you do throughout the book. . . . Anzaldta: Yes. Another figure that works very much in conjunc- tion with the Llorona is the moon goddess, the Aztec moon god- dess, and her name is Coyolxauhqui. And she had six hundred brothers, and one of her brothers killed her by dismembering her and burying her bones in different places. The brother who killed her was Huitzilopochtli, the war god. And her mother was Coatli- cue. For me as I write I create a textual self, which is differentINTERVIEW: ANZALDUA 15 from the “me” that lives out in the world. But the textual self that I create also changes the historical “me.” And so I'm kind of creat- ing myself as I go along, mostly through the writing and the speaking. In order to do this [ have to take myself apart and then put myself together. This is the Coyolxauhqui metaphor, and it’s very painful, this dismemberment, burial, and then having to look for all the hidden parts of you that have been scattered throughout. And when you reconstitute yourself, or when I reconstitute myself, it’s a different me that I reconstitute, and that’s where the trans- formative aspect comes in. But also it’s like tearing apart your innards, your entrails, and it’s physically painful, and emotionally painful, and psychologically painful. Interviewer: Do you think there are particular elements of Border- lands/La Frontera, or of its’ sequel, Lloronas, that will speak to twenty-first century readers in particular? Anzaldua: Yes, | do. | think that Borderlands/La Frontera spoke about the overlapping border spaces and that’s a reality in these times; and people have to negotiate. And | think the other book is addressing more about representation and self-representation and the complexity of the “I,” the fictive “1,” an “I” that is more than just the biological “I” or the historical “I.” And also it’s going to be dealing with notions of reality and notions of nature, and how much more of a construction it is than people actually think it is. But the construction is not simplistic; it’s not the kind of construc- tion that says, “Oh, well, if you were raped, it must have been your fault. You create your reality.” It’s not that kind of simplistic creation. It’s interdependent—what happens to me doesn’t just depend on me creating my own reality but everybody else because I’m in relation to everybody else. So it’s a—an unraveling of these thoughts, and. . . 1 think that it will speak a lot about identity and reality, and ways of knowing, and one of the chapters in it is called “Autohistorias,” which deals with self-representation. Interviewer: When is that due to come out, Lioronas? Anzaldia: It'll be a couple or three more years because I’m still working on Prieta and La Prieta is about three quarters done, and16 ANN E. REUMAN this summer | want to finish it up. There are a few other chapters that have been published already—one on border art, nepantla art, is one chapter. “To Queer the Writer” is another chapter. It’s in InVersions, by Betsy Warland. And it needs revision, but... . ’m doing some chapters on alliance; part of one has been published in Lisa Albrecht’s book. . . . Interviewer: Bridges of Power? Anzaldtia: Yes. But I’m working on “Allies Two”—or what- ever—I have these working titles for them. So parts of the book have already been published. And then when I speak, | will take aspects of the L/oronas book and present them to the public so that it’s in dialogue. But I need to finish the—there’s two little books, the Prietita, the Lloronas book, | need to finish that, and I need to finish the book of stories before making the Lloronas the front- burner project. I kind of am multi-tasked. Interviewer: Do you feel that Borderlands/La Frontera helped bring Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras into being? Anzaldia: Actually, I was waiting for someone to do a sequel to This Bridge Called My Back, and nobody did. 1 would encourage people, but it’s a hard task to put together an anthology. And so This Bridge, and the fact that [ taught a class, “Women of Color in the U.S.,” here at U.C. Santa Cruz in the Spring of ’88 and I had to construct a reader. So this was the beginning of Haciendo Caras. And my being hired to teach, and my getting asked to speak comes directly from This Bridge and Borderlands, the fact that those books are out. So you could say that yes, Borderlands did help bring Making Face, Making Soul about, because if it wasn’t for Borderlands, my recognition in the community would just be based on This Bridge. And so the more recognized I am, the more I am in demand, and the more | am in dialogue, and it was this dialogue that created Making Face, Making Soul. Interviewer: This Bridge Called My Back and Borderlands/La Frontera seemed to use anger transformatively to critique colonial- istic viewpoints. Is there a way in which you see this tone in yourINTERVIEW: ANZALDUA 17 work shifting over the course of the years that you have been writing? How would you describe it, if you do? Or do you not think that that’s really true of your work? Anzaldia: Yes, | think that it shifts in tone, but it’s cyclical. Let me explain this. | think my work now is a little more playful and a little more experimental; and a little more creative, and a little more challenging of consensual reality. 1 uied to do that with Borderlands. And | also in Borderlands tried to let the different “me’s” speak out: the me that was pissed off. the me that was very diplomatic, the me that loves nature, the me with the hate and the anger, and not apologize for any of these. And when I got into doing the Lloronas, | found myself being a little more philosophi- cal and a little more even-toned and a little more theoretical than poetic, and that’s what I’m trying to correct now. And I think this was influenced in part by my being a grad student. I entered graduate school in the fall of ’88 and for about three years | did course work, took classes, and it made me overly serious and overly theoretical and overly—there wasn’t a balance there. And I knew this would happen, but | felt that the intellectual part of my identity needed to be given its space: that’s why I went back to school. Interviewer: Do you see yourself with the shift in tone—the playfulness and the greater interest in risk-taking and challeng- ing—do you see a trickster element in that? It sounds like you're describing having the kind of game-playing subversion of expecta- tions that a trickster might. Anzaldta: Yes. And [ think the struggle in my writing in the La Prieta stories has been about the _ trickster/playful/child- like/passionate part of me, of the writer, against the person that takes herself too seriously and is into race, class, and gender stuff and is addressing other scholars. And the struggle for me is in making, allowing that serious scholar to exist but also not letting that kill the playful trickster/child/nahual. Interviewer: | am reminded of your image in Borderlands of being somewhat of a rattlesnake, and how each time you added18 ANN E. REUMAN some growth it slightly altered the sound you make. There’s some element in that that seems to describe your retention and interplay of multiple selves and shifts in tone. Anzaldtiia: Yes, and that the skin is retained and it becomes another rattle. And that means that the “me’s” that I used to be are still in there somewhere. Interviewer: As if to show, “It’s all me.” Do you think that your second anthology, Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras has influenced your current writing, that that had a place in there as well? Anzaldia: What I tried to do with Haciendo Caras was have a balance of the poetry, the narrative, the personal narratives, along with the research and theoretical/critical writing, and have the different registers of language be in the book. And I think that that kind of striving to balance is what my struggle as a human being has been. Of always wanting to have that balance but of letting the see-saw take turns going down, so that I could experience a full range of passions. It’s hard when you want to experience a full range of passions to develop a balance. And I don’t know if it’s possible. . . . And the difficulty comes in that I have to live these extremes. That if I’m writing a story about some emotional pain, | can’t write it from the sidelines. I have to be embodied in it. And it hurts! Interviewer: You “write in red,” you say at one point. Anzaldia: Yes. I think with Making Face, Making Soul: Haci- endo Caras \'m trying to see a larger picture than I have in my subsequent writings. I’m looking at patterns; I’m looking at more comprehensive views, more inclusive visions. But I had to work my way into holding more and more complex patterns in my mind. It’s like when I envision a short story or an essay, I can hold it in my mind. When | envision a novel or a book of stories or an anthology, I have to hold more and more in my head. And now that I’m envisioning the Lloronas it means that my capacity to hold more and more complex elements is growing, so I think I’mINTERVIEW: ANZALDUA 19 becoming a little more—at the same time that I’m very regionalis- tic and very much a Chicana writer I’m also becoming more international, global, addressing larger communities and larger audiences and-—Does that make sense? Interviewer: Yes. Anzaldia: If you look at geography or if you look at a globe, I had to start out with south Texas and only knowing that region. And then expand out to the state, the U.S., and then... . Interviewer: You’re a “world”-traveler, as you said! Anzaldiia: Yes, and now it’s like it’s not even my thinking just in terms of this planet but of the galaxy and all the other galaxies. So that my mind can take in more and more and more space and more and more complexities; and I think that that is like a muscle that one exercises. And what was so scary for me about exercising this muscle was that when I was diagnosed with diabetes, | lost it, I couldn’t—1I suffered from this thing called mental distraction, chronic fatigue and depression. And | couldn’t function. | couldn’t function as a writer, as a thinker, because I couldn’t hold consecu- tive thoughts. It’s sort of like being in training to run and then somebody coming and severing the tendons in your ankle. Interviewer: | think you have already addressed this in a number of ways, but do you see an evolution in your work? Or is that not the term that you would use to describe the way that your ideas and works have developed? Anzaldiia: Somebody used the term “(r)evolution” with parenthe- ses around the “re”. Interviewer: Yes. I did, actually, in an article | wrote on your work, drawing on a phrase that you had used to describe yourself in Borderlands.20 ANN E. REUMAN Anzaldia: That’s you, that’s right! Yes, I really believe that my profession as a writer, as a scholar, is a life-time apprenticeship, and that the techniques that I’m learning are muscles that I am training, that are getting exercise and becoming more proficient. It’s like driving a car. When you first start to learn how to drive, you’re very aware of shifting and braking and looking at the rear- view mirror and the side mirror and you can’t talk with the other person, you can’t have any thoughts other than being very atten- tive. And as you drive for weeks and months and years it becomes unconscious: the stepping on the brake, the shifting from lane to lane. And you internalize these movements. So I think in writing a lot of the stuff that I’ve learned to do that I had to say, “OK, I’ve got to make sure that this dialogue is balanced. I’ve got to make sure that I recreate the five senses—hearing, smell, taste, sensation, sound, etcetera, etcetera.” [ don’t have to pay attention to those techniques now. I’m learning new ones. And | think that is what evolves, is that you internalize something that becomes an uncon- scious part of the actions that you take, and that frees up your attention to learn new ways. And again—I’m repeating the com- plexity/expansion thing—you graft onto yourself whatever is useful. So it becomes a kind of mestizaje, a mestiza. 1 see that as a learning, evolutionary process. Interviewer: Do you have a favorite kind of writing: short stories, or essays, or poems; or is there one genre that comes more easily to you? Or is it inappropriate to try to isolate that way? Anzaldia: I think that when | am writing fiction and I am writing the children’s books | have a yearning to be doing the more theoretical stuff, and when I’m doing the more philosophi- cal/theoretical stuff, | have a yearning to do the more playful. But I actually think that they’re all equally hard to do. It’s just that the grass is greener on the other side. And one of the things that I am gravitating toward more and more is doing these kinds of sha- manic, shifting, magical other-worldly excursions in my writing that is very exciting. But it’s not new. If I look back to when I first started writing: | wrote my first poem, I wrote my first story, and I wrote my first essay. I started out writing in all the genres. I didn’t write for children, though; that is something new. And I. . . | don’tINTERVIEW: ANZALDUA 21 have favorites: my favorite is whatever I’m working on at the time, but with this yearning to be doing the other. Because it’s a way of getting away from the pain, from the agony of creating. And maybe it’s just me, maybe other writers don’t have such a hard time, but with me it’s literally like taking myself apart. It’s like Coyolxauhqui. It’s just agony. And then | think to myself, “Wow, I have to not view my work that way because that’s the old meta- phor, the old myth about the suffering artist.” And so | do all this rationalizing and say, “You can lead a balanced life. You can have your artistic solitude as well as being out in the world. And you can balance this.” And I give myself all these pep talks, but when it comes down to doing the actual writing. .. . Interviewer: It’s still painful. Anzaldia: It’s still painful! And no amount of therapy would—I haven’t been in therapy, the writing is my therapy—and I think no amount of my dwelling on the process and why I get stuck and why I don’t and experiencing what I’m writing—whether it’s about abandonment or about some other emotional pain—I have to actually jump into that insight, into that pain, and just write from there. There’s no other way! I mean, I’ve tried to play it safe and the writing is flat. Or it’s too theoretical, or it’s too abstract, or it’s too intellectualized. When | get into the feeling and recreate the concrete realities, the images. I have to go through the experience. I have to feel it. And I know that some of the kinds of critical writings that people do is also painful in a different way. The people who keep themselves out of the text I think are the ones who are protecting themselves, but their writing isn’t as strong. Interviewer: Somehow passion is not supposed to be a part of critical, intellectual, scholarly writing. But | think that it is there: whether or not it shows, it is there. Anzaldda: Si. Interviewer: You take the risk of allowing the passion to be a part of the scholarship.22 ANN E. REUMAN Anzaldia: Yes. Interviewer: What new directions are you taking in your most recent work? What are you working on now? Anzaldia: | find myself more and more dealing with composition in writing and in art and the artist’s relation to community, the community, the role of the artist in the community, the commu- nity’s responsibility to the artist and the artist’s responsibility to the community, that I’m getting a little more into that relational kind of thing. And one of the projects that I see myself doing ten years down the road is a book on myself and “m/other,” with “m/other” as “m” slash “other.” I’ve got tons and tons of pages on my computer already. I have a novel, which is a continuation of one of the stories in La Prieta. It’s called Delores. And it’s a dialogue, it’s a story with two voices. One is my sister Delores’ voice, and the other one is me the writer, and our relationship together in the last fifty years. And I’d like to do a novel partially from her perspective and also from my own perspective. And there’s another manuscript of fiction called Fic Nineteen, which is more experimental, and I have actually more than nineteen stories that are mostly in a beginning stage—pre-draft, or first draft. Interviewer: What strikes me in what you’re saying is that you sound quite a bit like what Barbara DiBernard has called Audre Lorde: an “artist-in-relation,” a “connected artist-self who is able to identify and draw on the strengths of women around her and before her.” Do you see yourself in that way? Anzaldia: Yes. In ’88 I wrote an essay on the plural “I” and the singular “we,” and it was about representation and how the author, the writer a lot of times in using the “I” is using the “we” because there are other women who identify so strongly with her experi- ences. And then when she uses the “we,” the generic term of “we Chicanas” or “we black women,” it’s actually a more particular- ized “we.” And it’s one of the topics in the dissertation, in the Lloronas book. Well, actually the dissertation and the Lloronas book are two different projects, but they overlap. And I’m not sure what's going to go in which.INTERVIEW: ANZALDUA 23 Interviewer: Well, we'll look forward to reading them. “We”: all of us! Anzaldta: Well, don’t hold your breath, because we’re getting into the next question: “Did you ever hit blocks when writing?”. Definitely. “What contributed to these and what got you through them?”. OK, I hit a block not at the beginning stage of projects, not in the middle stage, but towards the end, towards the finishing stage. And I think I am. . . I suffer from perfectionism. Which means that what I put out there has to be good because if you’re a woman of color and you're a writer and you’re queer, your stuff has to be twice as good as anybody else’s. I have a hard time letting go of things. You know, I like to keep things and work them and I sit on them, and I’m constantly revising, so even things that I’ve already published I’m revising. And so that is one block. The other block is when an outside authority gives me deadlines, has a schedule, like book production you have to have a schedule. And so I am very amiable about their deadlines and I try and be very diplomatic and give in and negotiate but also be very flexible—I believe that writing is collaborative and that it’s not just my vision that gets put out, that my name is on the book but it’s also my publisher and editor and all the people who give me feedback, my readers— it’s a collaborative aspect. But when the other people that I’m dealing with become really fixed on the way something should be, they trigger in me this Lloronas type of rebel that puts its foot down, and refuses. And when | myself am the authority figure and I say, “OK, Gloria, you have to do this by a certain date, and you have to set up this discipline which is a daily writing schedule, daily writing routine,” and that routine gets complicated by my being a resource to other people, my doing the speaking engage- ments, my doing interviews, my having a social life and having dinner with friends. And there’re not enough hours in the day. That little rebel in me, the internal one, rebels not against the world but against me, the authority figure. So it’s an inner and outer sort of monkey throwing the monkey wrench in the works. And besides all the problems with inner and outer authority and with not wanting to let go of things, not finishing projects, not wanting to finish projects, it got complicated by diabetes. And part24 ANN E. REUMAN of diabetes is the chemicals in my bloodstream and my body induce a chemical depression. It was bad enough when I had the regular kinds of depressions, because I’ve always had insomnia and I’ve always had depression, and it was more cyclical, it was more of when my sun was going into the twelfth house, or when I was going through some psychologically painful thing. But with the diabetes, you know, a lot of times it had less to do with my psychological realities than with a kind of physical reality, even though the physical reality is impacted upon by what’s going on in my life outside. But that made it worse! That made it worse because I couldn’t predict when | was going to be depressed, you know. If something went wrong in my life I knew I would some- how have to deal with it and sometimes | would deal with it very fast, and | would get on top of it and come out feeling very posi- tive. With the diabetes, I couldn’t come out of it as fast because there was a component in it that had to do with the insulin in my body and the body processing sugars and my getting enough vitamin D and getting enough exercise and it was horrible! So the way I always dealt with depression—first of all, I shut down, I become a hermit, | go into this kind of dark space, the Coatlicue cave, and I don’t answer my phone and I don’t do stuff socially very much, unless it’s absolutely necessary. So for a week 1 would be in this Coatlicue state and 1 would completely switch my sleeping schedule so that | would be sleeping during the daylight and I would be up at night when I knew nobody was going to bother me. And I have a poem in Borderlands called “Creature of Darkness” that speaks to this. That’s the first thing. And then I start trying to articulate why I’m feeling this. During those days that I’m escaping from having to articulate why I’m feeling so bad, I read junk. Now this is when I read my mysteries, I read popular fiction, I'll do horror, Pll look at horror movies. And 1 completely understand the way that horror works because that’s how I work when I’m in this Coatlicue state. When I start articulat- ing, that means I start calling friends, and I start explaining why I haven’t been around. And I start working with my dreams. And I start taking symbols in the dreams, characters in the dreams, the dream person, me, the eagle, dream eagle, that’s what they call it in dream psychology. And I start working with my pendulum or my—I have several things that 1 work with. I have this thing calledINTERVIEW: ANZALDUA 25 the star gate which is a symbology system. | use the Taro—I have some Native American decks, | have a deck that I just bought the other day, it’s called the “inner child” cards and it’s a journey into fairy tales, myths, and nature. And then | have some dream cards that—and I also just use a plain deck of cards, and I will do a reading and I will say “Why am | depressed?”. And draw one card. And I'll say, “Why, what led to this?”. And Pll draw another card. And then [Il do a third card and I'll draw a card for “How can | get out of this?”. So, 1 do very simple things. Interviewer: Do you have any answers for us? For the rest of us who sometimes experience writing blocks and depressed states? Anzaldia: Yes, you can create your own kind of reading. “What is hindering me?” “What is helping me?” “What led to this situa- tion?” Even, “What situation am I in?”. Because a lot of times you don’t, you can’t figure out what the hell is wrong. And use differ- ent symbology systems, different Tarot systems. But mostly I will start pulling out of it, articulating by talking to my friends, working with my dreams, and meditating. And I'll take a walk and I'll go and do an ocean meditation—‘cause | live about a block from Monterey Bay, from the Pacific Ocean. So 1 go down to Light- house Beach here on West Cliff Drive, and I'll sit and I'll just be with the ocean, and watch the breakers come in and watch the birds flying over the crests looking tor food, and I'll watch where the sky and the ocean come together, or I'll do a walking medita- tion, or I'll do a sky meditation—most of the meditations that I do I call creative in that | try to put myself in a state of my brain waves slowing down to five or six cycles, which is a dream state, a state of semi-hypnosis. And enter into that space, and then record in my journal the thoughts that come to me, the images that come to me. And this is a technique that | use when I teach creative writing, these guided meditations. And that gets me in touch with what is wrong, with what I’m feeling. And a lot of good writing comes out of it, but during the days and weeks and sometimes months when | am in this depressed state, I don’t want to articulate it. | don’t want to figure it out. | don’t want to be helped. I just want to be left alone!26 ANN E. REUMAN Interviewer: It sounds like that time of withdrawal or hibernation is a time of replenishment and a time of just allowing yourself to not have to answer to other people for a while. Anzaldia: Yes! Interviewer: And it sounds like your whole process of the medita- tions in a way is a way of being an artist-in-relation, that it’s in relation to another rhythm, to the natural world, rather than just to human beings, and that there’s something very soothing in that. Anzaldta: And the funny thing that—well, maybe not so funny— is that it usually comes after a trip. | have this post-journey depres- sion. When I have been out in the world, or even when I visit my folks in south Texas, I’ll be so inundated with them and their concerns in the world that when I come back I go through this little hibernation period. Sometimes it’s only a day or two; sometimes it’s a week. And this past January was really extended into like five weeks of not feeling good and my diabetes and my depres- sion—and it had to do with the storms. Plus coming back from Texas and things going wrong with the house and I had to be dealing with the house and I just wanted to be doing my writing. And—I don’t know what else! You start grasping at straws to explain why you’re feeling what you're feeling. Interviewer: Sometimes there is no really rational explanation. Anzaldiia: And so | took out my chart, my astrological chart, and I thought, “Oh, God. Yeah, this is my mercury making all these transits, and they’re, they’re hard!”. But who knows! Who knows what the reasons are! And I usually like rain, I like winter, I like— but we got so many storms. I think there were ten storms in a row Interviewer: And all the flooding. . . . Anzaldia: And all the flooding. And I had water coming in through the floor in my closet. I had water leaking from the ceiling. 1 had water coming in through the front door. | had water comingINTERVIEW: ANZALDUA 27 in from the back door, And it was very depressing. I didn’t want to deal with maintenance problems. I wanted to be left alone so | could do my reading and writing because I figured I had been out in the world enough and I needed my solitude. And I didn’t need to deal with the service repairman coming to fix the washer, the insurance people—I didn’t need to deal! But anyway. Interviewer: Tugging on all those little pieces of you, like Coyolxauhqui. Each wants a little piece. Anzaldua: Yes. Interviewer: I’m thinking for a moment, just trying to connect some of these ideas that you're bringing out. When you are moving through some of these episodes and writing in a way that feels for you most productive, do you draw strength primarily from women? It seems as though many of the people you’ve mentioned in your work as having been important in giving encouragement and helping the works come into being have been women—Merlin Stone, Chela Sandoval, Cherrie Moraga and others. Would you say that that is so, that it’s mostly been women who have sustained and encouraged you; or is there more to it than that for you? Anzaldiua: | think that in terms of my historical everyday reality self, that yes, Merlin Stone and Chela Sandoval and Cherrie and these people who used to be in my life—some of them are still: Chela is still in my life—that the community here, the lesbian community, the women of color community, they’ve been very supportive. The women who—re-entry women into my class here in grad school, the people that were friends of mine in San Fran- cisco and Oakland—Elana Dykewomon from Sinister Wisdom, Kit Quan, people from my past, my friends—Randy Conner—-these people supported my work moralistically and politically. But I also see that the people that have influenced my concept of reality and my writing have been other—like Julio Cortasa, the writer from Argentina—has impacted really heavily on the way that | fictional- ize. And Juan Dulpho, who—the Mexican writer, after the fact, because | read him late. And Helena Penyatoska, the Mexican writer: also I read her late. They weren’t people who—except for28 ANN E. REUMAN Cortasa—they didn’t impact on me early on. Charlotte Bronté, who wrote Jane Eyre, was one of my models before | even became a writer. At the time when I was considering wanting to be an artist and a writer is when I read her. And then the women who first supported my writing have for the most part been Jewish. Well, maybe not. It’s kind of hard. Chicanas—lI first got published in Tejilos in ’76. There was a woman who supported my writing, Betty Lionie, who’s Italian, and who was married to a Chicano. And Kay Turner was there who has done a lot of work in anthro- pology. [rena Klepfisz sent me a letter wanting to publish my work in Conditions, and. . . . Let’s see. Adrienne Rich has always been very supportive of my writing and I’ve had other lesser known people—my writing intern. One way of my passing on what I’m learning is I offer apprenticeships and writing to students either for credit or for exchange, like when I have money I’m able to pay for a literary assistant, but mostly | have students who will take on a writing internship with me, and | will initiate them into critiqu- ing—how to read and respond to a piece of writing that’s in progress. And what a writing life is like. And what a political writing life is like. And mostly | work with Chicanas and Jews. And the Chicanas are students who want to take on the work that some of the Chicana writers and myself are doing—these are our future writers, our future teachers, our future theorists, our future artists, and ] work with them. So I draw from the strengths of many of these people. And I have to balance that with not letting myself be resourced to death, not letting other people siphon my life’s blood. Because everybody wants something from me. The only people who don’t want something from me are the people that | consider that I have a kind of a reciprocal relationship where they give as much as they take, which is your basic relationship. But | am exposed to a lot of people who want me to validate them, who want me to help them, who want to pick my brain as a resource—and that is all right as long as I don’t overdo it, and | think that two years ago, a year and a half ago, | was feeding other people so much that IT wasn’t feeding myself. And that the metaphor for that is diabetes where the body does not process nutrients, sugars, correctly. And | had to reconcile myself to the fact that nine out of ten phone calls or letters or faxes that | get are people who want something. And IINTERVIEW: ANZALDUA 29 had to stop feeling that | was a failure because | couldn’t be there for everybody. I felt badly that I was missing opportunities to speak at conferences, missing opportunities to dialogue with somebody just because of the day not having enough hours and I don’t have enough energy. And the people that I was drawing strength from were not that many and | needed to get more people that | would have reciprocal relationships with. And that’s been really hard because people see me as Gloria the teacher, the writer, and what can she do to help me articulate this particular thing in my life, or this syllabus, or this book or—you know? And it’s very flattering, it’s very validating of me—-I've gotten a lot from people and I’ve also given a lot to people, and if I can keep the balance I don’t get ill. When I keep the balance, I don’t get ill. So the community is always there for me and it plays a very significant role. Not just the community as a broad abstract cate- gory, but also members of particular communities have been there for me or have not been there for me but in cither case | am in relation with them. Interviewer: Are there particular family members who have been important to you in your work? You mentioned that one piece of your writing is a dialogue between your sister and you. Are there other family members that have been integral to your work and sustenance? Anzaldua: Yes. First of all my sister is both supportive and also undercutting. When Bridge came out and | talked about being queer, she did not talk to me for three years and she tore up the book and threw it in the trash can. My mother and my brothers I feel very close to. When Borderlands came out—there’s a poem called “Immaculate Inviolate” about my grandmother and how my grandfather had other women with family, with kids, that he would take turns being with. That poem was about the sexuality of women of the generation of my grandmother. My brother was appalled by it, and he threatened to get my other relatives to sue, that he was going to tell them about :t and they were going to sue me. When my children’s book came out, everybody rallied around that. They thought it was great, because in the children’s book it doesn't say anything about being a lesbian.30 ANN E. REUMAN Interviewer: It was safer ground for them. Anzaldia: Yes. For a long time my writing was being “indulgent” and “selfish” and I wasn’t really working in the real world. I was in this profession that paid nothing and my mom felt that with all my education I should be earning a living better than I was. I should have a house; I should have a car. I have those things now, but I didn’t until a few years ago because—the apprenticeship for a writer, all the time you need to create: [ wasn’t doing full-time work. And no one in my family approved of my writing, and especially not my mother because she thought it was. . . 1 was being selfish. When | read and studied as a younger person living with my mother, she thought that was selfishness. And now as a middle-aged woman—until recently, she felt that 1 was still being selfish and indulgent. And when I got a N.B.A., a twenty thousand dollar N.E.A., and I also got a call from my mom saying that this man named Wolfgang Kurar, who’s German, had come to the valley to talk to her about me and that he felt that I was one of the better writers in Texas, and that he was going to do a book on me. And when I got this call from her, she was all excited about it and all the other calls had been very critical of everything and this particular call was different, and she said, “Oh, and by the way, how is your writing?”. She’d never inquired about my writing. So now in terms of money-making and recognition she accepts that. But my family doesn’t want me to go and speak anywhere near them; and they don’t want any of my books to be shown anyone— other than the children’s books. Interviewer: That must be very difficult for you. Anzaldtia: Yes. The other two people that were very helpful to me: my two grandmothers. One died in °74 and the other one died in °76, and they were the ones that used to tell me stories about the old days, the days of the ranch settlements—’cause I grew up in a ranch settlement. And then my father, who died in ’57, who encouraged me to read, the only member of my family who ever wanted me to go past high school. Everybody else didn’t want meINTERVIEW: ANZALDUA 31 to go to college. And instead of helping, they were pulling me back. Interviewer: Do you think there was an additional gender expecta- tion there? Was that something especially that girls, that women were not supposed to do—be educated or use their intellectual talents? Anzaldua: | think it was more—that aspect, yes, is part of it; but more of a. ... With my mom, she never, she never pushed us into marriage. | mean, I think after my father died, she wanted to keep us. And my sister lives with her still, and all of us are very close to her. | was the one that got away, and for that she’s never forgiven me. But | think with the rest of the community there were these gender expectations—a woman’s place is tending to her husband and children, and certainly not thinking and not being educated and not writing and not being strong, not being autonomous. Interviewer: You speak at one point in one of your interviews about that nepantia place where you most recently made that choice to move from a working-class position to what you called in “intellectual, academic, artistic class”—although I’m assuming in that, like the rattlesnake, you keep elements of what you have grown from. ... Anzaldua: Si. | think—yes, the intellectual, artistic identity that | have is very old. From the time when I was in elementary school I was this little kid that was carrying around Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, —so | had that kind of identity. But the academic self was one that started showing its face with This Bridge Called My Back in °81 and then more with Borderlands in °87 and now it’s a very impor- tant part of my making a living because it’s the academic commu- nity that hires me to do these talks. What was really hard for me was the change of economic class. Still in my head and in my style of living I’m very much under- class, working class. But the power and the privilege that 1] have and the money that I earn is more middle class. And it was really hard to make that transition, to step over that border-—very, very hard. And then lately I realized that | haven’t actually stepped all32 ANN E. REUMAN the way because in style I still live very economically—you know, I turn off lights, I recycle—very much the way that my mom—in fact, she’s probably more wasteful in terms of energy and in terms of buying things than I am. Somehow or other the California thing influenced me into being more conservative with energy and more recycling and realizing what we’re doing to the earth, of stripping it of its resources. But in having powers of voice, in having privi- lege as a writer who has been recognized in different communities, that was so. . . . | went from the poor little Chicanita who was invisible and nobody gave a shit for to all of a sudden being asked and being respected as this elder who’s wise. Moving from the working class meant accepting that | was no longer a non-entity, that I had something to say and that people put a lot of energy into hearing me—you know, either by buying my books or by asking me to speak. And to change that inner image was hard because on the one hand I always felt oppressed and marginalized, but on the other hand I also felt very strong in that marginalized, oppressed part that | was standing on, that world that I was living in because | had the strength to rebel. So the strength was always in there, but other people hadn’t seen it. So dealing with power and privilege and the responsibilities of power and privilege and what I owed the community was really—well, was difficult. And the stepping over into the community of people that have and leaving the “have- nots” was hard because all of a sudden I became the enemy, | became the other, | became the person with the power, | became the patron, the patrona, the place that most of my life had been occupied by the gringo, by the Euro-American. All of a sudden | was in their side, in the “haves” side, and that’s when | started articulating the nos/otras. Then it was all right, then I could process it because I could articulate it, And | think that as long as I can articulate it and see it in a vision, in a visual picture which is connected to an emotion, then I can articulate that in writing. Interviewer: It sounds like writing has been important to you as a way of bridging some of the changes in your own life. Anzaldia: Definitely. The writing has been very therapeutic and it has been what has given significance to my life and also I makeINTERVIEW: ANZALDUA 33 meaning from it. I can say, “Well, this means this” and then I feel better. Interviewer: Do you think that your writing reflects aspects of you that come from working-class experiences? Anzaldta: | think yes. | think that some of what I write and my theoretical work and what | am fictionalizing in the stories most of the settings and the predominant class is working class and a kind of artistic class. And in some of the newer stories, more of the middle class/academic is coming in. The first six, seven years of my life 1 think influences and is very much alive in me. And I think it’s very much alive in most people. They, their childhood gets imprinted in some way, in a deep way. Interviewer: Do you feel that that also influenced—influences— your choice of form? I’m thinking of poetry and orality: you credited your father with storytelling as part of what he meant to you. Do you think that that’s in there us well? Anzaldia: | think that that’s a very important part of it, and [ think that’s what the L/oronas book focuses on is the stories that I was told, and they are cultural stories, stories that are expressive of the collectivity. And it’s a culture that [| want to change. | want to change those stories by creating new ones. I want to change those myths by re-mythologizing. And I needed that wall, or those roots, to bounce off of so that | could then shift to something else, or expand the myths into something else, or interpret them anew. | needed that ground of the early six or seven years of my life—t needed that. So everything is kind of in response and reaction and a growth from those carly years, and the cultural stuff—coming from a ranching, farming community. Interviewer: Do you see a place, a time that marks when you shifted into the more academic side? Do you connect that, for instance, with a movement away from your mother’s home and into California, or movement into graduate work, or. . . ?34 ANN E. REUMAN Anzaldia: | think it began when I graduated from high school. I went to college off and on—I would work a year or two and then drop out for a year or two so that I could save money so then I could go back to work. And I was doing my student teaching, and I was still working in the fields when I got my B.A., on weekends. I began to teach after | got my B.A. and I began to go to grad school to get my M.A. in the summertime when the public schools were closed. And I think that’s when I started articulating the scholar, the philosopher, the breaking away—the breaking away was after high school. And | literally left south Texas, went to Denton, which is north of Dallas, eight, nine-hundred miles—to get away from the constricted, cage-like thing in my family and my commu- nity, Then I had to leave Texas completely in order to really allow myself to become who I am, and to experience other realities and other worlds and be part of other communities. I had to literally leave the state and my community. In some ways I’ve become estranged from it; but in other ways I’ve become closer to it. Interviewer: Do you feel at all like an expatriate? | mean, some of what you’re describing is almost what some writers have felt when they left their country—which at least in a metaphoric sense, it sounds like you almost had to do in order to be able to write on your own and not be constricted by the views of others. Anzaldia: Yes, I call it being an internal exile, and I—this is another idea that I’m working out in the Lioronas book. So, yes, an internal exile. I also felt like an internal exile when I was a little girl and I was living with my family. | never was quite—I was always kind of freakish and different and felt alien, At the same time that I felt at home. And that’s been true of wherever I am: I feel both extremes, and I talk about this in the “Bridge, Draw- bridge, Sandbar, Island” essay. But it’s a very good description of where a lot of us are that are academic and are artistic Chicanas, political artistic activistas and artistas. It pretty much describes al! of us in that, yes, we’re part of this whole ethnic community, but we’re also at odds with it. And yes, we’re part of the university and white women’s community and the U.S. of A., Euro-American community. But we’re also very much at odds with it. And so I call it an internal exile—it was a term that I borrowed from. . . theINTERVIEW: ANZALDUA 35 woman who did the murals, what’s her name?-—Judy Baca. And she borrowed it from somebody else. I’m not sure who: the “inter- nal exile.” Interviewer: You had used the image at one point in Borderlands of being like a turtle carrying your home on your back, and it seems like there’s some element of that in what you're describing with this. That there’s a way in which you're a part of both worlds, or of many worlds, but also feel apart from them. Anzaldia: Yes. I feel pretty much of a journey or a traveler person who is mobile. A crosser into many different communities. And I have to take my home with me. And that is the turtle’s shell. But in the past it was literal—I was literally moving—a major move every seven years and then a smaller move every three-and-a-half years. And I broke the cycle purposely when I moved to Santa Cruz, and I said, “OK, this is going to be my home base. I’ve been here seven years, and I will wander and travel when I speak.” Interviewer: So you have a touchstone; you have a place where you feel grounded. Anzaldia: I have a touchstone, yes, because it got impossible for me to lug all my filing cabinets on my back. Interviewer: | would like to follow up on part of what you’re saying here in terms of a comment that you made in an interview with AnnLouise Keating. You mentioned that your lesbian per- spective had evolved. Can you say something about what that perspective means to you now, and how it influences your writing today? Anzaldaa: Yes. It has to do with the terms and labels of identity. When I was growing up in south Texas the word “queer” was very much what we called these people. Or “de Jas otras,” which means “of the others,” that I wrote about in Borderlands. Marimachas and marimachos, jotitas, jotas, tortilleras. these were labels and terms in the Chicano working-class community that ] grew up in. When I went and left home and became part of the women of color com-36 ANN E. REUMAN munity and came out as a lesbian, I started not liking to use the word “lesbian.” When I would dialogue with myself or with other women of color, I would use “dyke” or “queer.” And then with Chicanas I started using the word patlache. And patlache is a Nahuatl word that means “dyke,” “lesbian.” And I started seeing that what the white lesbian community was imposing on me was a Eurocentric view, a label that derived from Greece, Sappho, and was very white and that I wanted to articulate my queerness because it was different from their queerness and so | needed a different kind of language. And when I came out, the only com- munity there for me were a few Chicana dykes and the white lesbian community, so | embraced their books and their theories, and the way they dressed and everything. And | think all of us do this, we go with—if you're a dyke of color and there’s not enough in your community, you. . . . So I feel very close to the white dykes, and I have a love of them and their community and their art and their writing and their theories, but it began to be very con- strictive in that I thought I was in a cage and they were defining the bars; and I needed to break out of that cage, just like | needed to break out of the cage of my family and the nationalistic cage of just being a Chicana and nothing more. | didn’t want to just be a lesbian and nothing more. In the first place, | wasn’t a lesbian, because a lesbian is somebody who is white and middle class. And so I started chafing at the boundaries and limitations set by the white lesbian community and | particularly started resenting the writing agenda—if you’re a dyke, you only write about this content. So I would be put into that constraint both by heterosex- ual, Eurocentric society as to what a dyke writer was, and also by the lesbian community into what a lesbian writer was supposed to write about and be. And I had always had a link, an affection, a connection with the men in my culture, and also with white homosexuals. My friend Randy Conner was one of the first white gay males that came into my life and he really impacted on it. ] learned about homosexuality and about lesbianism and about feminism via my relationship with him. And in fact some of the writings that | started reading were by gay guys before I got into reading about lesbians or stuff by lesbians. So that is a perspective that has evolved when I started articulating the in-between space. That | wasn’t this white lesbian,INTERVIEW: ANZALDUA 37 and | wasn’t this white man, and | wasn’t this nothing-but Chicana. That I was this mestisa, and so as that concept has come into play in my life, thus has my perspective about being queer evolved. Interviewer: Are there other ways in which you think that you have affected and challenged white middle-class feminist thinking? Anzaldua: Yes, | think one of the first things that Cherrie and | and other women of color who were writing in This Bridge Called My Back, who were activists in the early ’80s, late ’70s, said was it’s about the intersection of things, it’s about the intersection of race and gender. Sexism is not the only kind of oppression that women suffer. Race has to do with it. Class has to do with it. Sexual orientation has to do with it. Age has to do with it. Abilities ....So I feel that this articulation that the women of color put out, it stopped the white feminists in their tracks. At first they were very angry; then they were hurt that we were being, that they felt like we were pushing them away, or that we were concentrating on differences instead of similarities. They wanted to conflate the differences and say “Oh, we’re all oppressed because we're all women. We’re all under colonial oppression. We’re all... .” You know. And when we said “What you’re doing by conflating dif- ferences, that’s a racist act, or that’s a classist act” or. . . whatever. And it made every one of them rethink their position! And it’s not just women of color—-me, Cherrie, the women of This Bridge, and other women of color during the *70s and ’80s—it was also a few progressive white women who were already teeling this way. They were already feeling that racism was a big thing and that it was being ignored. And they were questioning themselves. But [ think it took us—it took us women of color, activists and writers, to make them examine whiteness. To say that their whiteness was implicated in their political positions, where before it was just a given. So, yes, | think that I'm happy, I’m proud that we did that work. And white women have begun to credit us with that, but again there’s a kind of amnesia, of not crediting the multicultural movement to us, to the women of color and the white lesbians, white women, white feminists, who were implementing a women’s studies program or an ethnic studies program and they were bringing in material from diverse cultures. And they aren’t credited38 ANN E. REUMAN either because multiculturalism is supposed to be this fairly new movement and is being taken over by these Johnnie-come-latelies. Which is all right, except they don’t credit, they don’t historicize. Interviewer: Do you think that white feminism has affected you and your world view in writing in any way? Anzaldia: Yes, it’s had a very positive and strong effect. You know, I was reading—como se liama?—the Kate Millet book. .. . Interviewer: Sexual Politics? Anzaldua: Her. I was reading Robin Morgan, I was reading Judy Grahn, I was reading these people when I started working on a Ph.D. in 1974, °75, but a lot of my feminist ideas had already been developed out in the field when I was working as a farm worker. And when I was working with a bilingual and a migrant program in the state of Indiana and when | was teaching high school, migrant kids and bilingual programs in high school in south Texas, I had the experience but | didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate it, and these white feminists gave me the vocabulary. And once I had the vocabulary, then I had to start thinking of, developing my own, using my own cultural words and symbols and images. So, yes, I have a great love for English writers, for Euro-American women writers. I’ve never denied that, I’ve never denied that aspect of white in me, the white person in me. And sometimes I get very angry at that white aspect, and sometimes | get, | feel very positive and very fortunate to have it. It’s like any other identity. Interviewer: Are there ways in which you’ve seen that women of color have affected you in your writing? Or conversely, that you have affected the thinking of other women of color? Anzaldiia: I think it’s worked both ways. I think that Native Americans, both men and women, and their situation, their reali- ties, are very close to my reality as a Chicana connected to the land. And feeling the three-quarters of me that has Native Ameri- can blood—maybe more than three-quarters of me—and the part of me that has the Basque and the Spanish and the gypsy and theINTERVIEW: ANZALDUA 39 Jew is just a very small percentage—-I feel indigenous, but identify as Chicana. And their experience—talking to Chrystos, talking to Beth Brant, Paula Gunn Allen—talking to all these Native Ameri- can women, the Asian women and the Chinese-American women, their culture in some ways is similar to mine in the way that girls— women—are regarded in that culture. Gender stuff. I feel a strong connection to black women, especially the activists because of having come from a slave legacy. I feel that as a colonized Chicana in south Texas we were put in that kind of peon stage, which was not as drastic as being a slave, but there were similarities in having to answer to a master, or patron. Interviewer: Arc there particular African American women who have been important to your thinking? Anzaldia: Well, one of the first people, one of the first African Americans that | read was Toni Morrison. And she, | think, in an unconscious way really touched me. Then the political articulate- ness of Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith, where they spell things out, also. The stories of Gloria Naylor. Almost in every single women of color community, there have been writers and artists who in some way I’ve been in dialogue with even though | may never have met them. But I also feel that a lot of what | have developed in terms of politics and artistic ideas have been things that I worked with within myself, with my different selves, of which some of these selves have been touched by these other communities of color, particularly women, and I’ve internalized them and so that I’m in dialogue with myself but it’s actually with them. But I feel that a lot of my ideas were already there with “La Prieta” and “Speaking in Tongues” and that I’m just unraveling these. And that they were there when | was working in the fields and when [| was teaching and when I was in Indiana, so that actually, | don’t know how much impact these other people and their ideas have had other than that | have been in dialogue with them. But I have bounced off concepts that originated early in me before I met any of these people, before | had contact with any—in south Texas, the only other contact with a race was the whites. And we were eighty percent Chicano and they were twenty [percent] white, and our schools were segregated. So | was almost insulated40 ANN E. REUMAN with this Chicano community rather than exposed to this commu- nity. That didn’t happen until [ left Texas. And then | started having a connection with Mexican women writers, and Latino writers—Cortasa, Borges—these people that 1 mentioned before— Juan Dulpho—much later, much later in life. Interviewer: Do you see a connection between your teaching and your writing? I’m thinking for a moment about Audre Lorde who says that writing is important for survival but that is only part of the task, that another part of the task is teaching; and for many people, like you, who are writing, there does seem to be an inter- connection between the ways in which they teach and how that evolved and what’s going on in their writing. Do you see that with your work? Anzaldia: Yes, it’s like I need the teaching and being in dialogue with others as the other component of the solitude and being in my head and creating. I will be in my head and create and then I will take these images and these ideas and these feelings and I'll bounce them off people and—in the classroom or in the auditorium and the conference—and then I bring them back and refine them in the writing and I—it’s kind of reciprocal. I don’t think I could do either without the other. Interviewer: It’s hard to work in a vacuum. Anzaldua: It’s very hard to work in a vacuum, and I don’t think— it’s impossible to work in a vacuum, and J don’t think anyone can live in a vacuum. This is why the bridge metaphor is so strong in me and the historical reality of this bridge, from my world to the white world to the world of women of color, and in my internal life the metaphor is more of this kind of shamanistic image of travel- ing, flying to other worlds, traveling to other worlds, which relates to my last name Anzaldia, which is Basque. “An” means over or heaven, the upper world, the sky world, the world of the head and the intellect. “Zal” is the underworld, the world of the unconscious, the world of the instincts, the feelings. And “dua” is the joining of the two, and that is the earth part, the middle ground. So my name really means this traveler from the upper world to the underworldINTERVIEW: ANZALDUA 41 to the middle world to the nahual, the shape-shifter, the person who can in her imagination travel to these other places, access dreams that travel to these other places. So | keep extending the bridge metaphor or maybe the nahual/shaman metaphor has expanded—because | think it was there before the concrete bridge thing. And there is an essay in Conversant Essavs: Contemporary Poets on Poetry, edited by James McCorkle. It’s a collection of poets on their craft, and | have an essay in it, “Metaphors in the Tradition of the Shaman.” | kind of based that on an earlier essay that [ wrote for a college class many years ago that [ called “Grow- ing Up Chicana” and in it was that shape-shifting, nahual, shaman figure. So I developed a political kind of accompanying metaphor which is the bridge. drawbridge, sandbar, island. And somehow now I’m getting back to the nafual, the shape-shifter. It’s more of a dreaming identity, the identity that imagines and that dreams and that creates art, that has to travel to these other places. Magical flight into the creative art work. Interviewer: I think that image of the shape-shifter, one who moves around and is a world-traveler resonates for many people today who are juggling several positions, trying to be so many things at once, and moving through many languages and many ways of being, with many different kinds of people and situations. Anzaldta: Yes. There are a few stories in the Prieta manuscript that I think would be of interest to you. One is called “The Were- Jaguar,” and this is about a woman, Prieta, who dreams that she has this encounter with a jaguar, gets up and records the dream in her computer, is looking at her wall which has a mask of the mouth of this were-jaguar, hears---starts to-~it’s raining and she’s looking out at the corn, and she thinks she sees this animal moving in the corn. Then she is taking a nap or somehow or other gets into this fantasizing which comes out in the shape of a poem about her sexual encounter with this were-jaguar, with a woman who’s half female and half jaguar. And then she’s back on the computer and she’s composing the story about this experience and trying to figure out what’s happening in the real world, what’s happening in the world of the dream, what’s happening in the world of making fiction, what’s happening in the worid of her fantasies, and what’s42 ANN E. REUMAN the difference between all these realities, and what has more validity than the others. It’s been really hard to work on the story .... There are several of those that deal with the shape-shifting. I have another one which may or may not make it into the collection called “Lechuza.” And the lechuza is kind of an owl, an owl who used to be a woman, a woman who shape-shifis into an owl. And there are many cultural stories about the /echuza. What other stories shape-shift? Just a whole lot of them deal with this in a more prominent way that becomes not just a metaphor but it becomes a literal... . Interviewer: A reality. Anzaldia: A reality, yes. Interviewer: I'll be interested to see those stories. Well, I have just one other question. This is based on something that Adrienne Rich wrote in one of her articles. She said she had a vision, a hope, of a “quantum leap: a future in which women were, as she put it, “deeply valued and respected, . . . a culture which was woman- affirming, . . . a society which had truly addressed the issues of racism and hunger, . . . a society which was making full use of the spiritual, intellectual, emotional, physical gifts of women, in all our difference and diversity, . . . a society which laid no stigma upon lesbians, so that women grew up with real emotional and erotic options.” It was, she said, a vision of a world which operated not by “power over” but by the “power-to-create, power-to-think, power-to-articulate and concretize our visions and transform our lives.” I’m wondering if you share this vision, or if your mestiza consciousness is about something quite different? Anzaldia: I really admire her as a person and as a writer; and I think she has been the foundational theorist for a lot of women who are writing and who are scholars today. She’s impacted a whole lot, not just with her more political visions but also with the stuff around mothering and stuff like that, and I think that my mission is very similar to hers. I think mine has taken different stages. | started out with e/ mundo zurdo in This Bridge, of having the disenfranchised, of the marginalized groups, the queer groupsINTERVIEW: ANZALDUA 43 somehow working in alliance with each other, to make things better, to transform culture and get women out of the cage, because I have felt that all of what Adrienne Rich has written and what I have written is about getting out of this cage of limitations im- posed by our respective cultures, and the loss of language, the loss of gender, the loss of genre, the loss of. . . ideologies. And that we just have different ways of envisioning getting out and getting free. I think where mine differs from hers is that I think that as soon as you get out of one cage, you’ve built another one, and that you then have to rail against those bars and free yourself, and then you find yourself in another one. I’m not as—I’m hopeful, but I don’t think I'm as optimistic. . . . I think human nature is very much about a creature that is in conflict with itself. And as soon as we solve something, or as soon as something gets better, there’s something else that needs attention. Interviewer: There is no easy solution. Anzaldtia: There are no easy solutions, no. And some of this vision I’m trying to articulate in the alliance work because it’s a continuation of e/ mundo zurdo, mestiza consciousness, the border- lands, nepantia, and. . . . | don’t know if we're ever going to get to that culture where all these, where somebody’s not going to be top dog and somebody’s not going to be bottom. And | don’t think I have quite as much faith in feminists and in women that if we were top dog we wouldn’t mess up. And [’m also not sure that the race thing—that if Chicanos or blacks or Asians were top dog that things would. . . . | think that we need to work towards that vision. It always needs to be the carrot that we’re moving toward. And that it’s better than having a stick behind us, beating us. | prefer the carrot strategy. But this thing about power over, I don’t know if it’s ever going to be, that there will be always something that has power over, and yes, there will be plenty of things that are power- with or that’s reciprocal, and the space to create, the space to think, the space to articulate our visions: that’s what I’ve been struggling with, what my life has been like, and wanting to encourage that in other women, in giving them encouragement to find their voice, to find their space from which to articulate their visions, and their experiences, and in that respect, I think the mestiza consciousness44 ANN E. REUMAN differs a little bit from what she’s saying. And. . . I think that the mestiza consciousness is not so much concentrated on it being a woman, a gender thing. I use the feminine gender just because I’m tired of always the masculine “we,” but the men who read me, most of them don’t have any trouble when they see mestisa to see themselves as mestiso. So in terms of gender I don’t think that women are going to be the be-all and the end-all. I think that we have a renaissance right now, we have a movement right now, and that we have made some of the greatest improvements or that we've affected U.S. life, the planetary life as it is today, that feminists have really changed the world in some ways, from the incest movement to the nature movement, ecofeminism, to women in business, women in government. We’ve had a great impact. But | also think that maybe the men are going to have a movement of, the gentler, less cult-of-masculinity inclined men, might have their movement. But for now in this particular time period, yeah, it’s feminism that’s impacting; but the mestiza consciousness is not just about women. I think that we need to expand the term femi- nism, and feminist. And there are other genders—the bi and the straight, this kind of third gender that needs to be taken into account. I’m not sure if | answered your question. Interviewer: Oh, I think you have. In fact, it’s a very thoughtful response which recognizes it’s not an either/or, it’s not as though a separatist universe can be created in which everything is simply resolved. Anzaldia: Yes. And I think Adrienne would be the first to agree. I think that her writing has evolved. The projects that she’s working on now—when, where was this quote taken from? Interviewer: It was in On Lies, Secrets and Silence, published in the late 1970s. Anzaldtia: Right. And I think she herself would—we’re into revising everything we’ve said before.INTERVIEW: ANZALDUA 45 Interviewer: In drawing our discussion to a close, is there any- thing that you would like to add that | haven’t given you the opportunity to say? Anzaldaa: | just think that the work you’re doing and that other white feminists are doing— interviewers, scholars—is very impor- tant. And | appreciate your asking te interview me, and that you're dealing with this material. It’s part of the dialogue. Notes 1. “Imaginal” is a term borrowed from psychologist James Hillman that means capable of creating images. One’s life, Hillman contended, was an “enactment of mythical scenarios”; and only by exploring this “imaginal territory” could one come into some degree of consciousness of one’s soul. Selected Bibliography Anzaldia, Gloria. “Border Arte: Nepantla. | Lugar de la Frontera.” La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experi- Ence. Ed. Natasha Bonilla Martinez, San Diego: Centro Cultural de Ja Raza and the Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993. 107-23 . Borderands/La Frontera: The New: Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987 “Bridge, Drawbridge, Sandbar or Island: Lesbians-of-color Hacienda Alianzas.” Bridges of Power: Women’s Multicultural Alliances. Ed, Lisa Albrecht and Rose M. Brewer. Philadelphia: New Society, 1990. 216-31 —. ed. Muking Face. Making Soul: Hacienco Caras. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. 1990. “Metaphors in the Tradition of the Shaman.” Conversant Essays: Contem- porary Poets on Poetry. Ed. James McCorkle. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1990, 99-100 “Speaking In Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers.” This Bridge Called My Buck. Ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981. 165-73. Loca , eseritora v chicana,”” InVersions: Writing by Dykes, Queers & Lesbians. Ed. Betsy Warland. Vancouver: Press Gang . 1991, 249-63 Hillman, James. Re-visioning Psychology. New York: Harper and Row, 1975 Reuman, Ann E,* ‘Wild Tongues Can“t Be Tamed’ * Gloria Ancaldda’s (Revolution of Voice.” Violence. Silence, and Anger: Women's Writing as Transgression. Ed. Deirdre Lashgari, Charlottesville: UP of Virgin 1993, 305-19.