Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism

© 2002 by Daisy Hernández and Bushra Rehman

 

 

Published by SEAL PRESS
An Imprint of Avalon Publishing Group Incorporated
1400 65th Street, Suite 250
Emeryville, CA 94608

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.

 

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.

eISBN 9781580050678

 

987654

 

Designed by Susan Canavan

 

Printed in the United States of America by Berryville Graphics

Distributed by Publishers Group West

Thank you to our families, both chosen and of origin, who taught us how to be radical women; to the women in this book and those who sent submissions, you’ve made us think in new ways about this world, our lives and writing; to Cherríe Moraga, gracias, for your faith in this project and for making time to share your words; to our friends who gave so much positive energy and yelled Push! Push! as we were in the final stages of the book: Andrea Dobrich, Tazeen Khan, Keely Savoie, Stacey Holt, Stas Gibbs, Deidre Barber, Chitra Ganesh, Judy Yu, Rekha Malhotra, Mohan Krishna, Rebecca Hurdis; to Rebecca Walker and Gloria Anzaldúa for reading the manuscript and providing such inspiring words; to SAWCC (South Asian Women’s Creative Collective) and all the women who’ve made it what it is; to the women of WILL (Women in Literature and Letters), Marta Lucia, Adelina Anthony, Angie Cruz, Keila Cordova, Kam Chang, Alba Hernández and Teachers & Writers Collaborative; to Anantha Sudhakar and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop; to Barbara Rice, Katie Riley and Gracie; and to our literary mothers and sisters.

Gracias Leslie Miller for pursuing this idea with us and Angie Cruz for suggesting that we work together; Christina Henry de Tessan and the staff at Seal Press and Avalon Publishing Group.

 

Bushra Rehman for sharing this project with me, teaching me your hippie ways, and changing the world with your poetry! Gracias a mi mami, Alicia Sosa Hernandez, por ser mi angelito de la guarda y ayu-darme en todo; a mi papi, Ignacio Hernández, por su apoyo y sonrisas; y también quiero agradecerles a mis tías: María de Jesus Sosa, Rosa Sosa, y Dora Sosa Capunay; Liliana Hernández, my sister, for giving me the reasons to write; Geralen Silberg for sharing your love and laughter, Leslie Maryon-LaRose and Eugene LaRose for giving so much of yourselves; Diego Hernando Sosa, mi primo, for the conversa-ciones; my girlfriend, your love and support have been so important to this project; Kristina Kathryn Hermann, for sharing your sensitivity and passion. Thank you Marcia Gillespie for inviting me to Ms., Ann Marie Dobosz, and the staff especially Cheryl Rogers; Gail Collins whose own project gave me the chance to learn so much about women’s history; the mujeres at New York University’s CLACS program; Jacob Gershoni and the Monday night group.

Residencies at Hedgebrook and MacDowell were critical for this book, as was a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.

DAISY HERNÁNDEZ

 

Daisy Hernández for teaching me your light-hearted ways and sharing this project with me; my family who taught me how to care for others: Amma who always speaks her mind, Amey who is the strongest woman I know, Deddy who taught me generosity and kindness, my sisters who always inspire me and give meaning to my life: Aisha, Tahira, Sa’dia, Iffat, Aliya; my brothers: Atta, Saleem, Naser Bhai; my nieces and nephews: Kulsoom, Sarah, Zakariya, and those to come; Amber’s family; the Ciacci Family: Marino, Paul, Julie; Kristina Kathryn Hermann for putting up with us and being such a gentle, peaceful, fun-loving spirit; Norcroft and the women of the lake: Cedar Marie, Patricia Fox, Mi Ok Song Bruining, Joan Drury, Kay Grindland and Willie; my Alaskan family: Hava, Saba, Dubba; the good-hearted artists and organizers of South Asian art and activism festivals, especially Desh Pardesh and Diasporadics; Mohan Krishna; Jon Savant who helped me write again; all my teachers at The College of New Rochelle; the kindness of all the strangers I’ve met, all the vagabonds and guardian angels on my path.

BUSHRA REHMAN

Colonize This!
is a collection of writings by young women of color that testifies to the movement—political and physical—of a new generation of global citizens, activists and artists. It is a portrait of the changing landscape of U.S. women of color identity, one that guarantees no loyalties to the borders that attempt to contain it. As immigrant, native-born, and survivor-of-slavery daughters, these women are the female children of those “refugees from a world on fire,” described in the 1983 edition of
This Bridge Called My Back
¹
. They are women who have come of age with the living memory of disappearance in Colombia and Argentina and the daily reality of war “always a phone call away.” They are young sisters (our daughters) who didn’t “grow up to be statistics” (Taigi Smith), who have read and been schooled by the feminist writings and works of the women of color who preceded them, and as such are free to ask questions of feminism more deeply than we could have imagined twenty years ago.

The feminism portrayed in
Colonize This!
reflects what in the 1980s we understood as “theory in the flesh,” a strategy for women’s liberation, which is wrought from the living example of female labor and woman acts of loving. These narratives reflect consciousness born out of what their (our) mothers “knew first-hand: the interlocking system of racism, poverty and sexism” (Siobhan Brooks). In
Colonize This!
mothers serve as mirrors of choices made and unmade. They are the reflection of sacrifice, survival and sabiduría.

They are Cecilia Ballí’s mother who each evening wiped off the dining room table after dinner to “double as a desk” for her two daughters; they are she who had no more than seven years of school buying encyclopedias from the grocery store on the installment plan.

They are Ena from British Guiana, who used her sexiness to “get things like kerosene to light lamps and food for her children” (Paula Austin).

They are Tanmeet Sethi’s mother who advised, “you have to make home wherever you are. (And) this is what she did ... coming to the U.S. with a stranger who was her new husband.”

They are Siobhan Brooks’ mother, once placed in a mental hospital for infanticide, who “in spite of her mental state paid the bills on time, shopped for food and refused the free bread and butter services offered ... by the government.”

They are models of resistance from whom their daughters, through fierce loyalty to them, wield weapons of theory and practice.

In
Colonize This!,
editors Bushra Rehman and Daisy Hernandez have created an expanded vocabulary to describe an expanded feminism profoundly altered by massive immigration to the United States from North Africa, South and West Asia and Central and South America. An echoing theme in this collection is the impact of the U.S. experience in introducing the critical questions of inequalities in relation to gender. Similarly echoed is the profound disappointment in white feminist theory to truly respond to the specific cultural and class-constructed conditions of women of color lives. As Ijeoma A. describes it, consciousness about sexism assumed language and impetus in the United States, but it was born in the “kitchens” of her native Nigeria.
Colonize This!
draws a complex map of feminism, one that fights sexism and colonialism at once and recognizes genocide as a present and daily threat to our blood-nations. The feminism articulated in this collection requires cultural tradition and invention, negotiating multiple worlds; it is a theory and freedom practice, which “allows women to retain their culture, to have pride in their traditions, and to still vocalize gender issues of their community” (Susan Darraj). As Tanmeet Sethi writes, “I am happy to wear the weight of my culture.” She speaks of the gold jewelry inherited from family, but more so, she speaks of the profound preciousness of culture. “It is heavy, but not a burden.”

As a new generation of women of color, these writers carry a new language to describe their passions, their política, their prayers and their problems. In these narratives, Black feminism finds resonance in hip hop. Racism is now called “driving while black,” and “walking while brown” (Pandora Leong) in the middle class neighborhoods of Oregon. White male entitlement assumes a twenty-first century look in blond dread-locked Indophiles, studying Buddhism and “getting down with the people” (Bhavana Mody). Here, sexuality and pleasure are unabashedly integrated in a feminist of color analysis of survival and liberation, and “queer familia” is neither a question nor the subject of debate.

Still some things haven’t changed. Stereotyping does not change, as Alaskan-born Asian-American Pandora Leong reminds us. “I do not read Chinese or know anything about acupuncture.”

Women of color still suffer the same assaults against our bodies, the artillery of misogyny ever inventive. Patricia Justine Tumang testifies to the “living nightmare” of RU-486 abortion pill; and, Stella Luna recounts her own struggle for self-reclamation as a mother with HIV. She writes:

This is the real work of woman of color feminism: to resist acquiescence to fatality and guilt, to become warriors of conscience and action who resist death in all its myriad manifestations: poverty, cultural assimilation, child abuse, motherless mothering, gentrification, mental illness, welfare cuts, the prison system, racial profiling, immigrant and queer bashing, invasion and imperialism at home and at war.

To fight any kind of war, Kahente Horn-Miller writes, “The biggest single requirement is fighting spirit.” I thought much of this as I read
Colonize This!
since this collection appears in print at a time of escalating world-wide war—in Colombia, Afghanistan, Palestine. But is there ever a time of no-war for women of color? Is there ever a time when our home (our body, our land of origin) is not subject to violent occupation, violent invasion? If I retain any image to hold the heart-intention of this book, it is found in what Horn-Miller calls “the necessity of the war dance.” This book is one rite of passage, one ceremony of preparedness on the road to consciousness, on the “the war path of greater empowerment.”

 

May 14, 2002
Oakland, California