Stating Our Beliefs

Because this is TOO good not to share:

Anzaldua, Gloria E. and AnaLouise Keating (eds.) This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. New York: Routledge, 2002.

“Preface: (Un)Natural Bridge, (Un)Safe Spaces” (1-5)

(3) “But there are no safe spaces…Staying ‘home’ and not venturing out from our own group comes from woundedness, and stagnates our growth…To bridge is to attempt community, and for that we must risk being open to personal, political, and spiritual intimacy, to risk being wounded.”

(5) “Imagination, a function of the soul, has the capacity to extend us beyond the confines of our skin, situation, and condition so we can choose our responses. It enables us to reimagine our lives, rewrite the self, and create guiding myths for our times.”

In my quest for a PhD, I have read tens of thousands of pages and taken hundreds of pages of notes. While I still haven’t finished writing the one “paper” (as my mom calls my dissertation) that will bring me to my journey’s end, I have been trying to plod along steadily and “make good progress towards the degree” (as is required by my program and university).

Some days, I can’t help but stop a minute to reflect on all I’ve encountered along the way. Today, for example, I came across these quotations from Gloria Anzaldua’s preface to the book This Bridge We Call Home, and just had to share them here.

One of the things I absolutely love about Anzaldua was her mixture of activism and art…and yet at the same time that I have just written that, I realize that this is a false binary suggesting that activism and art are separate, distinct things. I think that at their best, they are one in the same.

Interestingly, just yesterday I overheard a conversation where one person said she thought her poetry reflected her beliefs too much and contemplated how to neutralize her writing. In response to this, without hesitation, the woman with whom this musing was being shared that such thoughts should be put to rest and that our beliefs were the exact things that should be at the heart of our writing (and I extrapolate here--our art, our activism, our scholarship, our lives).

May we all be surrounded by (and be) such friends and voices of wisdom!