"When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision" and "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens"

Women. Adrienne Rich says we have our work cut out for us. Alice Walker says we could do so much given the artistic chance. Patricia Williams says that we are not sleeping. I listen and relate to these women. And I wonder what do I say? I am a woman. I don't know what it means for me to be a woman. I just am.

Be Insatiable. Be insatiable and still a woman. Stand for your beliefs, be a bitch and yet stay soft and sexy and agreeable. I feel like a lousy commercial for some perfume, "I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan, and never let you forget you're a man, because I'm a woman." I am caught in the crossfire of who I am and who I ought to be according to everybody else. Is this what Williams' dream at the end of her essay was about? The red dress, the hair and she is loud. She is the "her that she had always dreamed of being, fascinating." What I find "Fascinating" is that even she is watching herself from the outside. I do this. I watch myself play each role.

I am not black, or Hispanic. I am heterosexual. I want to be a wife. I want to be a mother. I can look at society and see myself staring back at me, white, Christian and content. Does this make me unqualified to read and understand the meanings in the texts of Alice Walker, of Gloria Anzaldua? What about Adrienne Rich? These women have stared into the face of society and they are not reflected. But I do relate. Sometime I feel like the silent minority within the majority. The one that thinks and feels and understands and yet is overlooked, ignored.

I feel ignored because of the majority view that the because of the majority view that the minority has. I hear about the "Mormon" in this area, the ...

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...s the words of her fascinating self say, "Voices lost in the chasm speak from the slow eloquent fact of the chasm. They speak and speak and speak, like flowing water" and she wakens strong, single hearted and completely refreshed. Florida Scott Card said" you do not need to claim all the events in your life to make them yours, but when you do, you are fierce with reality." It is not always easy o reality." It is not always easy or notable to be a woman. Being a woman speaks from the chasm, it speaks from the walls, and it speaks from voices within, some chiding some soothing, like flowing water.

Works Cited

Rich, Adrienne. "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,"in Ways of Reading, 4th ed., (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996).

Walker, Alice. "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," in Ways of Reading, 4th ed., (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996).