After nearly five decades of writing praxis, I continue to write through what I experience as an abiding absence, toward what remains for me unwritten. My writing is often prompted by an unarticulated disquiet. I can’t name it, but it unsettles me and grows. It agitates and is not easily appeased. It compels and repels, and so, I know and fear that this work may require something beyond my capabilities.
Over the years in this doubt-ridden dance, I have come to trust my writing ways. I often pursue oppositional ways of knowing so as to uncover unexpected apertures for my writer’s journey.
As a child of the less than wholly “literate,” I fiercely guard the promise of a personal poetics: the original voice and vantage of my people cobbled together over generations. Like the gathering and toppling of word blocks by toddlers, we struggle to craft language that may be foreign to the majority but is effectively original. This is the ever-emergent writing that can change a country.
This article appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
I am never convinced of my own rightness. Perhaps that is the true impetus of the work, a desire to live in that place that always questions itself, and in so doing proves its worth. In the questions reside the no longer absent.
White patriarchy does not know what it has missed in our unwritten narratives. Of that much, I am sure. Still, I don’t write to fill in the blank for those who silence us through indifference. I write toward a private sovereignty where ancestral voices resonate in the heavy lifting of pen to page.
I am always interested in how it is we come to love. My earliest writings were probably the most difficult because I never had the opportunity to read work that might make sense of my life as a queer, closeted, Mexican-Catholic, woman-loving female. When I came out on the page in the mid-1970s, homosexuality was reviled by the Chicano community. Within the broader literary sectors of Los Angeles, I found little resonance as a mixed-blood Chicana, especially one who refused to assimilate to whiteness as the prerequisite for success. I simply wanted the right to write—openly, without fear of reprisal.
In 1977, I moved to Berkeley. Until then, I had written mostly lesbian love poems (requited loves and not), which, when I reread them today, still affect me.
But something was missing. Elvira.
I had never acknowledged in print that it was my Mexican mother who had shaped that insistent desire. Hers was embodied in an ethic of fierce survival, an impassioned heart and a spirit-sense that rendered meaning to each obstacle.
It took the 400 miles between us before I could write our truth. And the line came to me: “I am a white girl gone brown to the blood color of my mother, speaking for her.” The poem, “For the Color of My Mother,” was an affirmation of my faithfulness to my Mexican mother’s lineage and to the lesbian love that grew from it. From there, many writings would come.
In many ways, I continue to return to that first moment of consciousness that allowed the figure of my mother, formidable in her own right, to enter my writing with neither censorship nor censure. That early lesson is imprinted on all that I have produced thereafter.
How might writing ignite epiphanies of collective consciousness in ourselves and in our readers, wherein what has lain dormant and previously unrecognized begs for illuminated release?
My aim has always been for writing to ring and sing of revolution, to cause us to question everything—and in so doing to find ourselves full of wonder toward a transcendent rebellion of spirit that changes real lives.
Writing is our mirror.•
NATIVE COUNTRY OF THE HEART, BY CHERRÍE MORAGA
