"Woman, Native, Other" by Trinh T. Minh-ha

Naeem, this is especially for you :-)

"Write your body"

It wrote itself through me. "Women must write through their bodies." Must not let themselves be driven away from their bodies. (...) When armors and defense mechanism are removed, when new awareness of life is brought into previously deadened ares of the body, women begin to experience writing/the world differently. This is exciting and also very scary. For it takes time to be able to tolerate greater aliveness. Hence the recurrence of musts and must-nots. As soon as a barrier is destroyed, another is immediately erected. Call it reform or expansion. Or else, well-defined liberation revolution. Closure and openness, again, are one ongoing process: we do not have bodies, we are our bodies, and we are ourselves while being the world. Who can endure constant open-endedness? Who can keep on living completely exposed? We write - think and feel - (with) our entire bodies rather than only (with) our minds or hearts. It is a perversion to consider thought the product of one specialized organ, the brain, and feeling, that of the heart. The past convention was that we desire because we are incomplete, that we are always searching for that other missing half. More recently, we no longer desire-because, we simply desire, and we desire as we are. "I am a being of desire, therefore a being of words," said Nicole Brossard, "a being who looks for her body and looks for the body of the other: for me, this is the whole history of writing."

We are reading this book by Trinh T. Minh-ha for the Decolonizing seminar and I highly recommend it to everyone. It's so beautifully written. The moment I opened the first page, the very introduction, I already felt her story speaking through my body, my world:

"The story began long ago..."

That's how she started. "That sounds like how my story'd start," my heart beat a little faster.

"... In a remote village, people have decided to get together to discuss certain matters of capital importance to the well-being of their community. A meeting is thus fixed for a definite date at the marketplace at nightfall. On the day and at the time agreed, each member eats, washes him/herself, and arrives only when s/he is ready. Things proceed smoothly as usual, and the discussion does not have to begin at a precise time, since it does not break in on daily life but slips naturally into it. A mother continues to bathe her child amidst the group; two men go on playing a game they have started; a woman finishes braiding another woman 's hair. These activities do not prevent their listening or intervening when necessary. Never does one open discussion by coming right to the heart of the matter. For the heart of the matter is always somewhere else than where it is supposed to be. To allow it to emerge, people approach it indirectly by letting it come when it is ready to come. There is no need for a linear progression which gives the comforting illusion that one knows where one goes..."

Ok, that definitely sounds like my village!!! :-)))) and onwards from that page, her stories, her struggles, her theories, her rage, her incisive slashes at white wo/men colonialists... flow, weave, whip, spur, and set words on fire!

Again, highly recommended!! i'd type out the whole book here to share with you if I could :-))

For instance, this is just 1 among many great quotes from it ;-)

It must be odd
to be a minority
he was saying.
I looked around
and didn't see any.
So I said
Yeah
it must be.

- Mitsuye Yamada,
"Looking out" in Camp Notes