Essayists From The United States

"a prime fact of my life: you can leave the Island, master the English language, and travel as far as you can, but if you are a Latina, especially one like me who so obviously belongs to Rita Moreno's gene pool, the Island travels with you."

"Every great book contains matter that could be termed poetry. The Bible is a perfect example. So poetry, even if it's not what I'm doing, is my teacher."

"Mixed cultural signals have perpetuated certain stereotypes-for example, that of the Hispanic woman as the "Hot Tamale" or sexual firebrand. It is a one-dimensional view that the media have found easy to promote. In their special vocabulary, advertisers have designated "sizzling" and "smoldering" as the adjectives of choice for describing not only the foods but also the women of Latin America. From conversations in my house, I recall hearing about the harassment that Puerto Rican women endured in factories where the "bossmen" talked to them as if sexual innuendo was all they understood, and worse, often gave them the choice of submitting to advances or being fired."

"for two years the manuscript was circulating around New York, and my agent was getting rejections like, "It's beautifully written, but who wants to read about poor Puerto Ricans?”"

"I was born a white girl in Puerto Rico but became a brown girl when I came to live in the United States."

"I had discovered that I needed stability more than social life. I had brains for sure and some talent in writing. These facts were a constant in my life. My skin color, my size, and my appearance were variables-things that were judged cording to my current self-image, the aesthetic values of the times, the places I was in, and the people I met. My studies, later my writing, the respect of people who saw me as an individual person they cared about, these were the criteria for my sense of self-worth that would concentrate on in my adult life."

"I think it was a couple of years after Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel Prize and the so-called Latino boom began. All of a sudden people said, "Hey, these guys may have something important to say.""

"So my work is actually a response to the idea, like if you read my short story "Nada"-my mother's generation always had this idealized concept of the island as home and the only place where you could really be happy, like, "Oh, we were poor there, but at least we had the sun, or we had this and all this." Of course, I went back year after year, and of course I saw the sun, and it is a gorgeous island, but life was hard, difficult. So actually I don't have a nostalgic yearning for the island. I write about the dream of the island as opposed to the reality of the island."

"I've been to Palestine. It exists, right next to Israel. The problem is not that Palestine threatens or erases Israel. The problem is that there are Israeli soldiers all over Palestine. (p 172)"

"1. ACKNOWLEDGE CHAOS. 2. EXPERIMENT. 3. TO POLARIZE OR NOT TO POLARIZE 4. DON'T UNDERESTIMATE THE IMPORTANCE OF HUMOR 5. LOOK FOR OPPORTUNITIES TO BRIDGE CHASMS 6. DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE STRENGTH OF SUBGROUPS 7. WELCOME THE ENERGY AND COURAGE OF THE YOUNG 8. PAY ATTENTION TO PSYCHOLOGY 9. LOOK TO EXPAND PEOPLE'S SENSE OF POSSIBILITY"

"Anti-communism has been the U.S.'s powerful pro-war tool since 1945."

"The more the Israeli and Palestinian movements come into communication and coordination, the more possible peace seems. (p 110)"

"New movements are created by and create new forms: unions/walkabouts, which became strikes; civil rights/sit-ins; women's liberation/consciousness-raising groups. The most interesting new political forms, using the term loosely, of the past couple of years have been the lively disobedience of ACT UP and QUEER NATION, the campus rebellions opposing tuition increases and in support of multicultural agendas and-from the war-the Military Families Support Network and the GI Resistance. We need to learn from the most politically bold and creative among us. (We also need to offer concrete solidarity and support to those we learn from, lest learning from mean ripping off.)"

"When I talk about the long haul I'm talking partly about emulating those wonderful grownups of my childhood: the old Jewish left, some of the most energetic, caring, committed people I've ever met, who through the McCarthy period, which was my childhood, right up through the present never stopped fighting, or stopped and started again, over and over. That is one kind of long haul, how to go on being an activist. And even in a world where almost nothing seemed possible, even then I'd just as soon emulate the women and men I grew up around who refused to stop fighting; because, after all, you never know unless you try."

"we need the vision that inspires us forward. The couple, the nuclear family as the unit of survival, will not do. The single-issue movement will not do. The single-people struggle will not win. We are up against one of the most powerful, impenetrable machines of human history, our government. I am talking, ultimately, not only about preserving women's choice, or fighting hate, or even about peace between Israel and Palestine, but about massive transformation of society. This is what I had forgotten. This is the vision we need to hang on to. The old activists of my childhood who were my models-now I become them, and so do you. We are the only adults. No one will do it for us."

"We need to talk among ourselves about mistakes, assumptions and new possibilities. We need to be thinking more long range, not to get caught so off guard, so responsive/reactive. We need above all to acknowledge that neither this war nor the state of the world itself is as we knew it. We are confused. Only by admitting our confusion can we begin to build something new."

"I think we are entering a time when we need inspiration and vision. We need fresh voices. This means we need people to feel that what they have to say is welcomed, not that they're going to get dumped on the second they open their mouths. We need to create a sense of permission."

"Keeping balance means being very open to change, especially in a time like now when the ground is shifting. It does not mean digging in your heels."

"We need a new level of sustained activism-not only symbolic action. There have been too many marches where we get a permit and go home afterwards. What is significant about marches is the promise they offer, a promise of trouble, and it is time to live up to those promises."

"things are in motion. Grace Paley has said, when people stand up, other people discover they've got legs. While there are limits to this kind of analogy (not everyone can stand, or has legs for that matter), the motion is unmistakeable."

"We're all thinking about this. The intifada, and the cooperation between the peace camp Israelis and Palestinians, especially the women; Tienanmen Square. The bizarre events of Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, remind us of a basic, forgotten principle: vast unity across broad lines can challenge the very core of power. (The rise in ethnic chauvinism also reminds us-as do graveyard desecrations in Western Europe; if you can't find a live Jew, defile a dead one-of the longevity of anti-Semitism). The possibilities of breakthrough in South Africa contribute to our sense that what seemed frozen, impossible to budge, is not impervious to change."

"What we are beginning to see glimmers of, and what we must see operating in full force if there is to be a human future-not to be melodramatic, but given the level of environmental disaster, this is our last best shot-is more and more unity across our differences."

"Are we so attached to structures developed years ago as to believe that these are the only structures in which our organizations can function?"

"we should recognize that to the extent that lesbian culture represents the experience, insights, values, and interests of most lesbians, it will have a combative relationship to the dominant culture-as long as in that culture, lesbians are oppressed. Rubyfruit Jungle doesn't alter this oppression. Lesbian culture, for it to belong to and represent most lesbians, will be pro-woman, pro-working people, and multiracial. This means that a genuine culture of lesbians will always be in danger of repression, co-optation, and absorption, until such time as lesbians have control of our lives."

"As long as we cherish the creativity of ordinary women and value what women themselves have valued, we center exactly on the passionately egalitarian vision named in "women's liberation.""

"It's simple. If I teach everyone to talk, future generations will not find a woman's Brooklyn Jewish accent unpoetic or comic. But if British aristocrats-or even William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg-prime our poetic sensibilities, my voice will never sound classic."

"What is a classic? Is a classic a book that stays in print? Who decides what stays in print, what gets remaindered, what makes it into paperback, onto the supermarket displays, back into hardbound collected works? Alice Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, was out of print for seven years. It didn't change. By what mechanism is it now available in paperback? Pat Parker's Movement In Black is out of print, as is Barbara Deming's work. How might their work come back to us? By their deaths? "Discovery" by an influential critic? In fact, much of the work of Aphra Behn, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Angelina Weld Grimké, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, H.D., and others, was out of print or hard to come by prior to the second wave of feminism (and who knew that all of these women loved women!) Is this work classic now, but not then? Can we only talk about classics after a suitable passage of time?"

"This desire to identify with whiteness, as well as bigotry and fear, blocks solidarity."

"one task in creating a culture is to reclaim what one ought to have learned but that somehow went by and was lost."

"one way to expand protection for sexual freedom is to assert this freedom. If our developing culture does support sexual honesty, then perhaps explicitly sexual art and literature will replace exclusively floral interpretations of our cunts."

"Progressive Jewishness is about that strand of Jewish tradition which heads toward justice. It must include all the other liberation struggles. Its root is compassion; its assumption, that domination is not only wrong but unnecessary. Progressive Jewishness approaches the world with an ethical imperative and a Marxist slant on constant transformation. Always something needs doing. The world is not a fixed entity but constantly changing, and as progressive Jews our work is to help shape these changes."

"When we are scapegoated we are most conscious of how we feel humiliated, alienated, and endangered. But the other function of scapegoating is at least as pernicious. Scapegoating protects the source of the problem we are being scapegoated for, the vicious system of profit and exploitation, of plenty and scarcity existing side by side."

"Used well, education, choice, even comfort, can strengthen people, individually and collectively. As for money-let me say the dirty word—nothing gets done without it. The question is, what do we do with our education, our choice, privilege, skills, experience, passion for justice: our power. Don't racism and anti-Semitism make you sick? Doesn't hatred scare you? Don't you feel at least a little desperate about the way things are going unless something intervenes? I think Jews need to gather our power, make it visible, and use it right. I'm sick of the more conservative wing of the Jewish community speaking for all of us. Everyone knows that Jews are all over progressive movements, what I've come to think of as the political diaspora. Maybe our task is to ingather the Jews, just a little, into a new civil and human rights coalition, in which we are present and visible as Jews. It means being proud of our collective strength, confident that we can use it right. Someone will always call us pushy. Isn't it time to really push?"

"just as a racist remark by Jackie Mason does not reveal the inherent racism of all Jews, let us not assume that an anti-Semitic remark by Leonard Jeffries, or by ten Leonard Jeffries, reveals the heart of the African American community. We need to recognize the destructive role played by the media in fanning the flames of the "Black-Jewish Conflict.""

"It's also a hard time to be talking about the abuses of capitalism, when it seems that so many people living under communism have rejected it, or tried to. Even allowing for lies and misperceptions, the American left is going through something as massively disruptive to our way of describing and envisioning the world as were the fifties' exposés of Stalinism on one hand, and persecutions by McCarthy on the other. I know that some of us who came to adulthood calling Lyndon Baines Johnson a fascist have a perspective problem, one which Reagan and Bush have helped us address. But we have not yet dealt, even theoretically, with the re-emergence in Europe and the former Soviet Union of toxic nationalism, nor with the dazzling speed with which internationalization of capital is matched by internationalization of labor: "guest workers" in Germany, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia; "illegals" in the U.S. What do national boundaries or national identity mean at this century's end?"

"However difficult, weary, or frightening, there is only one way to go: forward. But singing."

"Humor empowers the disempowered"

"Sometimes I say this myself, like a mantra: WE ARE THE ONLY ADULTS. This enrages and frightens me. What it means to me is no one will do our work for us. No one can show us the way, or make good on our errors. If the Jewish people need spiritual and political redirection-and we do-if the planet needs saving, and the U.S. needs to spin on its axis, we'd better get busy. No one will do it for us."

"Malcolm X and Dr. King were probably both murdered because each in his own political development was isolating the racist, moneyed, ruling elite. This sort of polarization retains its sharp edge, but positions most people firmly on our side. In other words, radical politics is not about being hipper than our parents or neighbors. It is about enlarging the circle. It is about being inclusive of practically everyone except those few on top. How do we enlarge our circle? We begin close to home."

"What I think we must keep poised in response to our knowledge that communism as practiced has failed; so has capitalism."

"We must want equality, and we must grasp that equality does not coexist with class structure."

"We forget that people can change, including our own people; including ourselves."

"We know that while nothing guarantees allies, callousness guarantees callousness."

"Perhaps we need to engage, even in uncertainty, and work out issues as they arise...If we could start working together before we trust, understand, or like each other, we might learn to."

"We must remember: what is beautiful is the resistance, and that people can-and must-resist from their own authentic place in the world. we must reach out to Israelis fighting for peace, civil rights, and feminism without secretly feeling the Palestinians are more beautiful, because more besieged. One of the hardest acts of self-love for American radical Jews is to identify in this with Israelis, and I have come to believe it is a crucial stretch, for the alternative is denial of the Jewish connection. It is from this solid, self-knowing place that we can work towards peace and justice in the Middle East."

"Learning a language stretches a long way to help create trust, to strengthen our ability to communicate and to understand another people. It also signals willingness to give up centrality."

"Solidarity requires the bonding together of a people engaged in common struggle. But solidarity also means standing alongside another struggle, not because you feel guilty but because you recognize it as your own; it means using what you have on behalf of the struggle."

"Those who call resistance to assimilation a luxury might do well to think about calling "sexual preference" a luxury, or reproductive rights, or access to education or creative expression. None of these is bread, but "Bread and Roses" was a demand voiced by Rose Schneiderman, a union organizer and a Jew. What are the roses? As Jews we need our peoplehood, our culture, history, languages, music, calendar, tradition, literature... We need these things because they are beautiful and ours, and because the point of struggle is not bare survival but lives full of possibility. But Rose Schneiderman's metaphor flounders. Our culture is not a rose, it is our backbone."

"Particularly for those of us who are not religiously observant, much confusion attends our grasping - through anti-Semitism and often prodded by anti-Semitism - for something beyond common danger. We need to figure out how to undo assimilation without being nostalgic or xenophobic: how to reach in and out at the same time."

"The way Jews have been met with "not you too," the way anti-Semitism becomes the one issue too many, suggest that many white women are angry and resistant to dealing with racism but are too frightened to express that anger openly; suggest further how little our movement has taught us to see struggles against racism as life-giving, nourishing; as our own."