Feminists

"I belong to the first generation of Latin American writers brought up reading other Latin American writers. Before my time the work of Latin American writers was not well distributed, even on our continent. In Chile it was very hard to read other writers from Latin America. My greatest influences have been all the great writers of the Latin American Boom in literature: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Borges, Paz, Rulfo, Amado, etc. Many Russian novelists influenced me as well: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Nabokov, Gogol, and Bulgarov. The English writers who had a big influence on me during my adolescence were Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. I loved mysteries and read all of Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle. Also some American authors who were very popular in Spanish, like Mark Twain, Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many others. I remember the lasting impression that Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird had on me. I read that book again every decade or so. From these books I got a sense of plot and strong characters. I discovered fantasy and eroticism in One Thousand and One Nights, which I read in Lebanon at age fourteen. At that time and in that place, girls didn't have much social life aside from school and family; we didn't even go to the movies. My only escape from a troublesome family life was reading. My stepfather had four mysterious leather volumes in his locked closet, forbidden books that I was not supposed to see because they were “erotic.” Of course I found a way to copy the key and get in the closet when he was not around. I used a flashlight, could not mark the pages, and read quickly, skipping pages and looking for the dirty parts. My hormones were raging and my imagination went wild with those fantastic tales. When critics call me a Latin America Sheherazade I feel very flattered! The American and European feminists that I read in my twenties gave me an articulate language to express the anger I felt against the patriarchy in which we all live. I started working at Paula, a Chilean feminist magazine, sharpening my ideas and my pen to defy the male establishment. It was the best time of my life. I have always liked movies, and sometimes an image or a scene or a character stays with me for years and inspires me when I write. For example: the magic in Fanny and Alexander or the story within a story of Shakespeare in Love."

"Happy endings usually don't work for me. I like open endings. I trust the reader’s imagination."

"a novel is patient and daily work, like embroidering a tapestry of many colors. You go slowly, you have a pattern in mind. But all of a sudden you turn it and realize that it’s something else."

"To me a short story is like an arrow; it has to have the right direction from the beginning and you have to know exactly where you're aiming."

"People are complex and complicated—they seldom show all the aspects of their personalities. Characters should be that way too."

"I spend ten, twelve hours a day alone in a room writing. I don't talk to anybody. I don't answer the telephone. I'm just a medium or an instrument of something that is happening beyond me, voices that talk through me. I'm creating a world that is fiction but that doesn't belong to me. I'm not God; I'm just an instrument. And in that long, very patient daily exercise of writing I have discovered a lot about myself and about life. I have learned. I'm not conscious of what I'm writing. It’s a strange process—as if by this lying-in-fiction you discover little things that are true about yourself, about life, about people, about how the world works."

"Everybody has a story and all stories are interesting if they are told in the right tone."

"The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses. As a writer, you select some part of a whole. You decide that those things are important and the rest is not. And you write about those things from your perspective. Life is not that way. Everything happens simultaneously, in a chaotic way, and you don't make choices. You are not the boss; life is the boss. So when you accept as a writer that fiction is lying, then you become free. You can do anything. Then you start walking in circles. The larger the circle, the more truth you can get. The wider the horizon—the more you walk, the more you linger over everything—the better chance you have of finding particles of truth."

"I can only write fiction in Spanish, because it is for me a very organic process that I can only do in my native language."

"I never try to give a message in my fiction. When I see that an author is trying to preach to me in a novel, I feel insulted. If I find a message, it should come between the lines; I will discover it if it resonates with me. The ideas, feelings and experiences of the author appear unavoidably in the writing."

"I imagined the structure of the novel like a braid. My job was to blend three strands evenly and neatly. Each piece of the braid represented one of the stories. The characters were very different but they had something in common: they were emotionally wounded by events of their past."

"The theme of displacement is very natural for me. It always comes up in my books because I have been a foreigner all my life and I don’t feel I belong anywhere. I’m an immigrant."

"It would have been much better if I had started [writing novels] at 19. But I couldn't. I had to support a family, I wasn't ready. And I think I needed to lose my country to start writing, because The House of the Spirits is an attempt to recreate the country I had lost, the family I had lost."

"Thank God – because what are you going to write about if you don’t struggle as a child? I don’t think that you become creative because you have struggled, no, but creative people are fuelled by anger and passion, and haunted by demons and memories."

"Because she lived under the big umbrella of my grandfather and she didn't have any education - she had three kids, had been abandoned by her husband, had no money - it was a horrible life. The only way she could get attention from her father or anybody else was by being sick. She didn't do it consciously. As a child I felt impotent and guilty because I felt that I couldn't help her in any way."

"I told her she had run an enormous risk rescuing me, and she smiled. It was then I understood that the days of Colonel Garcia and all those like him are numbered, because they have not been able to destroy the spirit of these women. (p487)"

"The Poet’s funeral had turned into the symbolic burial of freedom. (p441)"

"The coup gave them a chance to put into practice what they had learned in their barracks: blind obedience, the use of arms, and other skills that soldiers can master once they silence the scruples of their hearts. (p436)"

"She felt that everything was made of glass, as fragile as a sigh... (p430)"

"...and on the date stipulated by law the left calmly came to power. And on that date the right began to stockpile hatred. (p392)"

""Public opinion wouldn’t stand for it,” Gómez replied. “This is a democracy. It’s not a dictatorship and it never will be.” “We always think things like that only happen elsewhere,” said Miguel, “until they happen to us too.” (p367)"

"The man and the little girl looked at each other, recognizing themselves in the other’s eyes. (p319)"

"Blanca argued that her reading should be monitored because there were certain things that were inappropriate for her age, but her Uncle Jaime felt that people never read what did not interest them and that if it interested them that meant they were sufficiently mature to read it. (p311)"

"He felt that Christianity, like almost all forms of superstition, made men weaker and more resigned, and that the point was not to await some reward in the sky but to fight for one’s rights on earth. (p255)"

""My son, the Holy Church is on the right, but Jesus Christ was always on the left.” (p182)"

"“This is to assuage our conscience, darling" she would explain to Blanca. "But it doesn't help the poor. They don't need charity; they need justice” (p162)"

"...Captain Longfellow—who, like most Englishmen, was kinder to animals than to people... (p31)"

"Barrabás came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. She was already in the habit of writing down important matters, and afterward, when she was mute, she also recorded trivialities, never suspecting that fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own. (first lines)"

"That was a good time in my life, in spite of having the sensation of floating on a cloud, surrounded by both lies and things left unspoken. Occasionally I thought I glimpsed the truth, but soon found myself once again lost in a forest of ambiguities. (p125)"

"She sowed in my mind the idea that reality is not only what we see on the surface; it has a magical dimension as well and, if we so desire, it is legitimate to enhance it and color it to make our journey through life less trying. (p22)"

"Simple María believed in love. That was what made her a living legend. All her neighbors came to her funeral, even the police and the blind man from the kiosk who almost never abandoned his business. Calle República was vacated and, as a sign of mourning, black ribbons hung from balconies and the red lights turned off in the houses. Every person has his or her story, and in this barrio they were almost always sad, stories of poverty and accumulated injustice, of every form of violence, of children dead before term and lovers who had run away, but María's story was different; it had a glow of elegance that gave wing to the imagination. (beginning of "Simple María")"

"There are all kinds of stories. Some are born with the telling, their substance is language, and before someone puts them into words they are but a hint of an emotion, a caprice of mind, an image, or an intangible recollection. Others are manifest whole, like an apple, and can be repeated infinitely without risk of altering their meaning. Some are taken from reality and processed through inspiration, while others rise up from an instant of inspiration and become real after being told. And then there are secret stories that remain hidden in the shadows of the mind, they are like living organisms, they grow roots and tentacles, they become covered with excrescences and parasites, and with time are transformed into the matter of nightmares. To exorcise the demons of memory, it is sometimes necessary to tell them as a story. (beginning of "Interminable Life")"

"She went by the name of Belisa Crepusculario, not because she had been baptized with that name or given it by her mother, but because she herself had searched until she found the poetry of "beauty" and "twilight" and cloaked herself in it. She made her living selling words. (first lines of "Two Words")"

""Tell me a story," I say to you. "What about?" "Tell me a story you have never told anyone before. Make it up for me." (last lines of Prologue)"

"You think in words, for you, language is an inexhaustible thread you weave as if life were created as you tell it. I think in the frozen images of a photograph. Not an image on a plate, but one traced by a fine pen, a small and perfect memory with the soft volumes and warm colors of a Renaissance painting, like an intention captured on grainy paper or cloth. It is a prophetic moment; it is our entire existence, all we have lived and have yet to live, all times in one time, without beginning or end. From an indefinite distance I am looking at that picture, which includes me. I am spectator and protagonist. I am in shadow, veiled by the fog of a translucent curtain. I know I am myself, but I am also this person observing from outside. (from Prologue)"

"If autobiographical fictions by women in general have been seen to disrupt the lifelines of male Bildungsromane in the European tradition, these Chicana stories do double duty, contesting both traditional European models and male Chicano models of lifetelling. Taken as a whole, their narratives contest unified or essentialist concepts of Chicana identity as they construct what Norma Alarcón calls "subjects-in-process" through the textual narrative (1996, 135). Their individual stories delineate a complex map of an ever-changing imagined community, no less real in fiction, that is differentiated by gender, generation, sexual preference, class, race, and regional distinctions."

"as Norma Alarcón has argued in another context, in uncritically accepting the terms of the film's logic, critics like Limón continue "to recodify a family romance, an oedipal drama in which the woman of color of the Americas has no 'designated' place" (1995, 42)."

"Poet and critic Norma Aiarcón tells us that "poetry has been the single most important genre employed by Chicanas in order to grasp and give shape to their experience and desire.""

"The (Chicano) movement to me is now like a mosaic with all these little pieces. The little pieces are the ones that are now being activated so that a poet like Lorna Dee Cervantes is her own little miniature movement. Francisco Alarcón, Norma Alarcón, José Limón, all the people who are writing are carrying out the struggle against domination and subordination in the kinds of things they focus on-language, folklore, just anything."

"To Freud's confusion on what do women want, I would say we want to dismantle a racist and misogynist heteronormative patriarchy that sucks the life out of women."

"My feminist idealism will not yield to pragmatism because it feels like giving up on the future we want to have and in which we want to live."

"I question whether feminism can be defined without saying that it harbors an idealist political philosophy that calls for a thorough transformation of our society, that seeks to deconstruct and reconstruct the world so that it is habitable for girls, women, and our queer futurity."

"My first collection: Una puertorriqueña en Penna came out of those years and the racism I experienced while being a graduate student at Bryn Mawr College. Some of the poems are also a defense of my Puerto Rican culture and language. It is sad to say that the poems were not accepted by a Latino publishing house at the time because I did not write "like a woman." In other words, I was supposed to write about flowers, gardening and domestic chores. This first anthology was amplified to be the final book, En el país de las maravillas, which my dearest Chicana sister, Norma Alarcón, agreed to publish as the first book from her established press: Third Woman. Third Woman Press gave me a platform from which to publish without pressure from the establishment on thematics. They also published my next two books: ...Y otras desgracias and The Margarita Poems"

"It is the Cuban Revolution that has taught the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean how to face blockades, how to defeat criminal invasions of their territories."

"Our government is not afraid of criticism, in fact we welcome criticism. We believe that the Revolution has gained over the months some positive and constructive criticisms which have been made from time to time."

"The present distribution of world economic power, wealth and living standards is manifestly unjust. It derives from the long history of imperialist expansion and control of the third world. We seek to change this order and to substitute for it a New International Economic Order."

"A wind of change is blowing through the Caribbean bringing with it a new regional balance of forces as a result of the changes towards progress by the peoples of Nicaragua, Grenada, St. Lucia and Dominica - a situation that has led the U.S. Secretary of State to define the Eastern Caribbean me one of the world's "trouble spots.""

"You can well understand the deep concern that we harbour for lasting peace. It is for this reason that we strongly support the efforts of the World Peace Council and any and all moves towards détente, peaceful co- existence and disarmament. The people of Grenada are gratified therefore that the Helsinki Final Act and now SALT II have been signed by both the U.K. and the U.S.S.R. We are however disturbed to note that reactionary elements who definitely have a vested interest in the prolongation of the arms race, have been making efforts to prevent the ratification of SALT II in the U.S. Senate."

"The peace of the world is a matter that concerns not only the rich and powerful nations, some of whom produce, purchase and deploy sophisticated weapons of mass destruction, but more profoundly, the poor, weak and small nations, who are the victims of the squander and waste that are characteristic of militarism."

"Consistent with our opposition to colonialism, imperialism and racism, we affirm today before this great assembly our firm support for the struggles being waged by the peoples of Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa under the leadership of the Patriotic Front, SWAPO and ANC for their liberation and against apartheid and racism. We recognise and applaud the principled and consistent support being given to these struggles by the Front Line States. We express our firmest support for and solidarity with the struggles of the people of Palestine led by their sole and legitimate representatives, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). On this basis, we reject the Camp David Agreement which does not have the support of the Palestinian people, the PLO, the Arab World or the entire democratic, progressive and Socialist World. We reaffirm our support for the people of Western Sahara under the leadership of the Polisario Front in their struggle for independence and self determination. We call upon the people of Korea to continue the just struggle for the reunification of their homeland. We express our firm support for Heng Samrin government and the heroic people of Kampuchea - a Government which we recognised on the 20th of August last. We support the struggles of the government and people of Belize for independence with full territorial integrity. We also wish to express our strongest solidarity with the people of Puerto Rico in their struggle for independence. We fully support the ongoing and determined struggle of the government and people of Cuba in their fight to gain control over Guantanamo Bay. Our profound solidarity also goes to the government and people of Panama in their just struggle to recover the Panama Canal. We support fully the struggles of all the people of the Caribbean who are fighting for an end to colonialism."