Feminists From The United States

"When Americans talk about racial politics they talk about the poles of black and white, where one group may be demonized and one group may be sanctified. I think that we must meet in the gray space in between to find harmony."

"I feel that I'm a conduit for many voices. Historical voices, ancient voices, contemporary feminist voices. Women's voices mostly."

"Adrienne Rich believes “the poem must serve” the people. Somehow, I don’t want my poems to be relevant to only a few readers in academia."

"I hope my work will prompt someone to consider or study more about Chinese poetry."

"I see myself and my identity as nonstatic. I see myself as a frontier, and I see my limits as limitless. Somebody once accused me of being a leftist radical feminist, West Coast, Pacific Rim, socialist, neo-Classical, Chinese American poet. And I say, "Oh yes, I am all of those things." Why not? I don't believe in static identities. I believe that identities are forever changing."

"I retired from my tenured job early partly because I would like to devote more time to writing poetry. The ancients did that too, they retreated to the countryside and “cleanse from the mud” of the academy and “palace art”. They retreated into the woods to hear their own voice again. Of course, these were rich privileged aristocratic poets. Some were forced exiles like Du Fu, who wrote some of his best works in his later years. In angst, of course. He felt abandoned. However, as we all know, he became the greatest poet of China."

"As a poet I believe I need to work in both Eastern and Western paradigms; I need to know both traditions."

"Early on, I was informed by theorists such as Cixous, Said, Spivak, Gates and mostly postcolonial and feminist theorists. I learned a lot from the black arts movement. I loved reading black feminist thinkers on my own (outside of academia)—Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, June Jordan, bell hooks, etc. Tough women poets/thinkers like Gloria Anzaldua and Tri Min Ha. And of course, Adrienne Rich."

"I echo Adrienne Rich’s idea that the personal is political. My poetics is rooted in my personal history, and from there I examine the world around me. I see myself not just as a Chinese-American, but as a global citizen. I care about America but also about what happens in the world."

"Chinese history, Hong Kong history course through my blood."

"The two main issues in American history are slavery and the destruction of native Americans, historical events that have left a profound mark on American history. On even a larger scale, I would say more than ever, now in the era of Trump. We must fight against demagogues all over the world. This open hatred against immigrants! Against dark-skinned peoples… The language of building a wall, “bad hombres”, China-shaming! The demagogues are manufacturing fear and hate, Islamophobia, and generally, phobia against anybody who is “different” and might take your job."

"I think it’s important to reinvent with poetry...I like to keep experimenting. It’s important to love your genre and the possibilities. There’s so much to explore for those poets with bilingual and multicultural backgrounds as well."

"Writers must always speak out against racism and injustice...In terms of the responsibility of a poet, it is important to engage in political and social issues, yes! This is a racist world! We must speak against all kinds of injustice."

"Henry Louis Gates told me that I must assert that I am first and foremost a poet, not just an activist poet. My work encompasses activist poetry but also does a lot more than protest. I am reinventing bicultural forms. I am an innovator: the creator of the Chinese-American quatrain, of the lyric manifesto, of erotic haiku and remix sonnets!"

"I believe that I am a poet of the body and of the mind and of the soul! to mimic Whitman."

"I belong to the American legacy and deserve a place in it."

"Food is celebratory, but its flip side is hunger and deprivation. Spiritual deprivation and hunger in the new country are important motifs of ethnic American literature. Hunger in the "gold" country, in the land of the plenty is almost obscene, so there always that doubleness in my work when I write about food."

"It’s important to have a transnational readership. To not have borders, to have one’s poetry travel well. I celebrate my Americanness. I celebrate my Chinese-ness. I celebrate my transnational identity."

"When we were young, we have to memorize those texts from Tu Fu and others. And my grandmother used to carry me on my back and chant to me Chinese poems and sayings. The first kind of poetry I heard was Chinese poetry, and it ingrained in my ear, even though English is my main language. I can hardly read Chinese. The Chinese poem was ingrained in me when I was very young. You can hear the Cantonese language in my work. The Chineseness is in the DNA of my work. I can’t divorce it from my work. I can’t say I forget it. it’s there. Bei Dao’s generation was not trained in that tradition. They didn’t go to university to study wenyanwen or ancient poetry. They were imitating the West. I tried to read Chinese poetry every day, because I think it’s important for my aesthetics."

"it has to do with Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness: you inherit a set of values at home, and have to embrace another set of values when you walk out of home. You are appreciated if you are more assertive at school. On the contrary, you are supposed to be obedient at home. It’s about balancing the two worlds. My poetry is about negotiating many worlds, the past and the present, as well as the East and the West. “Inner cultivation” and outer despair. The sublime and the ridiculous."

"I am always fighting against the stereotype of the subservient female maiden. I want to shake up the assumptions about being a Chinese-American woman. We all must champion women’s and children’s rights in the world. The little brown girl is still the most vulnerable person in the room."

"a world-class psychologist and writer known for her themes on women...Since Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola-Éstes has become known for her empowerment of women through the use of the very mythology that has been long used to dismiss women in society."

"I think the best camp for women is the Wild Women’s Snowboard Camp, launched by women’s 1992 World Extreme Champ, Greta Gaines, and co-directed by Mary Seibert. It follows a philosophy by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves, in that women need to break free; that there is a need and obligation for each woman to reach this level and let go. Snowboarding’s a fluid sport that allows you to do just this. Like rock climbing, it’s more about balance and grace than strength and ego. Therefore, women excel."

"the Life/Death/Life forces are part of our own nature, an inner authority that knows the steps, knows the dance of Life and Death. It is composed of the parts of ourselves who know when something can, should, and must be born and when it must die. It is a deep teacher if we can only learn its tempo. Rosario Castellanos, the Mexican mystic and ecstatic poet, writes about surrender to the forces that govern life and death: “... dadme la muerte que me falta .../give me the death I need . . .” Poets understand that there is nothing of value without death"

"I am gratified that some of my poems have served the people for decades. From the start of my career I waxed personal and political and have sought to be an activist-subversive-radical-immigrant-feminist-transnational-Buddhist-neoclassical-nerd poet who was always on her soapbox with a bag of tricks. I see myself as an inventor of a fusionist aesthetics, of bilingual and bicultural hybrid forms."

"Cynicism is the opposite of soulful. Cynicism means the conduit to the soul has a great kink in it, like a garden hose in which nothing flows in either direction. That’s what makes cynicism. If those conduits are open, you cannot be cynical."

"We are all filled with a longing for the wild. There are few culturally sanctioned antidotes for this yearning. We were taught to feel shame for such a desire. We grew our hair long and used it to hide our feelings. But the shadow of Wild Woman still lurks behind us during our days and in our nights. No matter where we are, the shadow that trots behind us is definitely four-footed."

"The pathologizing of variation in women's bodies is a deep bias endorsed by many psychological theorists, most certainly by Freud."

"Am I not the poet of witness? Am I not a disciple of Nellie Sachs and Paul Celan trying to describe the horrors of the Holocaust, meanwhile inventing a new lyric, which questions the possibility/impossibility of poetry after the most heinous episodes of history? Am I not a descendent of Qu Yuan, whose lyric intensity caused him to drown himself in the Mi Lo River in protest? And the descendent of the courageous feminist poet Qiu Jin, who recited a poem on the path to her own beheading?"

"We have means to extend the kitchen out into the world, or to extend the hearth place or the bonfire out into the world, and to gather together people who would ordinarily not be within our reach. So it is actually a very exciting time."

"The mother, if she commits herself to life and builds a vast storehouse of knowing inside of her, is her children’s bastion. She has a relationship with her children forever as mother. And she has the wisdom, hopefully, to know when to let go and let them lead their lives on their own. But she also is there when they come back and need something. There has to be a prototype for the mother who remains mother forever."

"I have to say that a man can never know who he is, or a woman cannot know who she is, until she has poured herself through the sieve that is her mother and poured herself through the sieve that is her father and come to understand through both."

"It is said that the grand storytellers of your generation and my generation is the cinema. Teenagers and young adults aren’t going to grandmother and grandfather anymore to sit in the kitchen and listen to their stories. We go to the cinema to see the cliffhangers on Saturdays."

"The Woman Warrior was a very important book in my life. I discovered it in 1977…in Amherst, Massachusetts. I was an undergraduate there...for a long time I was in despair. I thought, there was really no audience for my voice. And the narrator, the protagonist in The Woman Warrior, she was working hard to let her voice out. She had to wade through the contradictions of this dual culture, this heavy-duty heritage. If she had the power and the fortitude to continue her 'pressed duck' voice, to eke out that voice, I said, perhaps so must I continue my struggle."

"The way I understand my work is that it is like putting out food — a certain kind of food. People who have great hunger for that food will come. What I think for men and women is food, is healing food actually, is stories."

"My theory, which is a blasphemous and heinous theory, is that as long as men elevate the maiden and the sexual woman, they will trash the mother and the daughter."

"I interviewed Robert Bly in 1990. I can remember saying to him, “Now, what about the men’s movement?” And he said, “No, it’s not men’s movement.” And I said, “Well, what will you call it?” “Men’s work, just work with men, that’s all.” And, I really like that. I like that he called it work with men. Mythopoetic is too big a word. It is better to have simpler words."

"Marilyn Chin is a major voice."

"America is no longer a monolithic, European-derived culture. It is no longer a mono-lingual or mono-cultural country, and the margins are moving toward the center. That's to say that those of us who have an urgent message or who have polyphonic voices or who have colorful backgrounds and interesting lives and pasts have a lot to say, and it's now our turn to say it. Indeed, there's more urgency in what we have to say, and the contemporary poetry world can't keep us out. That's the thing. We're breaking new ground, and this is the voice of America. My voice is one of the many voices of America."

"I understand mythology. I understand stories. I understand poetry. I understand that they cut close to the bone. I am a poet who became a psychoanalyst. That is my background. I am a cantadora. I am a storyteller. It comes from my feet, upward, not from my brain, downward."

"I was raised by my grandmother who spoke Toisan, a very ancient language. I see myself as part of the minority tribe. I align myself more with people like Kafka, with his weird dialect. I see myself as an outsider on many levels even if we are Han."

"Miss Alice Paul, Ph.D., D.C.L., author of the Equal Rights Treaty, and a founder of the National Woman's Party of the United States, is chairman of the committee on nationality of the Inter-American Commission of Women, and to her indefatigable labor in research and the compilation of material is due the commission's monumental report now ready for presentation at the first plenary session. This report covers the nationality of women throughout the world. In every case, it gives actual excerpts from the law in the original language, with translation. This applies even to laws in Japanese, Greek, Siamese, Bulgarian, Russian, etc., with the original text in the original script facing the translation on the opposite page. Synopses of the laws are included also with important original chapters by Miss Paul so that the juridical information is made easily understandable to all readers, whether familiar with legal terms or not. Comprehensive tables on nationality prepared by Miss Stevens and Miss Paul are another novel and important feature of this report which is as plain as daylight, as thrilling as an air race, and as fascinatingly involved as a detective story."

"I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees. If I speak to you in anger, at least I have spoken to you: I have not put a gun to your head and shot you down in the street; I have not looked at your bleeding sister’s body and asked, “What did she do to deserve it?” This was the reaction of two white women to Mary Church Terrell’s telling of the lynching of a pregnant Black woman whose baby was then torn from her body. That was in 1921, and Alice Paul had just refused to publicly endorse the enforcement of the Nineteenth Amendment for all women — by refusing to endorse the inclusion of women of Color, although we had worked to help bring about that amendment."

"In 1940, at the World's Fair held in New York City, Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, addressing a receptive audience, declared that it is woman's main task to stop war...Though more militant than Mrs. Catt as a leader in the suffrage movement, Alice Paul was no less certain that war sprang from men's nature and that women were under obligation to put a stop to wars. When, in April, 1941, she was interviewed on her return from Geneva, where she had spent two years directing the organization of an international movement for equal rights for women, she declared, relative to the war in Europe: "Women's instincts are constructive and tend to build and create, not to tear down." The guilt of war she laid wholly on men, saying: "This war was brought about without the women having anything to say or do about it, and now they are the greatest sufferers.""

"Other evidences of changes in women’s status were more immediately apparent. The legendary ‘‘flapper’’ made her debut in the postwar decade, signaling with studied theatrical flourishes a new ethos of feminine freedom and sexual parity. The Nineteenth Amendment, enacted just in time for the 1920 presidential election, gave women at least formal political equality. The Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed by Alice Paul of the National Women’s Party in 1923, sought to guarantee full social and economic participation to women. An organized movement for the promotion of birth control, founded by Margaret Sanger in 1921 as the American Birth Control League, heralded a growing feminine focus on reproductive control and erotic liberation. Countless women, especially if they were urban, white, and affluent, now used the new technologies of spermicidal jelly and the Mensinga-type diaphragm, both first manufactured in quantity in the United States in the 1920s, to limit the size of their families. This development worried the authors of Recent Social Trends, who feared that the old-stock, white, urban middle class would be demographically swamped by the proliferation of the rural and immigrant poor, as well as blacks."

"I may add that Alice Paul's visit to London has brightened the lives of such Woman's Party exiles as Hazel Hunkins, Betty Gram and myself. To see this wonder-worker-so quiet, so indefatigable, so sure, once more beginning to move mountains, revives one's faith in the future."

"(how would you describe your contribution to the struggle for women’s rights?) I always feel ... the movement is a sort of mosaic. Each of us puts in one little stone, and then you get a great mosaic at the end."

"NAWSA opposed Paul's tactics, but many historians concur in the opinion that these militant actions helped to spur the urgency of the moment."

"during that time we opened—and by “we” I mean the whole women’s movement—we opened a great many doors to women with the power of the vote, things like getting women into the diplomatic service. And don’t forget we were successful in getting equality for women written into the charter of the United Nations in 1945."

"I feel very strongly that if you are going to do anything, you have to take one thing and do it."