Jul 18, 2015
Pinay Lit at usfca fulfills CORE C1 (Literature).
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Pinay Lit at usfca fulfills CORE C1 (Literature).
Three years ago, I taught my very first Pinay Lit class. Some takeaways:
Once again, I am teaching Pinay Lit at USF next semester!
We were then young girls and our want was written on our skins. Between our legs and along our necks and wrists, our skin craved friction and more friction. We kissed calluses into the backs of our hands, murmuring comfort at the enflamed flesh, but still, our skin would not be satisfied. In the dark, we rubbed pillows against stinging nipples and curled knee to chin, hoping to keep the skin from flying from our bodies. Stay with me, we said. In the mornings, we woke to puddles of wet sugar in our beds and wrung moisture from our underwear.
Advice to emerging writers: Keep your day job. Don’t get too comfortable. http://goo.gl/MTR5Ai
http://goo.gl/MTR5Ai
Rather than “resisting Americanization,” I think of my writing as examining (Interrogating? Excavating?) Americanization, and this came for me when I was educated critically on Americanization, and when I read other American women writers of color also apparently resisting or examining or interrogating Americanization and Anglo male privilege – Gloria Anzaldúa, Leslie Marmon Silko, Jessica Hagedorn, Audre Lorde, Harryette Mullen, Frances Chung, Haunani-Kay Trask, for example. My American upbringing would not have been the same as those who represented the majority and the mainstream, and so finding these women of color authors writing that complexity, ambivalence, with some degree of grit or edginess or militancy, was a big deal for me.
These days, expanding on America (USA) and América (Latin America), in addition to Anzaldúa, I think of Adrian Castro, Alejandro Murguía, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Juan Felipe Herrera, Jack Agüeros, and especially the mighty Eduardo Galeano, on language, on place, on history. In fact, it’s been fantastic and revelatory being included over the past decade, in a number of Latino poetics projects.
There’s the jazz of Bob Kaufman and Nate Mackey. Of his performances, Mackey once told me that when collaborating with musicians, word starts to approximate sound, and sound to approximate word. There’s the pidgin of Lee A. Tonouchi (check out his book, Living Pidgin, from Tinfish Press), and the fact that he wrote his entire masters thesis in pidgin. All of this really gets me thinking more about how I use language, why I use the languages that I use.
How does your work differ from others of its genre?
Is Pinay Lit a genre? Let’s go ahead and say it is. However conversational or politicized the usage of Pinay, I’ve been interested in some time now, in potentially Pinay-centered literary space, in writing, reading, and teaching. Can we push the discussion to where it’s most sharp, most difficult — regarding historical and social issues, and just as important, narrative, craft, language, form.
Can we do this in spaces where those who identify as Pinay are both encouraged and emboldened to speak and push their writing, without the kinds of gendered, racialized pressures exerted upon us by our Filipino male community members who want to tell us what to do and what to think, by our white women colleagues who want to save us and speak for us, by our oblivious American classmates who just don’t give a shit. Can we do this without descending into an uncritical Kumbayah. Can we create a strong foundation on our own terms, welcome and maintain rigor, be empowered and articulate wordsmiths. I hope we can.
Pinay Lit at USF! Pls help spread the word! Salamat po! http://goo.gl/58Z7pz