Bearwitika -

Abstract

Write with your eyes like painters, with your ears like musicians, with your feet like dancers. You are the truthsayer with quill and torch. Write with your tongues on fire. – Gloria E. Anzaldua Throughout the courses I have taken for my degree, I have participated in multiple discussions on the significance of counternarratives: narratives that go against the popular and inaccurate portrayal of certain peoples as they fight back by telling their own stories. That was the first time I started to think of storytelling as a political tool. I remember the first American Studies reading that ever truly resonated with me; it was Gloria E. Anzaldua’s Borderlands-La Frontera: The New Mestiza. In her book, she says: But it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank, shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed locked in mortal combat, like the cop and the criminal, both are reduced to a common denominator of violence. The counterstance refutes the dominate culture’s views and beliefs, and, for this, it is proudly defiant. All reaction is limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting against. Because the counterstance stems from a problem with authority—outer as well as inner—it’s a step towards liberation from the cultural domination. But it is not a way of life. At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes. Or perhaps we will decide to disengage from the dominant culture, write it off altogether as a lost cause, and cross the border into a wholly new and separate territory. Or we might go another route. The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react. The reason that quote, in addition to her celebration of the act of writing, resonated with me so much is due to the fact that I