from: Deirdre Lashgari, Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women's Writing as Transgression (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1995).

Since Tillie Olsen's provocative work "Silences" in 1965, feminist writing in the United States has taken seriously the roles of silence and anger in the lives and literary production of women.1 Little, however, has been written on the specific conjunction of these issues with women's culturally shaped responses to violence. The essays in this volume engage in a cross-cultural exploration of responses to violence in texts by writers from twelve non-Western countries as well as the United States and England.2

The contributors' discussions draw from such fields as psychoanalysis, anthropology, political economy, and medicine as well as critical theory, and their voices extend from the formal and academic to the highly personal and autobiographical. The range of texts discussed invites an examination of cultural and class-based differences in the nature of the violence that women have experienced, the costs of breaking cultural taboos against speaking out, and the strategies enabling women to violate societal expectations without forfeiting the chance to be heard.

A writer faces contrary imperatives: to be honest, and to be heard. It can be difficult for the writer herself to look closely into the systems that justify and perpetuate violence, as several of the essays show. Once one has identified the violence, it can be difficult to name it publicly, and difficult to make oneself heard. In the United States, for example, mainstream arbiters of literary quality have often worked from assumptions uncon-

sciously rooted in gender, class, and Eurocentric culture, with a bias toward authorial distance. For a woman writing from the margins, whose work may clash with these assumptions, acceptance by the literary mainstream too often means silencing a part of what she sees and knows.3 To write honestly may thus mean transgressing, violating the literary boundaries of the expected and accepted. This double bind is particularly strong for women writers of color, especially so if their vision is shaped by a language other than English. What is read by the dominant group as alien, rough-edged, jolting, strident, is more likely to offend when it comes from a woman. If the woman writer's root culture also has strong injunctions against "making noise' the temptation to self-silencing increases, as does the risk and necessity for breaking through. This risk often influences the way a writer shapes her work, its dramatic and narrative strategies, its language and imagery.

In addition to taboos against speaking and publishing what is regarded as unspeakable, the writer faces her audience's resistance to I hearing. Paradoxically, the violence permeating the media-television, movies, newspapers- makes it more difficult, rather than easier, for us to hear. Packaged and sanitized, "violence as entertainment" can have an anaesthetizing effect that prevents us from feeling or acting. In different ways, the writers discussed in this anthology provide antidotes to this numbing. Their work calls into question our ways of keeping at arm's length what makes us uncomfortable. At its most powerful, their work often impels us to in-corporate the pain of violation, to take it into our own bodies where it can force us to respond. It implicates us, along with its characters and narrative speakers, in the struggle to give voice to the horror and the determination to end it.

The multiplicity of voices talking back to each other within and among the essays in this book shapes the theoretical discourse of the volume as a whole .4 Underlying this discourse are several concepts crucial to understanding the place of silence, anger, and transgression in women's responses to violence: decentering, heteroglossia, dialogics, and travesia.

Decentering, a process essential to postcolonial literary practice, redefines both subject and object of critical attention. When those who are marginal to the dominant power re-place the center, making the margin the new center of their own subjectivity, different perspectives on violence become possible. The monologic discourse of the imperial center tends to rec-

ognize as violence only what it perceives as threatening to itself. Shifting the vantage point of the subject allows one to see forms of violence that had been invisible, or to see in unfamiliar ways. When the gaze is redefined, what it encompasses changes, deconstructing the master narrative.5

The need for this shift away from the old center is clear in the work of such writers as Trinh T. Minh-ha and Abdul JanMohamed, who provide valuable ways of understanding and thus disrupting the binary operation of the dominant discourse. Trinh confirms the need for a "certain work of displacement" without which "'speaking about' only partakes in the conservation of systems of binary opposition (subject / object; I / It; We / They) on which territorialized knowledge depends ."6 Also implicit in the monologic discourse of the dominant group is what JanMohamed calls its " manichaean economy," a structuring of the world along rigid us / them lines.7 Such global binary oppositions go beyond simple nonjudgmental distinctions; inherently unstable, they tip easily onto a vertical axis: superior / inferior; better / worse. As long as the dominant hear no voices but their own, their monologic "truth" blinds them.8 As JanMohamed shows, when the colonizer attempts to know the colonized, he generally sees not the other but only his own reversed reflection, either demonized or idealized.9 Or, as Mary Louise Pratt shows, he sees nothing at all, only a landscape from which all human presence has been erased, containing only resources for the taking.10

Heteroglossia, emerging from the specifics of social context, frees the monologue from its constricting knots. When a multiplicity of voices enters the discourse, when the margins talk back to the imperial or neocolonial center, the binary structure unravels. In Rosario Ferré's novel Sweet Diamond Dust, when the family (national) history is retold by the household servant, the orthodox truths dissolve, other truths emerge, the shape of the story shifts, what had been presented as courage and conquest becomes violence, violation. 11

Dialogics, the constructive discourse of conflict, becomes possible when polyvocal discourse interrupts the dominant monologue. The dialogic process is inherently confrontive, exposing discrepancies, contradictions, rifts. Thus the perceived threat: "Everything was nice and harmonious before. Now you're creating divisions." The divisions and differences were there all along but were simply whitewashed into invisibility. Dialogics allows us to begin to see.12

This movement toward understanding is the travesia, or crossing, which is the other side of transgression. Whatever the ground one stands on, whether center or margin, one faces in each moment an/Other ground,

which is the threatening not-known. Only by violating the boundaries of the familiar and proper, risking conflict, can one reach toward connection.13 The word, as Bakhtin says, calls forth response.14 Conflict becomes music, or dance, exhilarating as well as dangerous.

Travesía applies not only to the unknown ground of the Other; it also means questioning what had seemed familiar, the very ground under one's own feet. The task for each of us is, as Trinh says, "to listen, to see like a stranger in one's own land; to fare like a foreigner across one's own language."15 Particularly for readers shaped by a monologic discourse, confrontation with unfamiliar and widely differing texts and perspectives can be disconcerting. For one thing, to realize that the invisible was "not not there," as Toni Morrison says, can be humbling.16 It is not simply that the voices of working-class people and people of color have been stifled; they also have been unheard and rendered unhearable, aurally erased. And the dominant group, too, has been damaged in the process, deprived of access to crucial experience and ways of seeing. Polyvocal discourse can render visible the vacant spaces in what one thought was knowledge, making possible the crossing onto new ground.17

As Morrison reminds us, "Cultures, whether silenced or monologistic, whether repressed or repressing, seek meaning in the language and images available to them.18 Texts like the ones discussed in this volume, by authors writing out of culturally diverse contexts, question the reader's awareness of their cultural specificities. What sociohistorical conditions made it possible for these women to write at all? What traditions exist in their cultures of women writing? And what oppressive or liberating structures have shaped their responses to violence?

In many cultures and periods, the only women likely to have access to literacy and to a literary tradition, as well as the resources and leisure for writing, were the daughters or wives of rulers or aristocrats, or courtesans, or religious devotees. The early poetry of India, for instance, is rich with the work of women who were Buddhist nuns or, later, followers of Siva. In the Arab world and Iran, women Sufis wrote some of the earliest mystic poetry in that tradition (eighth century in Arabic, eleventh in Farsi). In certain cultures and periods, women across a broader social spectrum were actively involved in literary production. In many oral cultures, from pre-Islamic Bedouin Arabia to the twentieth-century Inuit, each member of the community was considered a potential poet, and women along with

men took part in the poetic competitions and celebrations that constituted the heart of their culture.19

Until fairly recently, the vast majority of women in literate cultures worked too hard and were too poor to have the chance to read, much less write. Literacy has been mainly a privilege of the well-to-do, and then only in certain countries and times, and only for the fortunate. Our knowledge of women who did write has been limited by the politics of transmission: works considered important at one period could disappear in the next, in part through patriarchal bias in the institutions responsible for literary publication, distribution, and preservation .20

Some of the women whose work is discussed in this volume write with an awareness of a long line of literary foremothers, while others draw from ancient traditions in which "literary" composition by women has been oral rather than written. Middle Eastern women writers such as Etel Adnan and Simin Daneshvar work out of a literary heritage going back more than 4,000 years-to Enheduanna, the poet-priestess of Sumer who composed elaborate hymns to the goddess Inanna around z300 B.C.E. and is the earliest poet known by name; and to Kubatum, another Sumerian woman, who wrote lyric poetry around 2031 B.C.E.21

In some cases, the relations between societies that were at differing stages of literary development created extraordinary space for women's creative work. Japan, which had no indigenous written language until around the seventh century C.E., depended for a long time on China, whose written language was nearly two thousand years older. During the 400 years of the Heian Period (794-1185), "serious" Japanese literature was written in Chinese by Japanese men educated in the foreign Chinese tradition. The young Japanese script, considered inferior and appropriate only for trivial writing, was left to the use of women-who proceeded to invent what were to become the most significant forms of subsequent Japanese literature: the tanka, the haiku, the novel .22

In the present century, postcolonial writers have worked in similarly complex cultural and linguistic situations. Senegalese novelists Mariama Ba and Aminata Sow Fall, for example, inherit both a written African literary tradition, beginning with the early pharoahs of Egypt, and a rich oral tradition. Each has chosen to write in the language of the French colonizers, which is more widely accessible than their native languages. Laguna Pueblo novelist-poet Leslie Marmon Silko, who draws inspiration both from a long oral heritage and from the ancient Aztec and Maya written traditions, writes in English .23 This increasingly wide use of English and other European languages by writers from Third World cultures has

expanded the range of those languages, carrying them beyond the imperial singular to an inclusive plural- "englishes , " "frenches , " "spanishes" capable of embodying cultural differences .24

On the other hand, many writers who have chosen not to write in the dominant languages of the West have found themselves outside the West's powerful literary institutions, from publishing houses and distribution systems to the Nobel Prize and other international awards. In this country, the influence of translation on literary production has played a significant role only since the mid-1970s. Even now, widespread access in the United States to literature from lesser-known languages is dependent on the chanciness of the interest of talented translators, political visibility, and sometimes the creation of publishing houses devoted to translating work from particular cultures .25 Twelve of the texts discussed in this volume come to us out of other languages, six translated from Caribbean, African, and Middle Eastern French, three from Spanish, and one each from Arabic, Farsi, and Afrikaans.

This opening of the doors of mainstream U.S. literature to voices outside the walls has necessarily shifted our understanding of the canon that never clearly defined but strongly guarded fortress of "Indisputable" Great Literature. Tony Morrison, discussing the startling absence of African Americans from the founding works of canonic nineteenth-century American literature, shows how deeply in fact the "presence of Afro-Americans has shaped the choices, the languages, the structure-the meaning of so much American literature" (210). Her concept of the "unspeakable things unspoken" and the "Invisible things [that] are not necessarily 'not-there"' (210) is crucial to understanding silencings and erasures effected by literary institutions and by the dominant cultural ideologies that shape them .26

It is also important to remind ourselves that systems of domination and exclusion exist within "nondominant" cultures as well. As Shirley Lim's essay in this volume shows, societies in the process of throwing off colonial shackles nonetheless-and consequently-have a tendency to silence voices that "don't fit" in the nationalizing discourse. Lim argues that. Sybil Kathigasu's memoirs from World War II, for example, have been shut out of the Malaysian national literary canon in part because of her positive treatment of British colonial influence. Similarly, Janet Lim's "Westernized" critique of gender oppression in Singapore in the 1930s and 1940s clashed with the anticolonial nationalist discourse there.

Cultural communities split by language and forced dispersion have found other ways of defining and preserving a common bond. Writers of the African diaspora, marked by widely divergent histories and cultures,

see themselves as linked by the shared experience of colonization, slavery, and racist oppression as well as by the consciousness of a rich common cultural heritage in the continent of Africa. Shared oppression and culture likewise unite the peoples of other diasporas such as the Jewish, Palestinian, and Armenian.27

In contrast, societies encompassing disparate communities from different countries of origin have often, though not always easily, forged a new, heteroglossic identity. Malaysia, especially in such areas as Melaka, combines cultures as diverse as the Polynesian-based Malay; Tamil and Hokkien Chinese immigrants; and the Portuguese and Baba Nyonya, two groups whose unique mixed cultural and linguistic traditions derive from sixteenth-century immigrants who intermarried with Malays. Imperialism and neocolonialism work as a different sort of multicultural influence in many Third World countries, often to the detriment of women, at times28 to their benefit.

The issue of language goes further. As several contributors to this volume show, having to learn and speak and write in the language of the oppressor can be problematic. Aside from the physical danger involved in criticizing and organizing against the dominant powers in a language they understand, speaking in a tongue not one's own requires grappling with the unspeakable in many forms. Among Rigoberta Menchú's people, the Quiché Maya of Guatemala, Indians who speak Spanish have been looked upon as traitors, sellouts. Nevertheless, realizing that without knowledge of the dominant language she could do little to protect her people from annihilation, Mench6 learned Spanish in her late teens and agreed to tell her life story in this new language to Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, who edited it for publication in Spanish and later translation into English. Gaps and fissures will necessarily remain in such a multiply-translated account, especially when no words can be found in the lexicon of the second, or third, language adequate to the meanings in the first.29 Other instances of the unspeakable in Mench6s text are cultural: rituals, concepts, experiences guarded as sacred secrets by the Maya, not to be revealed to outsiders. And in addition to the not-told against which any narrative unfolds, the teller also makes rhetorical omissions and alterations, shaping the account to a form better able to carry truth to the reluctant reader.

What one is capable of seeing as violence depends on one's angle of vision. When Cherrie Moraga speaks of the "threat of genocide" suffered by

people of color, she is referring not only to violences of overt action but also to hidden, structural violence and to the passive acquiescence that permits it to continue.30 Women born into relative privilege, defended from racial and economic oppression, often find it hard to recognize how

they stand with one foot each in the camps of the dominator and the dominated, how they have, however unconsciously, benefited from and been complicit in the oppression of others. As Peggy McIntosh points out, the heavy price paid for privilege is a peculiar blindness, the inability to

see that the privilege exists. Men frequently suffer from this blindness on matters of gender, middle-class people on class, European Americans on race." 31

In part because of their recognition of interconnected oppressions, the writing of women of color has tended to avoid reductive oppositions between women and men. At the same time, they are often bitterly impatient with men in their communities for attacking as "disloyal to their people" women who point out connections between gender oppression and other forms of oppression. As Moraga reminds us, "To be critical of one's culture is not to betray that culture"; in fact, it is the withholding of criticism that constitutes betrayal, complicity in holding the community back .32 There are no simple dichotomies. Men, despite the problematic advantages of gender domination, have also been scarred by patriarchy. And men are not the only oppressors. Women, whether overtly privileged or not, have frequently played a role in keeping the mechanisms of patriarchy in place, as many men have worked as allies in dismantling them.

The specificities of cultural difference reveal varying forms of resistance to oppression, and varying forms of silence and anger. Unconsciousness and acquiescence as responses to violence can be explained in terms of internalized oppression, the incorporation of the attitudes of the oppressor by the victim, or of the colonizer by the colonized." Where violence is opposed, resistance may not be conscious: madness or anorexia, for instance, may be an embodied repudiation of a gendered situation that seems to allow one no other control .34 On the other hand, conscious anger is not necessarily productive; it may simply be reactive, a lashing out harmful to self and others. When constructive, anger may not be direct. It can be explicit without being voiced: expressed nonverbally, for example, or communicated within overt politeness.

Conscious anger openly expressed may serve as a counterforce to the stultifying weight of conformist silence. Many Third World texts emphasize the necessity for such confrontive anger and action. Others portray countercommunity, empowered by shared silences, as the most effective

opposition to violence. At times, in what Mary Daly has called "space on the boundary" outside the system of domination, the impact of violence can be resisted or healed through collective ritual and myth .35 In still other cases, silence may be a means of survival, or of subversion-disguise, masking, "warrior duplicity." Examples of subversive silence appear frequently in works by nineteenth-century women writers as coded invitations to their women readers to read between the lines what could without danger be said outright .36

Poet Janice Mirikitani calls us to shed our debilitating silence, to "birth our rage" from the "mute grave" of patriarchal history.37 But rage can be dangerously transgressive. Cultures differ greatly in the comfort or discomfort their members feel with overt anger or any direct expression of conflict. Anger is a form of energy that can be constructive or destructive depending on context. Aimed at the perpetrator of violence rather than at the violent act, it merely replicates the problem. As a counterforce to the wrong itself, anger is capable of transforming the opponent into a potential ally. Constructive anger is thus not something one ever "gets beyond." We can use its power to move us from unconscious passivity into clarity and the will to act. In this sense, anger is awareness amplified so it can be spoken, speech amplified so it can be heard.

But what if the hearer resists hearing, either in an effort to avoid pain, or from fear of having cherished values challenged, or from resentment of anger misread as personal attack? Any undermining of established assumptions can seem threatening. Yet, as readers, our experiences of marginalization and subordination can serve us. As adults who were once children, most of us have been members of dominated as well as dominator groups; and we can call on this remembered experience to free us from an imprisoning monologic view of the world.

The essays in this volume and the conversations opening out beyond them call on us to risk hearing, to risk seeing, and to risk the travesia, the transgressive crossing into new space.

Trinh Minh-ha reminds us, "The challenge is thus: how can one re-create without re-circulating domination?"38 Undoing binary structures means destabilizing not only the master narratives of the patriarchs but also our own. Women assume varying, often contradictory, positions in response to multiple hegemonies or monologisms, and as Sally Robinson points

out, it is through these shifting positions that we constitute our multivalent subjectivities.39 At the same time, however, we may be denying the multivalent subjectivities of the Other. As Trinh puts it, Western thinkers "extol the concept of decolonization and continuously invite into their fold 'the challenge of the Third World.' Yet ... when they confront the challenge 'in the flesh,' they ... do not hear, do not see. They promptly reject it as they assign it to their one-place-fits-all 'other' category."40 Similarly, in Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Empire-Building, Laura E. Donaldson argues for the need to do away with what she calls the "Miranda effect ' " the tendency among feminists to construct and then be trapped by a universalizing image of women's solidarity. Attempting to squeeze all women into this ideological construct, ignoring differences of history, economic class, and culture, one falls into a blindness akin to the blindness that kept Miranda from "seeing" Caliban .41

Strategies that displace the imperial center "defy the world of compartmentalization and the systems of dependence it engenders, while filling the shifting space of creation with a passion named wonder."42 One metaphor for this act of displacement is that of mapping. As long as readers in the United States, for instance, assume their vantage point as thecenter of the universe, they may find it hard to enter into a heteroglossic discourse. The Australians' "Corrective Map of the World," with Australia at the center and everything "upside down," is not merely funny. How deeply ingrained one's seeing of the world is, how deeply forgotten the realization that on this planet there is no top or bottom, no West or Orient, unless these directions are imposed by the master discourse. Moving this center, whether on the map or in our unconscious conception of the location of imperial authority, is no easy matter-and it is crucial.

The need for this shift in vision became clear to me some years ago when I was involved in an extended collaborative project to uncover and publish international poetry by women. In the beginning, exhilarated by the connections among women from cultures as diverse as Stalinist Russia and indigenous Papua New Guinea, revolutionary Vietnam and Finland, we organized our first anthology thematically, focusing on what we as European Americans saw as the startling "universals" of women's experience. As we gathered work for the more ambitious second collection, covering 4,300 years instead of eighty, we found ourselves thrown outside our familiar ground, forced to recognize the specific cultural context in which each poet had written. This shift led us to organize the historical volume by cultural areas rather than by "common voices.' Further, it disrupted our sense of geographical relationships, making it impossible to

perpetuate the familiar treatment of "other cultures" as interesting additions along the banks of the U.S. or Western mainstream. Our familiar literary ground, displaced from center, became one thread among many in a shifting tapestry whose patterns were only just emerging.

This multiplicity of social voices is also crucial to the concerns of this volume. For any society to get away with persistent systemic violence against those excluded from power, it must impose a monologic definition of truth, and then convince its members that any deviation would risk chaos. Yet, wherever there is a dominant discourse there are always already numerous other voices, subverting, transgressing boundaries, working to disrupt its centripetal certainties .41 Some have argued that encouraging a multiplicity of voices carries the dangerous implication that they are all equally worthy, that everything is relative, that there is nothing we can recognize as better or more true. What, for example, about voices that are clearly speaking untruths or dangerous half-truths? The dialogics of the essays in this collection suggests that the way toward truth is not to try to build walls to shut out falsehood. Rather, as John Milton argued in "Areopagitica," destructive thinking can best be demolished through dialogue in the public marketplace, since it is more likely to wither in the light of day than if it is driven underground .41

This emerging play of voices in social context is, to quote Bakhtin again, "the natural orientation of any living discourse." Bakhtin defines the conflicts of difference as exhilarating, the "unrepeatable play of colors and light" as "the word encounters an alien word ... in a living, tension-filled interaction ."46 The tensions of dialogic discourse involve risks, too, especially in what Trinh describes as a "maximal consumer society" that is "always dividing and alienating at the same time as it works at filling in blanks, holes, gaps, and cracks; rendering invisible the open wounds; evading cleverly all radical reflection upon itself." 47 Those in power tend to argue that anger is "improper" precisely because they think it is to their advantage to shut up voices that question, or might make them question, their dominator role .48

Oppression is destructive for the oppressor as well as for the oppressed, as Toni Morrison points out: "The trauma of racism is, for the racist and the victim, the severe fragmentation of the self." 49 The curandera in Toni Cade Bambara's novel The Salt Eaters challenges us in response to this fragmentation, "Can you afford to be whole?"'50 As Mary Daly and Gloria Anzaldúa show, it is always at the boundaries, the margins, the barbed-wire fences with the "no trespassing" signs that the most exciting and transformative energies lie. And the voices that have been

silenced or, speaking, have not been noticed hold the missing pieces of our understanding of human community, and of ourselves.

The monologue of the dominator can deafen us to other voices. To be heard, countervoices must engage in a kind of aesthetic violence, finding new ways to make us hear. The language of creative transgression is an act of daring, a border crossing that is both "festively vertiginous" and dangerous.51 One learns to move alertly but without fear through the borderlands, to experience the margins both as re-placed center and as cutting edge, the ground of transformation. In Trinh's words, "Whether we choose to concentrate on another culture, or on our own culture, our work will always be cross-cultural ... because of the heterogeneous reality we all live today, in postmodern times-a reality, therefore, that is not a mere crossing from one borderline to the other or that is not merely double, but a reality that involves the crossing of an indeterminate number of borderlineS."52

These, then, are the two sides of transgression: to violate the master's boundaries is also to affirm the possibility of the travesía, the crossing over. Not that we will get it right. In this space on and among the boundaries, our greatest advantage is the willingness to risk blowing it. Knowing we will blow it, and realizing it's not only okay, it's the only way through--like having to fall off the bicycle in order to learn to ride. Or like the alkido roll--"fall-down-get-up, one motion ."53

One risk lies in the very language we use in talking of difference. In this challenging and often disconcerting period in North-South relations, when the comfortable assumptions of the dominant establishment are being called into question, the language in which these relations are discussed no longer constitutes solid ground. In many cases, we have no adequate terminology for the categories central to our conversation: old solutions have been found wanting, and new ones being proposed likewise have flaws .54 Contributors to this volume frequently contradict each other in deciding which terms best fit the particular discourse in which they are engaged.

Part of the complication in terminology and discourse arises from changes that have occurred in accepted language as marginalized groups have reclaimed terms once considered pejorative, such as Black, Chicano, native, queer, crone. Other difficulties result from the fact that we are still immersed in the situations to which the old terms refer. In the mid-1970s, the initially invaluable term androgyny became outdated even as we still needed it. As Adrienne Rich argued, it was dangerous because it perpetuated the old assumption that certain human capacities were inherently

masculine and others feminine.55 But it was at the same time useful, not just because no other term seemed to express adequately what we meant but also because we had not yet crossed over to the new space in which such a word could apply. In order to cross over, we needed to be able to refer simultaneously to the old shore and to the new.

This shakiness of the linguistic ground beneath us becomes a metonym for the kind of reading these essays demand. Differences in language among the contributions here, like their differences in viewpoint and tone, require us to enter into dialogue with the writers, wrestling with the problems and advantages of conflicting positions. No one can be safe on this uncertain ground; each of us must negotiate our own way, with as much clarity as possible and with the continuing willingness to learn. We each confront this creative risk, repeatedly, as we seek to shape a language more appropriate to our interactions In a culturally diverse society. This process requires a critical and nonjudgmental reflectiveness, questioning our own words and the attitudes they clothe, as well as listening to the impact of our language on others, especially those to whom the language applies.

The issue, then, is not to avoid offending or making mistakes in the terms we use, since that's not possible, but rather to be willing, continually, to interrogate our own and each other's language, noticing the holes, the gaps, the distortions-and using these very fissures as passageways to clearer understanding. There is no way I can know, meeting someone for the first time, whether she will be offended by the word Chicana instead of Mexican American, or Latina, or Hispanic. But when my choice of words does offend, I can learn to hear this without defensiveness or apology and I can let this interaction help me understand the roots of this negative response in the history of the term in the Mexican-American community. I may, then, choose either to discard the term or to continue to use it, unapologetically, as the best alternative I have found so far.

As for the bugaboo of "political correctness" in general, the best response may be to undermine its illusory power with laughter.56 My first encounter with the term was in women's groups in the 1970s, when we would humorously and affectionately call ourselves to task when we slid into self-congratulatory "rightness." Precisely because we took seriously both our differences and our interactions with each other, we knew we could not afford to trap ourselves in hostile monologisms, that no one of us owned an absolute or static truth. Laughter freed us to question our own and each other's assumptions and use of language. Language is loaded and has the power to kill .57 It must be used with care--not walking

on eggshells (which is also deadly), but realizing that we learn through error, through risking and falling on our faces. And we learn best when "error" is seen not as shame but as the most effective way to learn.

Once our polyvocal discourse has broken free from the strangleholds of polarization, so that those born into dominator status can stop fighting to silence the voices of the Other and those in the borderlands can stop fighting to be heard, then we can look around us and see what is to be seen, in all its disconcerting and empowering multiplicity. We can, together, get on with the business of envisioning and weaving a world conducive to human life.

Beyond Part I, which addresses theoretical issues involved in writing and reading female silence, the essays in this volume move from silencing toward transgressive voice, and from the isolated individual toward the possibility of empowered community. Part 5, the closing section, returns us to a focus on the strategies that writers use to speak the unspeakable, as they transgress limits, overturning the "proper" and envisioning liberatory change.

Part 1, "The 'Knife in the Tongue': The Politics of Speech and Silence" opens with Jane Hoogestraat's examination of the multiple silences in Adrienne Rich's work-experiences that cannot be named because they have been erased by dominant institutions, as well as the active silences of women struggling to find "language for pain, poverty, and violence, and then the courage to speak that language.' In her discussion of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs, Anne Dalton examines the author's deliberate use of silences and omissions as a way of shaping her relationship with her readers, who were predominantly female, white, middle class, and abolitionist. George Handley extends this discussion of difficulties inherent in testimonial literature, considering the methods that Rosario Ferré and Rigoberta Menchú use to negotiate the imaginative representation of pain in order to bring it into discourse. In "Native Witness, White 'Translator,"' Kristi Dalven examines the fissures in Elsa Joubert's "documentary novel" Poppie Nongena as examples of narrative problems that arise when a privileged Afrikaner woman attempts to speak for a Xhosa woman surviving under South African apartheid.

Part 2, "Domestic Politics: Violence on the Home Front" includes two pairs of essays dealing with related themes. The essays by Merry Pawlowski and Gisela Norat discuss attempts to retrieve deeply buried experi-

ences of childhood sexual abuse; those by Pamela Smiley and Ruth Saxton examine problematic relationships between mothers and children, especially daughters. In all four , although the analysis focuses on family problems, It also shows how closely linked domestic violence is to larger, systemic violence: fascism, homophobia, classism, and unwitting literary misogyny on the part of women writers who confuse the destructive patriarchal ideology of the "good mother" with the capacity for nurturing in each of us.

Merry Pawlowski digs beneath the silences and gaps in Virginia Woolf's autobiographical writing to show the ways in which Woolf, through most of her life, suppressed awareness of the violence she had suffered as a child in an oppressively patriarchal household. Similarly, Gisela Norat shows how, in Sylvia Molloy's Certificate of Absence, the narrator's account of an abusive relationship with a woman lover overlies the deeper, more painful experience of her father's sexual and emotional abuse of her as a child.

Women unable to confront the ideology of the "perfect mother" have trouble acknowledging anger toward their own children, and this anger, unspoken, perpetuates itself. Conversely, daughters' fear of and anger at their mothers may both result from and perpetuate an exaggerated image of the mother's "goodness." As Pamela Smiley shows in her study of Mary Gordon's Men and Angels, the protagonist finds it hard to deal with the anger of the woman whose biography she is writing in part because she denies her own "angry mother" side. On the other hand, as Ruth Saxton argues, many women novelists transpose the idealized image of motherhood into the equally unreal image of the mother as deadly because she is "too good."

The essays in Part 3, "Structures of Oppression: Subjectivity and the Social Order," look at systems of violence on a larger scale and at the effects of this structural violence on the sense of individual identity and efficacy. Madhuchhanda Mitra discusses Nawal El Saadawi's novel God Dies by the Nile, which focuses on the abuse of Egyptian peasants by interlocking institutions of class, gender, government, and religion. Although the peasants as Saadawi depicts them seem incapable of effective action, protest is implicit in their ability to see.

The essays by Wills, Lim, and Cook reveal an increasing potential for resistance, although systemic oppression remains firmly in place. In her anthropological analysis of the novels of two Senegalese writers, Mariama Ba and Aminata Sow Fall, Dorothy Wills shows how the female protagonists, in violating the traditional injunction against "making noise," ges-

ture toward the possibility of undermining the interconnected systems of social oppression. Both Shirley Lim and Michaela Cook argue for the possibility of female heroism within systems of pervasive and brutalizing oppression imposed both by indigenous social and gender hierarchies and by invading colonial and neocolonial forces. Lim's essay shows the impact of imperialism, both Japanese and Western, on the narrators of two World War II memoirs, from Malaysia and Singapore, as they struggle against systematic gender oppression. Michaela Cook discusses the way Simin Daneshvar's novel Savushun, set in World War II Iran, displaces the conventional patriarchal hero in the process of redefining the nature of heroism itself, while also calling into question prevailing Western misapprehensions of the Muslim woman as passive and invisible.

In the essays in Part 3, resistance to oppression is only potential; in Part 4, "Collective Silence, Collective Voice: Toward Community," the movement is toward an effective dismantling of the walls of isolation, silence, and immobility. In Sherri Hallgren's essay, this movement appears, paradoxically, in the subversive and collectively empowered inaction and silence of the women in Susan Glaspell's "A jury of Her Peers" as well as in its narrative strategy of author-reader collusion. Ann Trapasso explores, as Lillian Kremer does in the essay that follows, the troubling question of the effects of systemic racist violence on survivors of its horrors. Trapasso shows how Sherley Anne Williams in Dessa Rose creates a counterdiscourse to slavery by means of a kind of collective guerrilla theater, in which the use of masking and subversive laughter disguises truth in order to free it. Lillian Kremer's analysis of fiction by Cynthia Ozick and Norma Rosen points to the role of "acting" in surviving and deconstructing the violence of the Nazi holocaust, either negatively through an isolating counterdrama or positively through shared witnessing. Acting collectively becomes increasingly important in the five African American and Caribbean plays discussed by WV& Clark, in which theater serves as an increasingly feminist and participatory medium for speaking the unspeakable.

The essays in Part 5, "Revolting Texts: Transgression (and) Transformation'" show how language and strategies of representation can themselves be the site of revolt, altering our ways of seeing and being. Roseanne Quinn decodes misogynistic and universalizing discourses on breast cancer in popular and medical publications, then analyzes works by women that in acknowledging difference allow us to reclaim the power to speak and act. Madeline Cassidy's essay explores the way the dialogic structure of Sitt Marie-Rose, Etel Adnan's narrative of the torture and execution of a woman in Beirut in 1975, during the civil war, allows the text to point

toward a "new space, a new moral ethic, that can only exist outside the framework of tribalism and factionalism, either Christian or Muslim." My own analysis of Janice Mirikitani's collection Shedding Silence focuses on the literary techniques by which she maneuvers the reader into hearing the unspeakable, by violating both the boundaries of normal social discourse and the personal boundaries that keep us "safe In the final essay, Ann Reuman discusses the way Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands /

La Frontera reappropriates the concept of marginalization, making it not a diminution but the mark of a "new, affirmative, feminist landscape' " the cutting edge of change where "wild tongues" won't stay silenced.

"Every work materialized can be said to be a work-in-progress .1151 inclusiveness is what this book invites the reader toward, not what it achieves. It has, as Bakhtin would say, a "joyous awareness" of its gaps and inadequacies, the holes in the fence through which it beckons the reader to explore territories and texts still waiting.59

May the conversations in this volume lead the reader to carry these discussions into new grounds yet to be named.

1. Tillie Olsen, "Silences in Literature"; see also Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence.

2. The essays in this volume consider texts by writers from African American, Asian American, Chicana, and European American traditions in the United States, and by writers from other countries including Senegal, South Africa, Egypt, Lebanon, Iran, Singapore, Malaysia, England, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Argentina, and Quiché Maya Guatemala.

3. For a discussion of silencing by cultural injunction and dominant literary institutions, see King-kok Cheung, "'Don't Tell"'; Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, "Cultural Influences: Chicana"; and Norma Alarcón, "The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism," 363 -64.

4. See bell hooks, Talking Back, for a provocative discussion of the dialogic process.

5. "Decentering": compare the term "re-placing" in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, and, earlier, the concept of "living on the boundaries" in Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father, 4z-44. In The Colonial Harem, Malek Alloula undertakes a specific desubjectifying of the colonizer's gaze.

6. Trinh T. Minh-ha, "Cotton and Iron;' in When the Moon Waxes Red, 1 Z.

7. Abdul R. JanMohamed, "The Economy of Manichean Allegory." JanMohamed borrows the concept of the manichean struggle from Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 41. Sylvia Wynter provides an interesting comparison: "The pervasive cultural nationalism of the West invites as its negation an inversion of its own

presuppositions. The past has been reinvented as ideology by the West, to sustain the West's consciousness of itself as subject, a consciousness which needed the negation of the Other, the non-West" ("History, Ideology, and the Reinvention of the Past;' 44).

8. See Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade, for a valuable historical analysis of "dominator" as opposed to "partnership" forms of social organization, and their implications for gender and class relations.

9. JanMohamed, "Manichean Allegory," 83-Ioz. For further theoretical perspectives on this process, see Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, 38, and W. Lawrence Hogue's discussion of Foucault in Discourse and the Other, 6. Any dominant discourse includes aspects of the Other that threaten the presuppositions of that monologism. Confronted with this Other, a member of the dominant group tends to respond in one of three ways: he will, as Roland Barthes says, "blind himself, ignore and deny him [the Other], or else transform him [the Other] into himself" (Mytbologies, 151-5z)

10.Mary Louise Pratt, "Scratches on the Face of the Country." Israeli writer Amos Oz, for example, has described both polarizing and inclusive strains in the Zionist tradition: the dominant current reflected in the slogan describing Palestine as a "land without a people for a people without a land;' and an important agrarian countercurrent that saw the Palestinians as long-lost brothers and sisters whom Jews would rejoin when they returned from exile (in a talk he presented at Hillel House, Berkeley, Calif., 1972).

11. For a discussion of heteroglossia and dialogism, see M. M. Bakhtin, "Discourse and the Novel! See in particular the "Glossary" explanation of heteroglossia: " that which insures the primacy of context over text;' that insures "that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions" (428); Bakhtin also describes heteroglossia in terms of "a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships," which disperse "into the rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia ... dialogization" (z63)

12. For "dialogism," see Bakhtin7s Glossary: "The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue" (z76).

13. See Gloria Anzald6a, Borderlands/ La Frontera: "Every increment of consciousness, every step forward is a travesía, a crossing. I am again an alien in new territory. And again, and again" (48). Also (78-79): "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 we might go another route. The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react."

14. "The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer's direction" (Bakhtin, "Discourse;' z8o).

15. Trinh, "World as Foreign Land;' in When the Moon Waxes Red, 19q. In a talk in 1991, Chela Sandoval addressed the critical importance of the dialogic process in interactions between European American feminists and American feminists of color ("U.S. Third World Feminisms"). See also her essay "Feminism and Racism."

16. Toni Morrison, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken," 210. For a powerful bringing-into-view of aspects of cultural violence that are "not not-there," see Alice Walker's polyvocal novel about clitoridectomy, Possessing the Secret of Joy. Like Walker, Gayatri Spivak criticizes the structural functionalist argument that if clitoridectomy "works" for a particular social structure, it must therefore be justified; see "French Feminism in an International Frame."

17. Monologic discourses about the dominant culture in any society can also erase the experiences of unacknowledged subgroups. Many European Americans, for instance, although privileged by color, have been marginalized by class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, language, immigrant status, as well as by gender, and have at times constituted a significant counterforce against the ideological hegemony of those in power.

18. Morrison, "Unspeakable;' zo8. The phrase "the difference (cultural) difference makes" recalls Gregory Bateson's description of communication: "the difference that makes the difference" (Steps to an Ecology of Mind).

19. See the introductions to cultural areas in Joanna Bankier and Deirdre Lashgari, eds., Women Poets of the World, esp. Stella Sandahl, "India"; Bridget Connelly, "The Arab World"; Lashgari, "Iran" and "Native American."

20. See Joanna Bankier (with Thomas D'Evelyn), "Greece of Antiquity." Sappho's poetry was all but lost during the extreme misogyny of classical Greece; a few quotations in the work of grammarians and some papyrus fragments used for packing objects in jars are all that has come down to us (136). Even in our more enlightened times, as recently as the early 1970s, the work of women writers was seldom included in English-language anthologies. Clearly, a society that assumes that women don't write will fail to see what women have written. In this case, it is not that women haven't been speaking, but that the audience has been ideologically deaf.

21.. Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, "Sumero-Babylonia;' in Women Poets.

22. Rob Swigart, "Japan;' in ibid.

23. See Lashgari, "Africa" and "Native American," in ibid.

24. For extensive discussion of the literary significance of multiple englishes, see Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Empire. At its greatest stretch, writing in English by Latino authors such as Gloria Anzald6a has incorporated extensive use of various spanishes as well, from Chicano Spanglish to untranslated passages in formal Spanish, from brief phrases noted or explained to untranslated passages in Spanish that require the monolingual English reader to make the effort to "reach across." For studies of the development of creole languages and the creole continuum, see such works as Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, Eloge de la créolité; Mervyn Alleyne, Comparative Afro-American; and Derek Bickerton, "The Nature of a Creole Continuum.'

25. For example, little from Iran had appeared in English translation until the creation in the mid-iig8os of such presses as Mage and Mazda. Three Continents Press and some small presses like Waveland focus more broadly on translations from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, with smaller listings from the Middle East.

26. Morrison, "Unspeakable;' 207, , 210. See also Hogue, Discourse and the Other, especially 1-22.

27. See Trinh on the "naming of identity" as a way of "declaring solidarity among the hyphenated people of the Diaspora" ("Cotton and Iron;' 14).

28. For a negative instance, see Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop. Allen describes "degynocratization" as a particularly deleterious effect of the imperializing influence on women's status in indigenous American cultures. She quotes Jesuit missionary priest Father Paul Le Jeun as speaking explicitly in his reports to the French government about the concerted effort to "loosen the hold of Montagnais women on tribal policies and convince men and women that a woman's proper place was under the authority of her husband and a man7s proper place under the authority of the priests" (z4). As is clear in the novels of Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Paula Gunn Allen, the role of women in indigenous cultures has survived with strength despite the persistence of such attacks.

29. See also George Steiner, After Babel.

30. Cherrie Moraga, "From a Long Line of Vendidas": "Unlike most white people, with the exception of the Jews, Third World people have suffered the threat of genocide.... When they kill our boys in their own imperialist wars to gain greater profits for American corporations; when they keep us in ghettos, reservations, and barrios which ensure that our own people will be the recipients of our frustrated acts of violence; when they sterilize our women without our consent because we are unable to read the document we sign; when they prevent our families from getting decent housing, adequate child care, sufficient fuel, regular medical care; then we have reason to believe -although they may no longer technically be lynching us in Texas or our sisters and brothers in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi -they intend to see us dead" (181).

31. Peggy McIntosh, "White Privilege.' McIntosh makes the point that being born into privilege is not a fault, nor are privileges themselves bad: each of us should be free to find work based on qualifications rather than on color, or to walk through a department store without being followed by security guards. The question is what one does with the privileges one has.

32. Moraga, "Vendidas;' 180.

33. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. For a discussion of socially enforced self-silencing by teenage girls, see Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, "Meeting at the Crossroads. " The authors describe the progressive inhibiting of voice in adolescent girls as "a kind of psychological foot-binding," which protects the "relational

lies that are at the center of patriarchal cultures: subtle untruths and various forms of violation and violence that cover over or lead to women's disappearance in both the public world of history and culture and the private world of intimacy and love" (30). The girls in their study least likely to give up their voices were those who "because of

color or class live in the margins" (31).

34. For example, see Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Charlotte Brontë's novel Shirley; see also my essay "What Some Women Can't Swallow. "

35. Daly, Beyond God the Father, 42-44.

36. See, for example, Sarah Ellis's The Daughters of England (1843), 90, as well as the suggestion at the end of Charlotte's Brontë's novel Shirley that the reader "put on spectacles" to "find the moral" (599). I discuss coded subversion in this and other works in my forthcoming study The Agony of Leaving: Narrative Strategy in Nineteenth- Century Novels by Women. Judith Lowder Newton's Women, Power, and Subversion (1981) is a valuable early work on subversive strategies in literature by women.

37. Janice Mirikitani, "Prisons of Silence;' in Shedding Silence, 8.

38. Trinh, "Cotton and Iron;' 15

39. Sally Robinson, Engendering the Subject.

40. Trinh, "Cotton and Iron;' 16.

41. Laura E. Donaldson, Decolonizing Feminisms.

42. Trinh, "Cotton and Iron;' 23.

43. See Joanna Bankier et al., eds., The Other Voice; and Bankier and Lashgari, eds., Women Poets of the World.

44. Bakhtin, "Discourse," 263.

45. Our marketplace of ideas, of course, is not a free market. The human tendency toward intellectual diversity now runs up against the effects of globalization and media monopoly, which further conformity through control of information.

46. Bakhtin, "Discourse," z77, z79.

47. Trinh, "World as a Foreign Land," 196.

48. See Ronald T. Takaki, Iron Cages.

49. Morrison, "Unspeakable Things," z14.

50. Quoted in Moraga, "Vendidas," i8o.

51. Trinh, "Cotton and Iron;' 14.

52. Trinh, "A Minute Too Long;' 107.

53. This is one of the lessons of the crone / bag lady in Naomi Newman's one-woman drama Snake-Talk. Newman is one of the founding members of A Traveling Jewish Theater, and the co-author of Coming from a Great Distance, Dance of Exile, and The Last Yiddish Poet.

54. I refer to terms such as dominant v. minority, center v. margin, Third World, people of color, the West, race. Minority, which implies "lesser," seems inappropriate as a term for people of color, who constitute the majority of the world's population. "Third World" was invented, to refer to themselves, by representatives at the Bandung Conference of Nonaligned Nations in 1956 to distinguish themselves from the capitalist First World and the Communist Second World. Some now question its use as connoting third class. Similarly, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has argued for placing the word "race" in quotation marks to remind ourselves that although the concept as concept continues to wreak havoc on social relations, it has no objective or scientific validity as a means of distinguishing groups of people ("Editor's Introduction: Writing 'Race' and the Difference It Makes;' in "Race," Writing, and Difference, 11-20).

55. Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence.

56. Humor can serve us both as an antidote to our own lapses into thinking that we have found truth, and as support in confronting concerted attacks on diversity by those who want to preserve the hegemony of the dominant discourse. These opponents of cultural difference often put up linguistic smoke screens accusing multiculturalists of imposing a monologic correct line, and presenting themselves as defenders of intellectual freedom.

57. See, for example, Lorna Dee Cervantes's "Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person, Could Believe in the War between Races" in her collection Emplumada.

58. Trinh, "Cotton and Iron;' 16.

59. Bakhtin, "Introduction;' Dialogic Imagination, xxxiii.

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