Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (2 page)

Bushra Rehman
Daisy Hernández

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When we began editing this book, we knew only a little about each other. We were two dark-haired women who moved in overlapping circles of writers, queers, artists and feminists. We had met in New York City through the collective Women in Literature and Letters (WILL), which organized affordable writing programs that were women of color-centered. It was while editing this book, however, that we realized how much a Pakistani-Muslim girl from Queens could have in common with a Catholic, Cuban-Colombian girl from New Jersey.

We both grew up bilingual in working-class immigrant neighborhoods. Our childhoods had been steeped in the religions and traditions of our parents’ homelands, and at an early age, we were well acquainted with going through customs, both at home and at the airports. We followed our parents’ faith like good daughters until we became women: At fifteen, Daisy left obligatory Sunday mass and Catholicism when a nun said the Bible didn’t have to be interpreted literally and no, Noah’s ark had never existed. At sixteen, Bushra discovered her body—and stopped praying five times a day.

Of course, there were also differences. Bushra had been raised knowing that violence was as common as friendship between people of color. Her family had moved from Pakistan to New York City to Saudi Arabia to Pakistan and then back to New York City. Daisy, on the other hand, had grown up with white European immigrants who were becoming white Americans, and her familia had only moved from one side of town to the other. We also broke with our families in different ways: Bushra left home without getting married; Daisy stayed home and began dating women.

Our personal rebellions led to a loss of family that took us on another path, where we met other not-so-perfect South-Asian and Latina women also working for social change. It felt like it had taken us a lifetime to find these spaces with women who gave us a feeling of familiarity and of belonging, something that had never been a given in our lives. With these women we could talk about our families and find the understanding that would help us go back home. We began to realize, however, that working with our own was only the groundwork. To make change happen we needed to partner up with other women of color. To work on this book we had to venture out of our safe zones.

And then 9/11 happened. People from our communities turned on each other in new ways. Girls wearing the hijab to elementary school were being slapped by other colored girls. Any mujer dating an Arab man was now suspect in her own community. People we considered friends were now suspicious of Middle Eastern men, Muslims and Arab immigrants, even if they were immigrants themselves. Living near Ground Zero, we watched people respond to their grief and fear with violence that escalated in both action and conversation, and we felt our own fear close to home: Daisy was afraid that, with the surge of pro-American sentiments, her mother would be mistreated for not speaking English, and Bushra feared for her mother and sisters who veil, and for her father and brothers with beards who fit the look of “terrorists.”

In response to the war, we wanted to do “traditional” activist work, to organize rallies and protest on the street, but abandoning this book project didn’t feel right. Darice Jones, one of our contributors, reminded us of Angela Davis’s words: We are living in a world for which old forms of activism are not enough and today’s activism is about creating coalitions between communities. This is exactly our hope for this book. Despite differences of language, skin color and class, we have a long, shared history of oppression and resistance. For us, this book is activism, a way to continue the conversations among young women of color found in earlier books like
This Bridge Called My Back and Making Face, Making Soul.

 

After many late night talks, we chose the title of Cristina Tzintzún’s essay for this book in order to acknowledge how the stories of women and colonization are intimately tied. But when we first sat down to write this introduction and looked in the dictionary, we found that colonize means “to create a settlement.” It sounds so simple and peaceful. We rewrote the definition. To colonize is “to strip a people of their culture, language, land, family structure, who they are as a person and as a people.” Ironically, the dictionary helped us better articulate the meaning of this book. It reminded us that it’s important for women of color to write. We can’t have someone else defining our lives or our feminism.

Like many other women of color, the two of us first learned the language of feminism in college through a white, middle-class perspective, one form of colonization. Feminism should have brought us closer to our mothers and sisters and to our aunties in the Third World. Instead it took us further away. The academic feminism didn’t teach us how to talk with the women in our families about why they stayed with alcoholic husbands or chose to veil. In rejecting their life choices as women, we lost a part of ourselves and our own history.

This is difficult to write because, initially, white feminism felt so liberating. It gave us a framework for understanding the silences and tempers of our fathers and the religious piety of our mothers. It gave us Ani Di Franco’s music to sing to and professors telling us that no, patriarchy isn’t only in our colored homes, it is everywhere. There is actually a system in place that we can analyze and even change.

But our experience with white feminism was bittersweet at best. Daisy felt uncomfortable talking about her parents’ factory work in the middle-class living rooms where feminists met to talk about sweatshops. Bushra realized how different she was from her feminist sisters whenever there was a flare-up in the Middle East and she was asked to choose between her identity as a Muslim and an American. There was always a dualism at play between our “enlightened” feminist friends at college and the “unenlightened” nonfeminist women in our families. We wondered how it could be that, according to feminist thought, our mothers were considered passive when they raised six children; worked night and day at stores, in factories and at home; and when they were feared and respected even by the bully on the block.

It was only after college, through word of mouth from other women of color, that we learned about another kind of feminism. These groups practiced women of color feminism, sometimes naming it as such and sometimes not saying it at all. Daisy joined WILL, a collective founded by three Latinas to use writing as a political weapon, and that’s how she first read Cherríe Moraga’s writings on homosexuality and began publishing her own work. Bushra joined SAWCC (South Asian Women’s Creative Collective), where she found a desi audience and began performing her poetry first in New York City and eventually around the country. It was among these women that we both began developing a feminist way of looking at la vida that linked the shit we got as women to the color of our skin, the languages we spoke and the zip codes we knew as home.

Our feminism lies where other people don’t expect it to. As we write this introduction, the cop who (allegedly) took part in sodomizing Abner Louima has just been released from jail. We see pictures of the cop kissing his wife splattered across the newspapers. This sanctioning of sexual violence and police brutality against a black Haitian immigrant feels like a slap in the face. As women of color, this is where our feminism lies. When the media vilifies a whole race, when a woman breaks the image of a model minority, when she leaves her entire community behind only to recreate it continually in her art and her writing, or when our neighborhoods are being gentrified, this is also where our feminism lies.

 

As young women of color, we have both a different and similar relationship to feminism as the women in our mothers’ generation. We’ve grown up with legalized abortion, the legacy of the Civil Rights movement and gay liberation, but we still deal with sexual harassment, racist remarks from feminists and the homophobia within our communities. The difference is that now we talk about these issues in women’s studies classes, in classrooms that are multicultural but xenophobic and in a society that pretends to be racially integrated but remains racially profiled.

We have also grown up with a body of literature created by women of color in the last thirty years—Alice Walker’s words about womanism, Gloria Anzaldúa’s theories about living in the borderlands and Audre Lorde’s writings about silences and survival. In reading the submissions for this anthology, we found that it was the books that kept young women of color sane through college, abortions and first romances with women. Many of us just needed the books: We needed another woman of color writing about her fear of loving a dark woman’s body or about being black and pregnant and feeling the scarcity of her choices.

In working with the writers in this book, we often thought of Audre Lorde’s words from her poem, “A Litany for Survival”:
We were never meant to survive.
Who would think that we would survive—we, young girls prey to the hands of men, the insults of teachers, the restrictive laws of holy texts and a world that tells us “this is not your world.” For the young women in this book, creating lives on their own terms is an act of survival and resistance. It’s also a part of a larger liberation struggle for women and people of color.

With these ideas and essays in hand, we locked ourselves up for weeks at a time until the book took form. We chose to focus on the four major themes of family and community, mothers, cultural customs and talking back. Our first section, “Family and Community: A Litany for Survival,” describes how we band closer to our birth or chosen families because of the hostility in the world, of someone calling us “spic,” “nigger,” “fag,” “terrorist” or because political and economic wars are only a phone call away to aunties living in Nicaragua or the Philippines. But family is only a safe zone until you kiss another woman, question the faith or go to the movies with a white boy. With our communities we’re expected to suppress our individual selves and our dissent in order to look strong in the face of racism. In this section, mixed-race women write to those of us who question their belonging to a women of color community. Women search for chosen families, act like the “man of the house” because there isn’t any man and choose different lives after being diagnosed with HIV. Their feminism and community activism are based on the model of family.