Word.: On Being a [Woman] Writer

WORD is a nice collection of some hard-to-get feminist texts from all over the world. I was impressed by Jocelyn Burrell's ambitions to have a representative sampling of the writing of so many women from so many cultures. Sometimes the excerpts seem curtailed, but I suspect that might be a publishing decision and that she was handed down the fiat to shorten the book by another 10,000 words. If so it is excellently done with not a seam showing, just the general feeling of wanting more. It is not only the most well known women authors who contribute the best pieces to WORD. No, there are some great essays here by woman with very low profiles. Liza Fiol-Matta is of course a widely published author and thinker of New Jersey, but she does not have the cultural capital of (say) Margaret Atwood, and yet her essay here, "Beyond Survival" A Politics/Poetics of Puerto Rican Consciousness" is every bit as captivating and poetically written as Atwood's--if not more so. As she says, "Rescuing a poet/ from the claws of colonial bilingualism/ is not an easy thing." In the poem that begins her essay, she lets loose with a number of uncomfortable truths. As a Puerto Rican lesbian living on the mainland, stuck between Spanish and English, she is a nomad, doomed to carry mutual heritages and to weather a disastrous tide of diminishing resources. She cites Homi Bhabha and Bhabha's conception of the "in-between spaces." She was six when her father moved her family to Arkansas--of all places. Another great Puerto Rican author to appear here is Judith Ortiz Cofer, sometimes thought of as the "Puerto Rican Joyce Carol Oates." But in truth, if we were honest with ourselves and able to see through the thick walls of culture, we would be referring to Oates as the "Detroit Judith Ortiz Cofer."