Written for ENG 3430: Survey of Women and Literature (SP 2019)
Builder Levy - Jacqueline Santiago and Cathy Lindsey. Bushwick, Brooklyn, 1970
Published over thirty years apart, Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street (1984) and Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn (2016) seem in many ways to be in dialogue with each other, as they similarly explore the desire to live “inside the pure joy of Home” (Woodson 52). In their semi-autobiographical narratives about “growing up Girl” (Woodson 3), they underscore the power of writing as transformative, as a way to channel rage and give voice to “the ones who cannot out” (Cisneros 110)—the ones “trying to dream themselves out” (Woodson 77)—of systemic poverty and race/gender-based violence.
Their stylistically poetic narratives, both constructed through a series of vignettes that explore the unreliability of memory and perspective, also indicate the difficulty of finding one’s voice, especially for women of color and their communities whose experiences and histories have not always been represented in literature "with love and honesty." Even if writing has the power to “keep you free” (Cisneros 61), when you are struggling to find your voice or a place where your voice might be heard, “How do you begin to tell your own story?” (Woodson 160).
For Cisneros, if the house of literature has not provided you with a room of your own, then it becomes a lifelong process of being a writer in search of a home. In her introduction to the 25th Anniversary edition of Mango Street, Cisneros reflects on how finding a home of her own required “doing the things I was afraid of doing so that I would no longer be afraid” (xxiii). She explains further: “I couldn’t trust my own voice. … Because I was unsure of my own adult voice and often censored myself, I made up another voice, Esperanza’s, to be my voice and ask the things I needed answers to myself” (xxiv). She also notes in an interview that when she was starting out as a writer and realized that her community, her experiences, and her Chicana identity had “never been portrayed with honesty,” she felt extreme sadness.
But Mexican women are very strong women, and the opposite side of sadness is rage. It took me only a weekend to get to the opposite side of my sadness. … I got angry. This is a wonderful thing you can do with rage if you know how to transform it.
The House on Mango Street is a coming-of-age narrative about a girl growing up Mexican-American in 1960s Chicago and how she learns to break gender and ethnic barriers while finding the courage to break free from patriarchal expectations that she grow up into a woman trapped by marriage and children. Esperanza observes the sadness, fear, and frustration of the women around her—those worn down by poverty and abuse, locked up in homes by possessive husbands and fathers, married and pregnant too young, unable to protect themselves from the predatory violence of men—and she refuses that life: “I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain. … I have begun my own quiet war” (88-89). Cisneros has noted that she “didn’t want [her] mother’s life," to end up a frustrated artist, and she used her own anger over her mother’s suppressed voice to leave home and become a writer, but like Esperanza, without forgetting “who I am or where I come from” (87). Ultimately, Cisneros views writing not only as a way to transform her anger into art, but that writing itself, telling the stories of those “who cannot out,” is a form of social justice: “art should serve our communities” (Introduction xvii).
In Another Brooklyn, Woodson also aims to tell a story about “what it means to grow up girl in this country” (Afterword, “On Writing Another Brooklyn” 171). Her fragmented narrative about four black girls growing up in 1970s Bushwick, as Jon Lewis-Katz notes in his review of the novel, also encapsulates the black experience of exile and diaspora: “we are always living elsewhere, defined by all that has happened and the promise of what may very well never occur.” Although Another Brooklyn is a story of loss, grief, betrayal, and trauma—about the wounds of black history and communal memory—it is also one that Woodson “wrote toward the hope and longing for the girls’ survival” (Afterword 173). That survival, however, is never guaranteed, especially for girls growing up in a community that is also struggling to survive the ravages of systemic poverty, internalized racism, gender violence, the consequences of “white flight,” the erosion of public resources, and a drug epidemic that seems to transform Bushwick into a war zone (reflecting the Vietnam War):
We had blades inside our kneesocks and were growing our nails long. We were learning to walk the Brooklyn streets as though we had always belonged to them—our voices loud, our laughter even louder. But Brooklyn had longer nails and sharper blades. (61)
In passages like this, Woodson frames the possibility of the girls’ survival through their collective strength, using their voices, laughter, and friendship as a collective defiance of all the dangers of their world; yet simmering beneath August’s own meditative recounting of how she both lost and found her voice, there is a sense of outrage directed toward the ever-present predatory violence that threatens the girls: “There were men inside darkened hallways, around street corners, behind draped windows, waiting to grab us, feel us, unzip their pants to offer us a glimpse” (74). The violence is not only endemic to their time and place but also a constant reminder of their vulnerability because they are black girls, or, “ghetto girls” (a term used by Sylvia’s father to label and shame them).
We were not afraid of the dark places we went to with our boyfriends. … But in Times Square that same year [1979], brown girls were dying. Although we were miles away in Brooklyn, their stories felt close enough to touch, and haunted our nights. Those were the ones that were found, bodies rolled into rugs, behind trash bins, or naked and bobbling in the East River, throats slashed in the bathrooms of Forty-Second Street porn theaters. We knew that crossing that bridge meant being on the same side of the river as that place called Times Square, where girls like us got snatched up by pimps, shot up with dope, and spent the rest of their lives walking along Eighth Avenue, ducking their heads into slowing cars. This terrified us even more than losing Angela. (141-42)
Angela does indeed disappear after her mother dies of an overdose, leaving behind a gaping absence and loss that precipitates the girls’ friendship falling apart. However, Angela reappears when August is in college and she sees her on T.V. in a movie “about a dancer hungry for the lead role in La Sylphide” (168). Angela has danced and dreamed herself out just as August escapes through “a thing called the Ivy League” (154). But not everyone escapes and August remains rooted to the past and her longing for a sense of home and belonging that can never be returned to her except through memory: “I imagined myself home again, my girls around me, the four of us laughing. All of us alive” (161). Not everyone survives and not everyone’s voices or dreams are heard, but Woodson, much like Cisneros, views writing as a transformative vehicle for processing fear, sadness, and rage by redirecting these emotions toward representing the experiences of black girlhood and black communities from a place of authenticity and through the lens of social justice. In a 2017 interview, Woodson explains how she found her own voice:
So how did I become the writer I am today? I wrote past not only my own fear, but other people’s fear for my future. I knew, even if no one ever published me, there were things I wanted to do and say with my writing and was going to do and say these things whether or not they were ever seen by anyone besides me. I wrote all the time. Writing made me feel better about the world, helped me to understand what I was bearing witness to…
In an earlier essay, Woodson also speaks to the question of who gets to write about the experiences of people of color, a question that she is often asked and one that used to enrage her: “How do you feel about people writing outside of their own experiences? How do you feel about white people writing about people of color?” I’ll give Woodson the last word here in my post because her response speaks to the ways in which the experiences of women of color are often silenced but also given a voice by and through women writers who refuse to be silenced:
Their stylistically poetic narratives, both constructed through a series of vignettes that explore the unreliability of memory and perspective, also indicate the difficulty of finding one’s voice, especially for women of color and their communities whose experiences and histories have not always been represented in literature "with love and honesty." Even if writing has the power to “keep you free” (Cisneros 61), when you are struggling to find your voice or a place where your voice might be heard, “How do you begin to tell your own story?” (Woodson 160).
For Cisneros, if the house of literature has not provided you with a room of your own, then it becomes a lifelong process of being a writer in search of a home. In her introduction to the 25th Anniversary edition of Mango Street, Cisneros reflects on how finding a home of her own required “doing the things I was afraid of doing so that I would no longer be afraid” (xxiii). She explains further: “I couldn’t trust my own voice. … Because I was unsure of my own adult voice and often censored myself, I made up another voice, Esperanza’s, to be my voice and ask the things I needed answers to myself” (xxiv). She also notes in an interview that when she was starting out as a writer and realized that her community, her experiences, and her Chicana identity had “never been portrayed with honesty,” she felt extreme sadness.
But Mexican women are very strong women, and the opposite side of sadness is rage. It took me only a weekend to get to the opposite side of my sadness. … I got angry. This is a wonderful thing you can do with rage if you know how to transform it.
The House on Mango Street is a coming-of-age narrative about a girl growing up Mexican-American in 1960s Chicago and how she learns to break gender and ethnic barriers while finding the courage to break free from patriarchal expectations that she grow up into a woman trapped by marriage and children. Esperanza observes the sadness, fear, and frustration of the women around her—those worn down by poverty and abuse, locked up in homes by possessive husbands and fathers, married and pregnant too young, unable to protect themselves from the predatory violence of men—and she refuses that life: “I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain. … I have begun my own quiet war” (88-89). Cisneros has noted that she “didn’t want [her] mother’s life," to end up a frustrated artist, and she used her own anger over her mother’s suppressed voice to leave home and become a writer, but like Esperanza, without forgetting “who I am or where I come from” (87). Ultimately, Cisneros views writing not only as a way to transform her anger into art, but that writing itself, telling the stories of those “who cannot out,” is a form of social justice: “art should serve our communities” (Introduction xvii).
In Another Brooklyn, Woodson also aims to tell a story about “what it means to grow up girl in this country” (Afterword, “On Writing Another Brooklyn” 171). Her fragmented narrative about four black girls growing up in 1970s Bushwick, as Jon Lewis-Katz notes in his review of the novel, also encapsulates the black experience of exile and diaspora: “we are always living elsewhere, defined by all that has happened and the promise of what may very well never occur.” Although Another Brooklyn is a story of loss, grief, betrayal, and trauma—about the wounds of black history and communal memory—it is also one that Woodson “wrote toward the hope and longing for the girls’ survival” (Afterword 173). That survival, however, is never guaranteed, especially for girls growing up in a community that is also struggling to survive the ravages of systemic poverty, internalized racism, gender violence, the consequences of “white flight,” the erosion of public resources, and a drug epidemic that seems to transform Bushwick into a war zone (reflecting the Vietnam War):
We had blades inside our kneesocks and were growing our nails long. We were learning to walk the Brooklyn streets as though we had always belonged to them—our voices loud, our laughter even louder. But Brooklyn had longer nails and sharper blades. (61)
In passages like this, Woodson frames the possibility of the girls’ survival through their collective strength, using their voices, laughter, and friendship as a collective defiance of all the dangers of their world; yet simmering beneath August’s own meditative recounting of how she both lost and found her voice, there is a sense of outrage directed toward the ever-present predatory violence that threatens the girls: “There were men inside darkened hallways, around street corners, behind draped windows, waiting to grab us, feel us, unzip their pants to offer us a glimpse” (74). The violence is not only endemic to their time and place but also a constant reminder of their vulnerability because they are black girls, or, “ghetto girls” (a term used by Sylvia’s father to label and shame them).
We were not afraid of the dark places we went to with our boyfriends. … But in Times Square that same year [1979], brown girls were dying. Although we were miles away in Brooklyn, their stories felt close enough to touch, and haunted our nights. Those were the ones that were found, bodies rolled into rugs, behind trash bins, or naked and bobbling in the East River, throats slashed in the bathrooms of Forty-Second Street porn theaters. We knew that crossing that bridge meant being on the same side of the river as that place called Times Square, where girls like us got snatched up by pimps, shot up with dope, and spent the rest of their lives walking along Eighth Avenue, ducking their heads into slowing cars. This terrified us even more than losing Angela. (141-42)
Angela does indeed disappear after her mother dies of an overdose, leaving behind a gaping absence and loss that precipitates the girls’ friendship falling apart. However, Angela reappears when August is in college and she sees her on T.V. in a movie “about a dancer hungry for the lead role in La Sylphide” (168). Angela has danced and dreamed herself out just as August escapes through “a thing called the Ivy League” (154). But not everyone escapes and August remains rooted to the past and her longing for a sense of home and belonging that can never be returned to her except through memory: “I imagined myself home again, my girls around me, the four of us laughing. All of us alive” (161). Not everyone survives and not everyone’s voices or dreams are heard, but Woodson, much like Cisneros, views writing as a transformative vehicle for processing fear, sadness, and rage by redirecting these emotions toward representing the experiences of black girlhood and black communities from a place of authenticity and through the lens of social justice. In a 2017 interview, Woodson explains how she found her own voice:
So how did I become the writer I am today? I wrote past not only my own fear, but other people’s fear for my future. I knew, even if no one ever published me, there were things I wanted to do and say with my writing and was going to do and say these things whether or not they were ever seen by anyone besides me. I wrote all the time. Writing made me feel better about the world, helped me to understand what I was bearing witness to…
In an earlier essay, Woodson also speaks to the question of who gets to write about the experiences of people of color, a question that she is often asked and one that used to enrage her: “How do you feel about people writing outside of their own experiences? How do you feel about white people writing about people of color?” I’ll give Woodson the last word here in my post because her response speaks to the ways in which the experiences of women of color are often silenced but also given a voice by and through women writers who refuse to be silenced:
 Via research.archives.gov | What is it about the power structure our society was built and remains upon that leads a white person to believe that this is a question that I, as a black woman, should, can, and must be willing to address? In the early days, I couldn’t see past the anger of constantly having this question hurled at me to the political ramifications of not only the question but the dynamic of the asking. And to the fact that what was happening in the moment of the question had always been happening. As my twenty-something activist mind wrapped around this idea, I began to speak. It was Audre Lorde who said, “Your silence will not protect you.” As I came to understand what Lorde meant by this, I became grateful to those who weren’t silent, who weren’t afraid to take the chance and ask this question of me. And I became grateful for the chance to no longer be silent. |
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