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Global Feminist Selves - Coggle Diagram

- - - - "When her dream commences, the Jungle Crow leads Ruth to first encounter Nao when she is working as a sex worker who is “naked except for a man’s shirt, which she wears unbuttoned” (349). She is then dragged away from Nao and the “Jungle Crow comes to save her” (350). The crow then leads her to a man sitting on a bench who she discovers to be Haruki #2. She then says “please don’t do it” (352), referring to his suicide attempt. The dream concludes with Ruth falling into Jiko’s arms “into silence, into darkness” (354)
    - - "Allow us to interject; these births are complicated moltings, leaving skins all over the place. But remain assured, Asụghara’s presence was not our absence, never that. We fell back when she burst forward, true, but we are many and she was just one of us, a beastself, a weapon that needed to be put in play." The Metaphor of a snake is used throughout the novel to detail Ada's various changes and "births". As she "molts" her skin, she is rebirthed. The image is used to convey how life constantly resurrects.
    - - "Coatlalopeuh is descended from, or is an aspect of, earlier Mesoamerican fertility and Earth goddess. The earliest is Coatlicue, or "Serpent Skirt." She has a human skull or serpent for a head, a necklace or human hearts, a skirt of twisted serpents and taloned feet... The male-dominated Azteca-Mexica culture drove the powerful female deities underground by giving them monstrous attributes and by substituting male deities in their place, thus splitting the female Self and female deities" (49)
      - Shadow-Beast
        
        "Women does not feel safe when her own culture, and white culture, are critical of her; she the males of all races hunt her as prey" (42) "For a lesbian of color, the ultimate rebellion she can make against her native culture is through her sexual behavior...to avoid rejection, some of us conform to the values of the culture, push the unacceptable parts into the shadows. Which leaves only one fear-that we will be found out and that the Shador-Beast will break out of its cage" (42)
    - - Connection between Laila and Nadir. Allows for Nadir to feel close to both Laila Z and his mother. Birds surround his memories of his mother and allow him to escape to a time where she is still alive.
  - - - "The US-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country-a border culture" (25).
    - - Nervous conditions
        
        Babamukuru is constantly forcing white western values onto his family back home, even forcing Tambu's parent's to get married, a ritual she finds extremely unorthodox and embarrassing. By the time Tambu returns home from Catholic school abroad, she finds Nyasha starved and "skeletal," having fallen victim to the "whiteness" her mother claimed would kill them all prior.
      - Minor Feelings
        
        “Whether our families come from Guatemala, Afghanistan, or South Korea, the immigrants since 1965 have shared histories that extend beyond this nation, to our countries of origin, where our lineage has been decimated by Western imperialism, war, and dictatorships orchestrated or supported by the United States. In our efforts to belong in America, we act grateful, as if we’ve been given a second chance at life. But our shared root is not the opportunity this nation has given us but how the capitalist accumulation of white supremacy has enriched itself off the blood of our countries. We cannot forget this.”
  - - - "In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purposegatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we are being used by whitest keep the black man down" (11)
    - - "For a people who are neither Spanish nor live in a country which Spanish id the first language; for a people who live in a country in which English is the reigning tongue but who are Anglo; for a people who cannot entirely identify with either standard (formal, Castilian) Spanish nor standard English, which recourse is left to them but to create their own language?" (77)
    - - "My name was alright, he said, but my brothers was too uncommon to take with him. Poised with his pen above the paper that wold change everything, Mr. Hamawi made suggestions, settling on Joseph, though Joseph was not a translation of Issa" (92) Coming to the US Laila and her brother have their identity stripped from them as they are forced to give up their name to something more palatable for Americans.
- - - - "Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist" (18).
    - - "The psychiatrist said that Nyasha could not be ill, that Africans did not suffer in the way we had described." (295)
    - - "The breeze strokes my face. To the night, I am a body without a past or a future, a pillar that bends light. The night doest know my name." (106) Nadir struggles to be seen as his true self in his daily life and the night offers him an escape where he can be who he is without judgment or care of others.
      - “I think to myself, It is terrifying to be visible, and then I think, I have been waiting all my life to be seen.” Again, Nadir grapples with feeling free while they are not seen (during the night), but also recognizing the power of being seen as his true self.
  - - - Nao's father offers different definitions of suicide in his email to Professor Leistiko, remarking that: "Suicide feels like One Authentic Thing. Suicide feels like the Meaning of Life. Suicide feels like having the Last Word. Suicide feels like time stopping altogether." At the same time, he recognizes that his suicide would have a negative impact on his daughter Nao and tries to find other answers about the meaning of life in the philosophy of "great Western minds." (90)
      - "Like my Dad, for example, who can convince himself that his suicide will not harm me or my mom because actually we'll be better off without him, and at some point in the not-so-distant future we'll realize this and thank him for killing himself. Same with Ugawa Sensei, who probably figured that I, too, would be happier just not being there, and he was actually right about that. In a way, he was just helping me achieve my goal and as a result, I could almost feel grateful" (78)
  - - - "This is all, ultimately, a litany of madness—the colors of it, the sounds it makes in heavy nights, the chirping of it across the shoulder of the morning. Think of brief insanities that are in you, not just the ones that blossomed as you grew into taller, more sinful versions of yourself, but the ones you were born with, tucked behind your liver. Take us, for instance." The novel label's itself as a "Litany of madness" but kind of works to remove the stigmas around "madness". While Ada displays many signs and symptoms of mental illness, the novel rejects that lens
- - - - Borderlands
        
        Anzaldua utilizes writing to rebel, expressing her rebellion against her culture’s norms by identifying with her queerness and her rebellion against white, colonial ideals by being a woman of color. Anzaldua’s cultural beliefs were formed by those in power, men, who make the laws and rules that govern women. The culture insists that “women are subservient to men” (17), a belief that was ingrained into Anzaldua’s belief system until she reflected on these ideas and discovered that she did not agree with them and refused to act the way that men in her culture thought women should behave.
      - A Tale for the Time Being
        
        "The term shishosestu ... refers to a genre of Japanese autobiographical fiction, commonly translated into English as "I-novel" ... Much has been said about the form, about tis "confessional style, its "transparency of text, and the "sincerity" and "authenticity" of its authoritorial voice... Early women writers of shishosetsu have largely been ignored... I argu[e] that at least one early women author of shishosetsu used the form in a way that was groundbreaking, energetic, and radical" (149)
    - - Tambu/Nyasha from Nervous Conditions
        
        At the conclusion of the novel, Nyasha experiences a mental breakdown where she destroys history books and “their bloody lies” while also destroying “her clay pots” (205). This is representative of the duality of Nyasha’s rebellion. She is destroying history books, rebelling against the white settlers who have ruined her African culture by imposing their European ideals and rewriting Shoan history to claim themselves as heroes and saviors to the Africans. She is aware of the political injustices suffered by Africans at the hands of colonists. However, Nyasha is also destroying her clay pots, a material good that is integral to her Shoan culture and women spend hours crafting them. This implies a rebellion against African ideals, the patriarchal society that forces Nyasha to bend to its will and act in a way that pleases the men in her life while paying no attention to her.
  - - - After Ruth intervenes in Nao's timeline, new pages begin to appear at the end of the diary in addition to restored ones. Ruth compares them to an "outgoing wave" when she talks to her friend Muriel and remarks that they lie "just beyond her reach." Muriel offers one possible explanation: "It's not about Nao's now. It's about yours. You haven't caught up with yourself yet, the now of your tory, and you can't reach her ending until you do" (377)
    - - She felt caught between two cultures: Mexican with a heavy Indian influence and Anglo. She lived in a place of contradictions and constantly felt like she was straddling two cultures. However "books saved [her] sanity, knowledge opened the locked place in [her] and taught [her] how to survive and how to soar" (1). Writing allowed her a way to express her true self and to understand who she was.
    - - "I only came into focus when I was making art and later when I began writing poetry, which I found freeing because my body was dematerialized, my identity shed, and I could imagine myself into other lives" (41-42).
  - - - “Readers, teachers, and editors told me in so many words that I should write whatever felt true to my heart but that since I was Asian, I might as well stick to the subject of Asians, even though no one cared about Asians, but what choice did I have since if I wrote about, say, nature, no one would care because I was an Asian person writing about nature?”
      - “The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain. Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain? I don’t think, therefore I am—I hurt, therefore I am. Therefore, my books are graded on a pain scale. If it’s 2, maybe it’s not worth telling my story. If it’s 10, maybe my book will be a bestseller.”
      - “At the time, I couldn’t relate to some of the Asian American fiction and poetry I came across. It seemed, for the lack of a better word, inauthentic, as if it were staged by white actors. I thought maybe English was the problem. It was certainly a problem for me. English tuned an experience that should be in the minor key to a major key; there was an intimacy and melancholy in Korean that were lost when I wrote in English, a language which I, from my childhood, associated with customs officers, hectoring teachers, and Hallmark cards. Even after all those years since I learned English, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that to write anything was to fill in a blank or to recite back the original.”
    - - "My 'stories' are acts encapsulated in time, 'enacted' every time they are spoken aloud or read silently. I like to think of them as performances and not as inert and 'dead' objects" (89)
- - - - "It was difficult to accept not being human but still being contained in a human body. For that one, though, the secret was in the situation. Ọgbanje are as liminal as is possible—spirit and human, both and neither. I am here and not here, real and not real, energy pushed into skin and bone. I am my others; we are one and we are many. Everything gets clearer with ea
    - - "Maybe this is why I don't want to make myself legible. I want to erase the meanings that have been ascribed to my breath, to my sweat, to my hair and fat and skin. I trace the green veins in my neck that branch down into my breasts as feathers. I am painting myself as the bird that, to the world outside this room, does not exist. I draw myself clothed in wings and tell myself that even the angels are sexless.”, Nadir seeks to move beyond the gender bianaries forced upon them and see themselves as the way they truly feel
  - - - Anzaldúa describes the process of recognizing and working through the injustices that are enmeshed in the society around her through her essay the "Coatlicue State" : "Those activities of Coatlicue states which disrupt the smooth flow (complacency) of life are exactly what propel the soul to do its work: make soul, increase consciousness of the self. Our greatest disappointments and painful experiences - if we can make meaning out of them - can lead us toward becoming more of who we are... The Coatlicue state can be a way station or it can be a way of life" (68)
    - - Tambu condemns Sacred Heart by the end of the novel, stating that the effect it had on the other members of her family made her start questioning everything. She says she refuses "to be brainwashed," which reveals she's grown and learned from when she was a child when she believed Sacred Heart was "a sunrise on [her] horizon."
  - - - “Rather than look back on childhood, I always looked sideways on childhood. If to look back is tinted with a honeyed cinematography of nostalgia, to look sideways at childhood is tainted with a sicklier haze of envy, an envy that ate at me when I stayed for dinner with my white friend’s family or watched the parade of commercials and T.V. shows that made it clear what a child looked like and what kind of family they should grow up in. The scholar Kathyrn Bond Stockton writes, "The queer child grew up sideways, because queer life often defied the linear chronology of marriage and children". Stockton also describes children of color as growing sideways since their youth is likewise outside the model of an enshrined white child. But for myself it is more accurate to say that i looked sideways at childhood… to look sideways has another connotation - giving side eyes telegraphs doubt, suspicion, and even contempt.
    - - "My dad seems to have found his superpower, and maybe I've started to find mine too, which is writing to you. And before I run out of space, I just want to let you know that me and my dad are really okay, now that I finally know what kind of man he his, and even though we haven't actually discussed the topic of suicide, I'm pretty sure that neither of us is thinking along those lines anymore. I know I'm not, anyway." (389)