Native Country of the Heart

Today is just asynchronous and no video. I’ll post a video for Thursday’s lesson. Three things to write about today. One short, one medium, and one longer.

In Native Country of the Heart, Moraga gives us glimpses into other parts of her life other than her relationship to her mother. What would you like to know more about and why?

I keep reflecting on the comment she makes about wondering if her mother is really demented, or if she is just Mexican in a white world. That metaphor seems particularly apt at the time of the funeral, when Moraga marvels at the differences between the viewing and the service the next day. Discuss the differences in her eulogy and her brother’s. What do you make of her choking metaphor?

Bear with me for a bit. I’m working on an essay for a chapter in a book about women’s friendships, and my work is on Castillo and Moraga. Here’s an excerpt from what I’m working on:

Moraga’s essay “Weapons of the Weak” seems strangely prescient to the pain she may have caused in the past. When detailing her own mother’s mental and physical decline, she reflects: “Anger has always run my life. How do I teach conscientious nonviolence and whole acts of bravery at the same time? Our girl-child is fucking up in math. Again. She has forgotten her homework. Again I am in a sudden rage […] I only watch her shrink before the violent volume of my voice, her eyes welling up with tears, and I can’t stop myself because my fear is stronger than my compassion” (Xicana Codex 61-62). This is a painful moment of self-awareness, but it’s even more painful when read against Castillo’s struggles with her son. The way the women’s relationship has diverged (they no longer share a child) is real, but neither family can wholly separate from the violence of fear—of sexual assault, of failure, of being a target in someone else’s rage, of raising brown children in a racist society. Moraga goes on in the essay to reflect on the need to take ownership over points of violence and domination in one’s own past. She clearly points to the double bind in activism: “How can we speak of violence against women of color without also naming our own violent acts? Psychic and physical.” (62). This awareness of her own tendency toward anger and violence is important, because it takes her to another place of memory; she discloses how her childhood servitude toward her brother bred physical and psychic wounds she still carries. These oppressive structures cause her to think: “It is not so long ago if at fifty I can still suffer the panic attacks of that censored girlhood […] We carry the diseases of our anger, our regret, our grief inside our middle-aged and aging women’s bodies” (63). When she considers how to let go of some of that grief and anger, she turns to her place in a larger struggle for justice, equality, peace, and civic responsibility. These actions build communities and form the foundations of friendships. As she reflects on aging, Moraga turns back to the relationships that sustained creative Chicana activism in the past in the hope that the strength there can move into the future.

In this excerpt, I’m drawing parallels in their work. I’d like you to draw some parallels in how they deal with their mothers’ deaths. Can you open with one, like I do above, draw a strong parallel to the other, and move to another point captured that your discussion is working toward? A strong topic sentence for your paragraph would be sophisticated, and develop it with quotations from both texts.

Briefly comment on three of your peers’ posts.