Creative Defecation: Being a Shity Hybrid

This posting is more personal as opposed to being focused on the subject of this blog, but this thought process comes from my own feminist consciousness and my third-waver conflict.

I always seem to write only when I am upset, so that I live in a space between tears and stories. I had to leave home again to say hello to my empty apartment, but somehow it didn’t feel as terrible as it often does. The last day of my weekend’s home are often morose—my feeling nostalgic, guilty, lonely, but attempting to enjoy those moments despite the difficult navigation of my constant emotions. These are the moments where words hit me on the forehead like the edge of the kitchen table when you rise too quickly from picking up a stray grape. So today, after weeks of not writing a word, when I boarded the plane I pulled out my plain compact yellow office pad and started to write. I wrote about my grandfather’s secrets, my mother’s childhood, my conflicting life wishes, and then this of course. By the time I got off the plane I knew I could somehow face the week.

When I think of myself as a writer—if we can even venture to refer to me as a writer—I know I want to follow Judith Ortiz Cofer’s advice. I want to be Maria la Sabida—who I consider to be a wonderful representation of underground feminism as she works covertly within the system by using her intellect as opposed to full frontal force—but never seem to get there. I want writing to be my daily ritual. I want to be the Maria Sabida who demands time for her art, but instead I am embarrassed to realize that I seem to fit some antiquated stereotype of the emotional poet who only writes in moments of great sensibility. This practice of writing after tears generally makes me entertain terrible self-deprecating thoughts of how my writing will likely always be limited, as I seem to treat language as a moment of creative defecation in search of a comfortable release so I no longer feel clogged up with emotions.

I always imagined that writing would be my best feminist activism—that when my talents evolved I would be a feminist writer, or more specifically an underground feminist writer. But instead of constructing the wonderfully complex stories for girls that I dream of writing, I am composing bursts of my family tree—memories that are my own and some I’ve stolen. Instead of being Maria la Sabida or Maria la Loca, I am a hybrid of both. I eat the “sleep inducing figs” and the run through the motions of everyday life, but then with the right catalyst I become the woman who has “wedded the negative forces in her life that would keep her from fulfilling her mission and, furthermore, that she has made the negative forces work for her instead of against her” (Cofer).

I’m not sure what this means about me as a writer, all I know is that I wait patiently for the catalyst that will make me drop everything to write in the margins of my yellow work pad.