Daisy Hernandez - Colonize This!

Colonize This! is a collection of writings by young women of color that testifies to the movementpolitical and physicalof a new generation of global citizens, activists, and artists. It is a portrait of the changing landscape of US women of color identity, one that guarantees no loyalties to the borders that attempt to contain it. As immigrant, native-born, and survivor-of-slavery daughters, these women are the female children of those refugees from a world on fire described in the 1983 edition of This Bridge Called My Back. They are women who have come of age with the living memory of disappearance in Colombia and Argentina and the daily reality of war always a phone call away. They are young sisters (our daughters) who didnt grow up to be statistics (Taigi Smith), who have read and been schooled by the feminist writings and works of the women of color who preceded them, and as such are free to ask questions of feminism more deeply than we could have imagined twenty years ago.

The feminism portrayed in Colonize This! reflects what in the 1980s we understood as theory in the flesh, a strategy for womens liberation which is wrought from the living example of female labor and woman acts of loving. These narratives reflect consciousness born out of what their (our) mothers knew first-hand: the interlocking system of racism, poverty, and sexism (Siobhan Brooks). In Colonize This!, mothers serve as mirrors of choices made and unmade. They are the reflection of sacrifice, survival, and sabidura.

They are Cecilia Balls mother, who each evening wiped off the dining room table after dinner to double as a desk for her two daughters; they are she who had no more than seven years of school buying encyclopedias from the grocery store on the installment plan.

They are Ena from British Guiana, who used her sexiness to get things, like money, kerosene to light the lamps, and food for her children (Paula Austin). They are Tanmeet Sethis mother, who advised, You have to make home wherever you are. And this is what she didcoming to the United States with a stranger who was her new husband. They are Siobhan Brookss mother, who was once placed in a mental hospital for infanticide, and who, in spite of her mental state, paid the bills on time, shopped for food, and refused the free bread-and-butter services the government offered.

They are models of resistance from whom their daughters, through fierce loyalty to them, wield weapons of theory and practice.

In Colonize This!, editors Bushra Rehman and Daisy Hernndez have created an expanded vocabulary to describe an expanded feminism profoundly altered by massive immigration to the United States from North Africa, South and West Asia, and Central and South America. An echoing theme in this collection is the impact of the US experience in introducing the critical questions of inequalities in relation to gender. Similarly echoed is the profound disappointment in white feminist theory to truly respond to the specific cultural and class-constructed conditions of women of color lives. As Ijeoma A. describes it, consciousness about sexism assumed language and impetus in the United States, but it was Colonize This! draws a complex map of feminism, one that fights sexism and colonialism at once and recognizes genocide as a present and daily threat to our blood-nations. The feminism articulated in this collection requires cultural tradition and invention, negotiating multiple worlds; it is a theory and freedom practice which allow[s] women to retain their culture, to have pride in their traditions, and to still vocalize the gender issues of their community (Susan Muaddi Darraj). As Tanmeet Sethi writes, she is happy to wear the weight of [her] culture. She speaks of the gold jewelry inherited from family, but more so, she speaks of the profound preciousness of culture: It is heavy but not a burden.

As a new generation of women of color, these writers carry a new language to describe their passions, their poltica, their prayer, and their problems. In these narratives, Black feminism finds resonance in hip hop. Racism is now called driving while black and walking while brown (Pandora Leong) in the middle-class neighborhoods of Oregon. White male entitlement assumes a twenty-first-century look in blond dread-locked Indophiles studying Buddhism and getting down with the people (Bhavana Mody). Here, sexuality and pleasure are unabashedly integrated in a feminist of color analysis of survival and liberation, and queer familia is neither a question nor the subject of debate.

As a new generation of women of color, these writers carry a new language to describe their passions, their poltica, their prayer, and their problems.

Still, some things havent changed. Stereotyping does not change, as Alaska-born Asian-American Pandora Leong reminds us: I do not read Chinese or know anything about acupuncture.

and Stella Luna recounts her own struggle for self-reclamation as a mother with HIV, writing:

I realized that I was imprisoned not only by a disease but also by a culture that had trained me to be as clean and untouched in soul and body as the Virgen de Guadalupe. If I chose to live my life according to this structure, maybe I should just give up and die.

This is the real work of woman of color feminism: to resist acquiescence to fatality and guilt, to become warriors of conscience and action who resist death in all its myriad manifestations: poverty, cultural assimilation, child abuse, motherless mothering, gentrification, mental illness, welfare cuts, the prison system, racial profiling, immigrant and queer bashing, and invasion and imperialism at home and at war.

To fight any kind of war, Kahente Horn-Miller writes, quoting her elder, the biggest single requirement is FIGHTING SPIRIT. I thought much of this as I read Colonize This!, since this collection appears in print at a time of escalating worldwide warin Colombia, Afghanistan, Palestine. But is there ever a time of no-war for women of color? Is there ever a time when our home (our body, our land of origin) is not subject to violent occupation, violent invasion? If I retain any image to hold the heart-intention of this book, it is found in what Horn-Miller calls the necessity of the war dance. This book is one rite of passage, one ceremony of preparedness on the road to consciousness, on the the war path of greater empowerment.