Need

For a while now I've been trying to say why I write, now that this writing is coming to fruition, why I am so urgent about being published, about not putting down the pen. But I have not had the words merely because I have not had the rage.

There is a different kind of rage than the small minded anger that fuels us for a season. There is an inherited, urgent rage when one sees that something must be done, and that it is left to us to do that something. Or, at least, part of the something. So, I read the prophets who raged on before me. Most of them women, many of them women of color who know there is much left to be done.

I write to record what other erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you. To become more intimate with myself and you.

It's too easy, blaming all on the white man or white feminists or society or on our parents. What we say and what we do ultimately comes back to us, so let us own our responsibility, place it in our hands and carry it with dignity and strength. no one's going to do my shitwork, I pick up after myself.

-- Gloria Anzaldua