“…a woman who writes has power. And a woman with power is feared.”

Gloria Anzaldúa (1942 -2004)

This quote is from Gloria Anzaldúa’s essay “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers,” a call to action to women of color to bring writing into their lives, to share their voices and their stories, to engage in a form of literary activism. The essay was originally published in the anthology This Bridge Called My Back, that Anzaldúa co-edited with Cherrie Moraga.

As Alexandra Barraza writes in Fem, UCLA’s feminist magazine, “The novelty of this work was its direct confrontation of the intersectional oppression faced by queer womxn of color, and the prevalence of such oppression within feminist and Chicano activist movements of the time. This book was the first of Anzaldúa’s many works, culminating in a life of critical theory analyzing race, feminism and queer and Xicanx experiences.”

Anzaldúa begins the essay:

…the dangers we face as women writers of color are not the same as those of white women though we have many in common. We don’t have as much to lose – we never had any privileges. I wanted to call the dangers “obstacles” but that would be a kind of lying. We can’t transcend the dangers, can’t rise above them. We must go through them and hope we won’t have to repeat the performance.

Growing up in the border state of Texas, living a multitude of identities, Anzaldúa advocated for “a consciousness of the Borderlands,” as she wrote in her seminal book Borderlands/La Frontera. Anzaldúa understood that words, and writing, carried power.

Writing is dangerous because we are afraid of what the writing reveals: the fears, the angers, the strengths of a woman under a triple or quadruple oppression. Yet in that very act lies our survival because a woman who writes has power. And a woman with power is feared.

She understood the link between language and identity, arguing strongly against linguistic terrorism. “So, if you really want to hurt me, talk badly about my language. I am my language,” she wrote in the essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.”

Language, and in turn the words that shape them, are a source of power, and Anzaldúa’s challenge to her fellow women of color around the globe was this:

Write with your eyes like painters, with your ears like musicians, with your feet like dancers. You are the truthsayer with quill and torch. Write with your tongues of fire. Don’t let the pen banish you from yourself. Don’t let the ink coagulate in your pens. Don’t let the censor snuff out the spark, nor the gags muffle your voice. Put your shit on the paper. We are not reconciled to the oppressors who whet their howl.

This papercut and profile are a part of the Women’s Wisdom Project, a project focused on showcasing the wisdom of inspiring, insightful women by making 100 papercut portraits.