Looking Ahead

I love it when cool artists go on to do great things for the world.  In a recent interview, Peter Gabriel described his human rights nonprofit, Witness, which provides video cameras, training, and exposure to human rights advocacy groups around the world.  Referring to torture in Chile, Gabriel explained the origins of the idea:

What I found especially shocking was that in many cases the abuses were denied despite written reports.  But whenever there was video evidence, the issues were kept alive.  So we decided to get cameras out to human rights activists.

As a writer with social justice concerns, I'm interested in this discrepancy.  I was struck recently by the fact that, while Taliban-led violence against women and girls in the Swat Valley has been making international news for months, it was a video of a teenage girl being publicly flogged that made people in Pakistan take to the streets in protest.
 
Gabriel's work, together with examples like this one, suggest that my fond notions about the political efficacy of the written word may be passing quickly into obsolescence.  So much for poets' being the unacknowledged legislators of the world; guerrilla filmmakers may have already inherited that mantle.  Maybe it's heresy for a writer to say so, but if I were in college today, I'd be trying to get into film school.  But my roots and my commitments are in the past and to the page.   

One social-justice writer who shook up my world in grad school was Gloria Anzaldúa, and I'm looking forward to attending the upcoming conference El Mundo Zurdo, the first international conference of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa, in San Antonio this May.  With my friends and UNL colleagues Amelia Montes and Ariana Vigil, I'll be on a panel about teaching Anzaldúa's knockout book Borderlands/La Frontera:  The New Mestiza in the Midwestern classroom.  It's a genre-rupturing classic of queer, Latina y Chicana, feminist, working-class studies that melds memoir, poetry, song, history, psychology, myth, and political theory.  I love it--my old black grad-school edition still has my gushy cursive on the title page ("The most incredible book I've ever read.  It speaks straight to me").  But passages like this one have a tendency to make some folks nervous:

When other races have given up their tongue, we've kept ours.  We know what it is to live under the hammer blow of the dominant norteamericano culture.  But more than we count the blows, we count the days the weeks the years the centuries the eons until the white laws and commerce and customs will rot in the deserts they've created, lie bleached.

Yeah, that makes folks nervous, all right, which can make it a tough book to teach.  (Try it in an all-male, all-white classroom sometime.  Mmm-hmm.) 

Teaching Borderlands is what Ariana, Amelia, and I will be talking about down in San Anto, and I'm looking forward to hanging out on the UTSA campus again.