Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza / Fast Speaking Woman

Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and Anne Waldman’s Fast Speaking Woman, have some similarities when it comes to the style of writing and the process of writing. 

Gloria Anzaldua starts off by saying that she started to write when she was young and realized that she was particularly good at making up stories for her little sister every night before going to bed, and decided to put those stories on paper. In the excerpt, Anzaldua talks about the process of writing, and how she “hallucinates” or pictures what her story is going to be about before she even starts to write it. I think that this is important for all writers because it gives them a chance to use their imagination. Anzaldua says, “To facilitate the “movies” with soundtracks, I need to be alone, or in a sensory-deprived state. I plug up my ears with wax, put on my black cloth eye-shadow, lie horizontal and unmoving, in a state between sleep and waking, mind and body locked in my fantasy. I am held prisoner. My body is experiencing events.”(187) This trance that the author goes through is called the Shamanic State, and it is her way of writing stories. 

In Fast Speaking Woman, Anne Waldman talks about women and society. I feel like she puts herself in other women’s shoes in order to define herself as well. In the excerpt, Waldman says “ I had in my head that I would do a list-chant naming all the kinds of women there are to be, interweaving personal details with all the energetic adjectives I could conjure up to make the chant speak of/to/for “everywomen.” (174) She writes her story in chant form, and also makes the “I” in her story speak for every woman. Walkman uses these chants and description to sort of empower woman all over the world. 

Nonetheless, both stories illustrate a slightly different approach to writing poetry. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and Fast Speaking Woman both demonstrate that in order for both authors to write their stories, they “escape from their own bodies” wether it is with hallucinations or using themselves to speak for others as well.