Reading Post 10/06

This weeks reading of Fast speaking Women by Anne Waldman was written in 1^st person anaphoric narrative style of writing.  This piece was inspired by a Mazatec woman named Maria Sabina, who introduced psilocybin mushrooms (once used in healing ceremonies) to the Western culture. In this chant Waldman tries to embody ever aspect and type of woman at a time she says had an unprecedented wave of writers and artist who happen to be women.  Waldman writes, “ I’m a day woman, I’m a doll woman, I’m a sun woman, I’m a late afternoon woman”, I believe she is using a paradox of self-beings in an attempt to be uplifting and encouraging.

The second reading by Gloria Anzaldua called Borderlands/La Frontera The New Mestiza, is also written from a 1^st person point of view when she speaks of her Mexican heritage, her poetry and her writing coming from a Shamanic state.  She writes “I used to think I was going crazy or that I was having hallucinations, … writing evokes images from my unconscious.” Meaning writing comes from the imagination, some think you need words to begin to write but without imagination/thoughts poetry is impossible.

Both writers talked about using a hallucination and out of body experiences to create art/poetry Anzaldua (out-of-body experience) being Pre-Western invasion of the sacred practice and Waldman  (through Sabina) being the result of what this invasion has had in Western culture.  Waldman’s introduction to Sabina was through Folkway recording of Sabina chant-like Tantra evoked through the language of the saint children.  Her community later ostracized Sabina for allowing the US to intrude on a sacred ritual usually used to cure the sick or ill but instead was used to get high. The exposure of ethno poetic work of Maria Sabina’s Vida, Waldman says allowed her “to absorb the experience of her works in me, and put myself into her and then let the “text” emerge as a kind of intuitive “re-working.”  What was an enlightening/influence to Waldman was Anzaldua culture.  Anzaldua writes “performance of the shaman, my people, the Indians, did not split the artistic from the functional, the sacred from the secular, art from everyday life… Before the conquest, poets gathered to play music, dance, sing and read poetry in open-air places around Xochicuahuitl…” I believe she is trying to give a look to American culture of what the mushrooms where really used prior to Wesson and the young people with long hair.