Are we not all broken in one way or another?  Is it not true that from the moment we breach our mother's wombs we are broken?  Is not the harsh reality of leaving our water paradise to be thrust into the cold world not a breaking of sorts?

Mark W. Bundy, the author of "'Know Me Unbroken': Peeling Back the Silenced Rind of the Queer Mouth", wishes to know Gloria Anzaldua unbroken "just as Maria Lugones wants all muted women 'to be seen unbroken'" (qtd. in Bundy 139).  Bundy's article is lyrical/poetical at times with his use of imagery and rhythm.  But I keep asking myself what is my reaction to the piece?  What have I taken away from my reading? 

Language.

The beauty of language.  The ability of language to build bridges through its human use.  These are things that I absorbed in my reading.  When discussing Anzaldua's use of language, Bundy writes: "These ongoing harvestings of yours, Gloria.  Peeling it all back--culture, self, body, voice, sex, identity, meaning, realities, love, illness, recover" (140).  All things can be discovered and known through language.  Understanding can occur through language and its use. 

If we are silent in our anguish, our fear, our anger, our love, our passion, how will anyone understand?  We need to make room for everyone's language, not just mine, not just yours: and yet, mine and yours.  In the words of the Na'vi (Avatar) "I see you."  That is what we should all be striving for by listening to the language of others.

"Adjectives are a way of constraining and controlling.  'The more adjectives you have the tighter the box.'  The adjective before writer [ex: feminist writer, lesbian writer] marks, for us, the 'inferior' writer, that is, the writer who doesn't write like them [the dominant culture]" (Anzaldua 264).  Adjectives are labels, and in Gloria Anzaldua's article "To(o) Queer the Writer--Loca, escritora y chicana," she discusses, among other things, some of the implications of using labels. 

As I have advocated before, I do not like labels, and I avoid using them for myself at all cost.  But often, we are faced with situations where we are forced to use them to define ourselves.  I could say that I am an Appalachian woman (said correctly), or what some would consider a hillbilly.  And I would wear that identity proudly, but as Anzaldua notes, that would place me in a box, and a quite tight fitting box as well. 

So if I didn't like that label, I could say that I am a feminist, or a lesbian, or a rhetorician (I'm NOT a speller), or a middle-class white woman, or, or, or.  As you can see, the list could go on and on forever.  To chose any ONE of those labels and say this is me, would be to deny those other parts that are just as important and just as vital to who I am as any other label.  I would, in essence, be dividing and splitting my identity: who I really am.

Anzaldua drives this point home when she argues so eloquently that "identity is not a bunch of little cubbyholes stuffed respectively with intellect, race, sex, class, vocation, gender.  Identity flows between over, aspects of a person.  Identity is a river--a process.  Contained within the river is its identity, and it needs to flow, to change, to stay a river--if it stopped it would be a contained body of water such as a lake or a pond" (267).  I wonder what my first-year composition students would think of this quote.  The 18 years-old students who felt that by the time you enter college your identity should be pretty much set! 

Anzaldua discusses more than just labels and identity with in this article, which is apparently an excerpt from a larger piece, but it is her comments about identity that resonate the most with me.  Is there such a thing as a lesbian writer, or a queer one for that matter?  I don't know, but I do not wish to cling to just one small part of my identity and be labeled that way.