Women And Writing Essays - Edwidge Danticat, Haitian People

Women And Writing Since the beginning of times, human beings have found various ways to express themselves and more specifically how to declare their feelings and emotions. We all know that art (in a general term) is supposed to be the tool used for expression. People from different communities, cultural backgrounds, and religions, have been appealed to manifest and share their uniqueness through art. Art, whether it was music, painting, sculpting or writing has been highly censured through time because of its contents of truth. The majorities of a society did not allow minorities to fully express themselves with fear of manifestations and revolts . Women, as a minority have fought to tell the truth. In order to understand better the meaning of Women's writing, we will first analyze the factors that pushed women to write, then we will go over the obstacles that women encountered and finally, we will discuss what the writers wanted to achieve through their writing. Factors that pushed women to write "There are writers who need to make sense of the world they live"(Dorothy Allison, Trash, p.19.) This sentence shows that the writer needed to write to see and understand herself through writing. This young white woman was living a life filled with alcohol and drug addiction, she tried to escape that trap by fooling herself and by rebuilding a total new idealistic image of her person (working as a social worker.) However, throughout her progression, she has been writing everything about herself on a yellow pad, whatever she would do, wherever she would be, those yellow pads were there, as a representation of her truth. She could fool herself, but not her yellow pads, her truth was written there. Allison as many women in the world has been trying to hide her suffering. Constantly fooling herself, she still had to yell out her truth, this, by spreading her pain on paper. However, the papers were taboo, just like someone would litter an embarrassing amount of trash. Allison had to take out her story and anger, even if they were full of shame. She could not live without writing, it was a matter of survival. This urge to write was shared by some other women writers. The search of an understanding was the factor that pushed Bell Hooks to write "I began to feel uncertain, displaced, estranged even, this was the condition of my spirit when I decided to be a writer, to seek for that light in words" (Bell Hooks, remembered ruptures, p.15) after that she declares "Searching for a space were writing could be understood, I asked for a diary" (Bell Hooks, remembered ruptures, p.15.) Writing was a way to understand herself a little like Dorothy Allison, a way to look at one's own person in a global manner, from a different angle, in other words, a way to be objective about oneself ?situation. Not only do women write for themselves with the thought that nobody can understand them, but they also write for others, a way to make a declaration to the world, a way to change the truth by saying it . In her writings, Sandra Cisneros implies that she wants to change the world. In her book "The House on Mango Street" she declares that she wants to leave the unpleasant neighborhood of Mango street, however, she says that she will come back, probably not physically, but at least trough her book. Coming back might mean that she wanted to do something to change Mango street, and that is trough her book, that's why she wrote it. Edwidge Danticat tells us how her desire to write was consuming her in a society where Women's writing was absolutely forbidden, something to do in the corner. Danticat learned how her female ancestors have been expressing themselves through nothing else than cooking, hair braiding or even carving potatoes. But she wanted to perpetuate the creativity of her ancestors, she just needed to do it through writing. "It was their whispers that pushed you, their murmurs over pots sizzling in your head. A thousand women urging you to speak through the blunt tip of your pencil." (Edwidge Danticat, Kirk? Krak! p.8.) By writing, she would have passed along a culture, just like braiding or cooking. However, her writing was threatening "the natural functioning" of a patriarchal society. Whether women write for themselves or for others, the main matter is that they write for an urge of understanding. There is a clear desire of comprehension. Obstacles that women encountered In her paper "A Room