Dialogue is the locale where both tension and connection can be present simultaneously; it is the site for both struggle and love.

-Layli Phillips, The Womanist Reader

As a writer, I have thought a lot about “community” and what it means.  I am often hyper-aware of my identities as I write: female, gay, Cuban-American, daughter of exiles. These identities have informed, situated, and contextualized my creative work.  However, at times it has meant isolating parts of myself and the literary community seemed to reinforce that. As a result, a few years ago when I was in college and had become very interested in women’s studies in particular, I stopped writing for a short time and turned my attention to yoga, meditation, and Buddhism. In the texts I studied, I was being challenged to think about impermanence, emptiness, non-duality, things we rarely discussed in academia but which had always concerned me. I suspected this “pause” would change my view of and approach to making art.

It was by examining the ways in which the principles of womanism intersect with yogic philosophy and practice that I began to discover new ways of engaging the body. In The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: “The word yoga (union) implies duality (as in the joining of two things or principles); the result of yoga is the nondual state.” This became a point of entry back into my writing.  I wanted to explore the personal/political/poetic while moving towards embodiment as a writer. I had decided to become a yoga instructor and one of the phrases I learned was “yield before push.” This seemed to be directly related to creative work. Observe first, then articulate. Let the work (like the breath) guide and support you.

Cover for Becoming: Young Ideas on Gender, Identity, and Sexuality

So what does it mean to write about race, gender, class, sexuality and stay grounded in the body, in one’s desire for psychic/spiritual health? How can a literary community support this? During and after college I did work within the queer community (publishing work in Becoming: Young Ideas on Gender, Identity, and Sexuality edited by Diane Anderson-Minshall (Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris Press, 2004) and Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology edited by Amy Sonnie (Los Angeles, CA: Alyson Publications, 2000). I have come to believe that identity as we define it, the binaries—gay/straight, black/white, male/female—matter and they also don’t matter. The personal narratives associated with these identities certainly matter but the classifications don’t. The classifications marginalize (and isolate) us and I often explore this question of marginality within the work. In this way, what is under the surface of the work becomes part of the work. As I reveal to a reader my relationship to identity, I also reveal it to myself. It is often on the page that these discoveries are made.

The knowledge that arises from this exploration can move us from complacency to application, for if we desire to engage with the world that sustains our creativity we must not be satisfied with art for art’s sake. In The Womanist Reader, Layli Phillips describes a “spiritualized politics… rooted in the conviction that … the transcendental or metaphysical dimension of life enhance and even undergird political action.” She adds that, “Physical healing is integral to social change for a variety of reasons.  Bodily well-being is the foundation for other forms of well-being…”

This is reminiscent of Audre Lorde’s, The Uses of the Erotic. She writes, “When we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us … Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.”

Cover for Audre Lorde’s, The Uses of the Erotic

Much to my surprise, it is in graduate school that I have found a literary community that is not only supportive but that encourages me to take risks in my work. I was apprehensive when I began the MFA at Hunter College; I imagined it would be incongruous with my goals toward embodied practice. Surely I would forget the body, I thought, as I re-entered academia. But I had been actively seeking out a community of like-minded thinkers, a group of individuals interested in writing, and I remained open. I’m now a year in. The group is predominantly women but diverse in terms of age, race, and class. We are all writing nonfiction, focusing on memoir. We are all writing our lives, personal narratives that require us not only to examine identity, but also what that means and how it intersects with the body and with history.

I have also worked collaboratively with a photographer, Lisa Ross, who has been making work in Northwest China for the past 7 years, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The process teaches me many things, including the importance of working in stages, in fragments, and also how all art-making is contingent upon one’s relationship to relationship. We become involved in creative work because we are interested in relating to our subject(s), exploring what it means to be separate from that which we are observing.

What emerges from this kind of “spiritualized politics” that Layli Phillips has described is that the physical and metaphysical co-exist and contextualize each other. By contemplating this possibility as we write we allow the critical mind, the corporal body, and the sacred to mix in ways that bridge theory and practice. For me, identity shifts from a fixed to a fluid thing as I move through it in my work. My work has appeared in various publications interested specifically in issues of identity. I still struggle at times with the notion of the “mainstream,” how my work relates or does not relate to the canon. But because I am a writer interested in the body and therefore in identity, my work will continue to find its home within literary communities that engage with issues of race, class, gender, sexuality and spirituality.

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Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984.

Phillips, Layli. The Womanist Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.