Loving in the War Years (Cherrie Moraga)
This is an excerpt from the paper...
In her book Loving in the War Years, Cherrie Moraga recounts her experiences and develops ideas concerning her existence as a Chicana and a lesbian in American society today, and she does so through a variety of literary forms, including short stories, poems, personal reminiscences, and essays. She states in the introduction that one of her reasons for writing this book is to preserve her culture and her life in the face of a society that is overwhelming both. At the same time, she makes the effort to reconcile a basic human conflict, that between loyalty to family and loyalty to self. As a lesbian, Moraga feels herself to be an outsider both to her family and to her societies, meaning both her Chicano society and the larger American society in which it is embedded. Her writings challenge a number of assumptions regarding the meaning of difference and the role of separateness in society.Moraga notes that many of her students ask her what her parents think of her work: "It's as if they are hungry to know if it's possible to have both--your own life and the life of the familia" (iv). Moraga sees herself as an outsider not only because of her lesbianism but because it is the role of the writer to be an outsider. Her lesbianism also brought her to writing because her first poems were love poems. While both writing and lesbianism separate her from her family and society in so degree, she finds benefits in both: I know with my family that even as my writing functioned to s
. . .
e my skin, but the someone inside my skin. In fact, to a large degree, the real battle with such oppression, for all of us, begins under the skin (54).
For Moraga, her oppression can be turned into a positive force. She says that such oppression affects women more than men, and she makes this clear in her essay "My Brother's Sex Was White. Mine, Brown," where being male equates with being white, while being female equates with being a minority under the thumb of the majority. She also finds that it is important for her to embrace this very sense of difference and to adopt the being of her mother:
If I were to build my womanhood on this self-evident truth, it is the love of the Chicana, the love of myself as a Chicana I had to embrace, no white man (94).
Love for others begins with love for herself.
The conflict Moraga faces throughout her book remains the tension between the family and the self, coupled with a conflict between the family as an ideal and the family as a reality. The family shapes the future, but the family also encumbers that future with a variety of baggage. Moraga finds a social component in this as well as the Chicano family acts out certain roles in U.S. society based on expectations imposed by the majori
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Cherrie Moraga, Capitalist Patriarchy, Mine Brown, chicana lesbian, South Press, Loving War, existence chicana lesbian, , loving war, love chicana, american society, outsider lesbianism, existence chicana, chicano family, moraga notes,
Approximate Word count = 1223
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Loving in the War Years (Cherrie Moraga)
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
