Feminism

"THE SECRET LANGUAGE"

BY :Maria Luisa B. Aguilar-Carino

I have learned your speech,

Fair stranger; for you

I have oiled my hair

And coiled it tight

Into a braid as thick

And beautiful as the serpent

In your story of Eden.

For you, I have covered

My breasts and hidden,

Among the folds of my surrendered

Inheritance, the beads

I have worn since girlhood.



It is fifty years now

Since the day my father

Took me to the school in Bua,

A headman's terrified

Peace-gift.  In the doorway,

The teacher stood, her hair

The bleached color of corn,

Watching with bird-eyes.



Now, I am Christina.

I am told I can make lace

Fine enough to lay upon the altar

Of a cathedral in Europe.

But this is a place

That I will never see.



I cook for tourists at an inn;

They praise my lemon pie

And my English, which they say

Is faultless.  I smile

And look past the window,

Imagining father's and grandfather's cattle

Grazing by the smoke trees.

But it is evening, and these

Are ghosts.

In the night,

When I am alone at last,

I lie uncorseted

Upon the iron bed,

Composing my lost beads

Over my chest, dreaming back

Each flecked and opalescent

Color, crooning the names,

Along with mine:

Binaay, Binaay.

ANALYSIS

At the outset, it needs to be said that courses in creative writing and in literature are not exactly dissimilar things: both locate the literary text—poetic, fictional, dramatic—at the center of their attentions, even as the privileged perspectives between them are admittedly different.

A creative writing class, simply because it intends to make writers out of its students, looks at texts from the vantage-point of their production. In other words, as a discipline creative writing, by its very nature, aims at an awareness of litera­ture as a species of artistry, an imaginative process whose workings can to a large extent be identified and discussed, duplicated.

On the other hand, a literature class can and does, depending on the persuasion of the teacher or perhaps even the student herself, choose to look at a literary text's meaningfulness in light of any number of concerns: its formal attributes, its writer's life and times, the reading practices of its intended and/or apparent audience, its artfulness, its thematic affiliations, the students' impressions or subjective "feelings" about it, etc.

Here we can see, upon closer scrutiny, a basic and even antago­nistic divergence of interests presenting itself: while a creative writing class encourages students to revise the literary texts they themselves create, a literature class invariably treats the text as a kind of "self-contained" object of study, one which doesn't need to be "improved," since the assumption behind its being read and discussed at all is that precisely it is already "good" anyway, or at least it already finds itself falling within the teacher's own idea of a "canon."

I do not, however, wish my lecture to get embroiled in what is always a torturous and finally futile subject—namely, the question of the "Canon." What I wish to propose is this: the teaching of literature can be greatly enhanced by employing certain creative writing techniques and strategies. In particular, I am interested in advancing the old argument that creation is the highest form of appreciation.