While reading Loving in the War Years, I especially resonated with the section titled "Traitor Begets Traitor," on page 90. "Chicanas begin to turn our backs on each other either to gain male approval or to avoid being sexually stigmatized by men..." While this seems, on the surface, to be specific to Chicana women, and more specifically, non-heterosexual Chicana women, what woman doesn't this apply to??? Women learn early, as girls, to turn our backs on each other to gain male approval. We push away friends, become people we don't recognize, do whatever we have to do to gain the approval of a man. Does this occur for women pursuing other women, as well, or is this something we do just for men? I tend to think it is probably an occurrence across the spectrum. To give up a piece of oneself, in giving up our friends, the women who are our allies, for this piece of ass.
In this way that we give up a piece of ourselves, are we losing part of our voice? I do not know what it is to be a part of a culture who has had their language taken from them. But can this be compared to women, or really anyone who has ever been a victim of any kind of abuse or neglect, and the piece of you that you lose to someone who chose to take it? Does this voice of your people before you compare to the voice you yourself once had but have lost? Can that voice you lost as a victim of some kind of abuse be compared to the voice lost as someone who has moved to another country, done everything they felt they needed to do to assimilate (including give up her language), only to become an old woman, dependent on men who treat you as though you no longer matter? Who decides which of these scenarios counts the most?
As I read these pieces, I couldn't help but think about what voices I have lost over the years. I say voices deliberately, as opposed to voice, because I believe we all have multiple voices, which grow and shrink and sometimes disappear altogether as others become more prominent as our days go by. I have, of course, lost the voice I had as a child. The voice which allows you to ask silly questions, to say silly things, and not be looked down upon. As we "grow up," that voice disappears. What about the voice I had before the rape? Who was I then? Did I sound different? Did my vowels and consonants roll off the same? I don't know. I don't remember that person. Now, the voice of a mother with two kids, a wife, whose voice is this I hear? Have I completely lost the voice of the woman I was before, when I got to care only of myself? Will that voice come back one day?
Where did those voices go? Did the person who took it from me become the owner of that voice? Will they give it to someone else, or let it die? Do they realize that they have that voice now? Do their words ever feel funny on their tongue, but they don't know why?
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