Culture

"I often find that the biggest thing tying me to some sort of existence on this planet is my will to break my generational curse"- Talia Smith, Yung Lords CEO

Yung Lords takes a visually poetic approach to serious themes such as the parasitic relationship that many capitalists structures and institutions have with young people, and Black women in particular. It's after effects include generational trauma, and years of unbreakable cyclical oppression. An illustration of an initialized robbing of innocence.

Short Film Directed and Edited By: Talia Smith

Short Film Produced by: Yung Lords Media

Accompanied Personal Essay+Words by: Talia Smith

Footage: Archival/ Public Domain Footage

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I Leave The Table Like a Man

By: Talia Smith

“without putting back the chair or picking up the plate...”- Esperanza, The House On Mango Street.

I’ve never cried over a man. But I have cried on behalf of many good women that have cried over bad men. Only by proxy.  A sadness that was surrogated and c-sectioned out of me. And me, I am a woman who has always craved the same power as a man. And that is why I can not submit to love, or anything of any kind. 
Sandra Cisneros understands this. She understands this to be an important part of every brown and black woman's life,that is, what it is to live on the cusps. Cisneros paints still life of inner city childhood, adolescence and imagination. A written and prosey still-life fixed right at the perfect moment, scenes that in today’s world, would maybe be called screenshots. 

She tells the story of Esperanza who is scared she will end up like her grandmother who  “looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow”, and wonders if “she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn’t be all the things she wanted to be.” Esperanza. “I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window.” Esperanza who wonders why Sire’s girlfriend can not tie her shoes, and why Sire says he likes Lois more because she lets him get off his bike, to tie her laces for her.

All Cisneros collections, writings, and published works laminate what it is to be a 3rd world writer. 3rd world writers, yes, that is what they’ll call us. The women who find the time to write between walks to school, and night classes, then work. Women who still find time to touch the pad after they’ve had their first child at 17 and  the father of their child was swallowed by nighttime and never came back. Women who still write in the darkness, away from the chaos and machiamiso that may strike them at any moment. Women like me who must walk to the coffee shops and parks to write, because they can not focus amidst the silence of a haven like the library, women who need a little noise and disorder that reminds them of home to write. 3rd world writers, we are women of color who enter the literary world not as white men, or a white woman, or even as black men. And that is what make us dangerous. We enter at intersections that do not give us the one thing we need,the one luxury we can not afford amongst our literary peers, time. Time to be creative, time to develop and say something a loud, loud enough to be heard, because there is always something else left to do.

Cisneros shows us these are not dangerous feats or even obstacles to break down and crush. Rather to embrace, and feel, and write through, and write with- because white men have spent decades re-working, revising,  and narrating our experiences into stories and poems that allow them to save the day.  

As Gloria Anzaldua puts it, the Third World writer can not allow herself to be tokenized.  “We must make our own writing that of Third World women the first priority. We cannot educate white women and take them by the hand. Most of us are willing to help but we can’t do the homework for her. That’s an energy drain. More times than we can remember, Nellie Wong, Asian American feminist writer, has been called by the white women wanting a list of Asian American women who can give readings or workshops. We are in danger of being reduced to purveyors of resource lists.”

Bucking any opportunity to be a “resource list” writer, Cisneros instead tells the stories of being young and not wanting to inherit sadness. Stories of dreaming of going far far away to write in a little house, and not with any man or any dog that we have been told to love and want with age, but just you and your own silence and your mounds of books and your own thoughts that you are in love with. Cisneros tells what it is to look around a neighborhood that has become a matriarchy built on sadness,  to dream to rebel against it and become something dangerous like a writer, or in my case, a journalist.  Stories of women who look men who whistle and say they would die for them in the eyes and say fuck off, so beautifully.I am a woman who does not tolerate much of anything from men, or anyone, largely because I have read Sandra Cisneros when it was crucial to read it. 

They are stories of young women who want to grow up to become independent and autonomous, in the way the world has told young men they are independent and autonomous. Of not needing a man, or any human being, outside of yourself. Stories that tell you, you can fall in love with a man and still not need him, or maybe even want him in the end, and that does not didact a single drop from one's own femininity.  

 Even larger than that, they are a stories of what happens to the third world writer after adolescence. When we leave for college. When we sit on their roommate-shared sofas and couches, and must join in on non-BIPOC peers conversations, that we can relate to only through what we have heard and seen on television. The 3rd world woman who dances underneath the fire hydrant, floats past men on the street that tell them they are beautiful with a smile that sags into their skin and mouth like a bag of quarters. A woman who stares straight and floats pass men that outline her body with their eyes and make sounds they wouldn’t want their daughter to hear.Women who can’t find time for bar room conversation or bar room visits or time for the bottle and late nights, because that is not what we left home intended to do. 

For me, it is too late to turn around. After I have realized, I can change the world from my laptop. I have begun my own counter culture. Created my own machismo.  “I have begun my own quiet war. Simple. Sure. I am the one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate.”

It seems there is a lot that goes into being a strong woman, and most times they are just found in the planeness of everyday life. Walking to the store, running home before the street lights go off, feeling out of place, wanting to be alone, sometimes wanting to be loved. Like fireflies,  Cisneros picks them all away, gathers them from the darkness and rolls them onto the page.