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STANDARDS feature | fiction | first person | poetry | reviews | visual arts |
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STANDARDS feature | fiction | first person | poetry | reviews | visual arts |
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Featured Authors
Gloria Anzaldúa
Elizabeth Fischer
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First Person: Bare
Nonfiction Narratives
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Original Photograph © 2005 by Lenni J. Calipo Graphical rendering © 2005 by Emmanuela Copal de León |
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an interview with Gloria Anzaldúa |
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. One way women have had of coping is to withdraw - to go into your own space, to be depressed. Instead of attacking and venting anger, you turn it inward, against yourself, so that you get to feeling really depressed: You're not good enough; you fucked up . . . You say all these bad things to yourself. It's like beating, self-abuse. You're beating on yourself with these words and these messages that there's something wrong with you, because you didn't complete this or that task; and look at you, you don't have a relationship; or, look at you, you messed up on your relationship. Whatever it is that brings the depression, you use those things to hit yourself over the head and your body, so that if you're depressed two weeks or three weeks or six months or six years, it's a constant abuse of self, a violence against the self. Some days, it's easier to take than somebody else abusing you, so what you do is you jump in and abuse yourself, before somebody else can do it. |
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by Elizabeth Fischer |
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the thing i have been wanting to do is a thing my father wanted to do but then he really didn't have the money to do and then he croaked, oh you know. fathers do that, they die. the thing he wanted to do was to go up into the mountains of transylvania which is not really hungary but romania although it was the oldest part of hungary until it got snatched in some battle and all the hungarians are still real pissed about that and make lots irate parlamentarian speeches about it but the romanians just go, haha, fuck you. so there it sits, the oldest part of hungary, in the middle of romania, and the romanians really hate all the people who live there, and the people who live there really hate the romanians. the usual shit. the thing my father wanted to do was to go up into the mountains and find a little village where a man lives, well, he too might have croaked by now, cause now he'd be very old. this man saved his life during ww2. as he told it, the family legend, there he was at the front, having been taken there by the hungarian army which was allied to germany, to essentially make croak digging ditches as they would do to young men of his racial/ religious/ whatever persuasion. and as he was vigourously being encouraged into the aforementioned state of non-being by an enthusiastic application of beating, a giant in the uniform of the hungarian transylvanian regiment appeared. after a minute or so of watching the festivities, he turned to the other army guys and said, well, why don't you just give me that there jew and i'll take care of it. the other army guys laughed, said sure. so the giant grabbed my father and slung him over his shoulder and walked off with him towards the woods. and kept walking. and then he nursed my father back to health and hid him in a village until the end of the war. this is how my father survived the war. his wife and kid and parents and brothers got croaked, though. anyways, as i said, he always wanted to go find the giant transylvanian, the family legend. i have his name and the name of his village in the mountains. konya antal from zagony. i have been thinking about it for a while. to go there and make a little miracle or something. the guys might be dead now but his family will still be in the village, people there stick around. |
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