This week for my Children’s Literature ILC I read The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros and it was so beautiful! This book was a work of fiction based on the author’s life and students and people she worked with so it’s not creative nonfiction but the writing was beautiful.
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Sally, do you sometimes wish you didn’t have to go home? Do you wish your feet would one day keep walking and take you far away from Mango Street, far away and maybe your feet would stop in front of a house, a nice one with flowers and big windows and steps for you to climb up two by two upstairs to where a room is waiting for you. And if you opened the little window latch, and give it a shove, the windows would swing open, all the sky would come in. (Cisneros, 102)
There were sunflowers big as flowers on Mars and thick cockscombs bleeding the deep red fringe of theater curtains. There were dizzy bees and bow-tied fruit flies turning somersaults and humming in the air. Sweet sweet peach trees. Thorn roses and thistle and pears. Weeds like so many squinty-eyed stars and brush that made your ankles itch and itch until you washed with soap and water. There were big green apples hard as knees. (Cisneros, 116)
They came with the wind that blows in August, thin as a spider web and barely noticed. Three who did not seem to be related to anything but the moon. One with laughter like tin and one with eyes of a cat and one with hands like porcelain. The aunts, the three sisters, las comadres, they said. (Cisneros, 126)
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This book relates to our project because Sandra Cisneros grew up in Chicago then moved to Iowa City to go to college there. In this place, people treated her like an outsider in academia and in America and through a painful process had to unlearn what she knew about writing to discover her own voice. She went on a journey to write about subjects and in a writing style that she had never read before, from her perspective as a Mexican American woman.
Growing up, we were taught to write in and speak in the language of power and were criticized and made to feel other if that is not how we spoke or wrote. When we were starting the final project I heard comments from people and felt apprehensive because of the feeling to please the professor and write what other people want, not out of our writing style or voice. I want to write in my voice and be confident in what I write. Let’s write this seven page draft, woo!!!