1. Wilson, Lorde, Anzaldua, Alexie
…and the 20th Century

2. What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
Like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Langston Hughes 1951

3. August Wilson

4. African American Theater
the color line
Lorraine Hansberry
A Raisin In The Sun
Broadway, 1959
Chicago’s Woodlawn

5. How am I to live?
LYONS: I know I got to eat. But I got to live too. I need something that gonna help me to get out of the bed in the morning. Make me feel like I belong in the world. I don’t bother nobody. I just stay with my music cause that’s the only way I can find to live I the world. Otherwise there ain’t no telling what I might do. Now I don’t come criticizing you and how you live. I just come by to ask you for ten dollars. I don’t wanna hear all that about how I live.
TROY: Boy, your mama did a hell of a job raising you.
LYONS: You can’t change me, Pop. I’m thirty-four years old. If you wanted to change me, you should have been there when I was growing up…

6. Audre Lorde “A war against the tyrannies of silence”
“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of it being bruised or misunderstood. [I have come to believe] that the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.” Transformations of Silence
“It is not difference that immobilizes us, but silence.”
Audre Lorde
Sister Outsider - (reprint 2007)
The Black Unicorn
Our Dead Behind Us

7. “Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out.”
Overcoming the Tradition of Silence.
“Pocho, cultural traitor, you’re speaking the oppressor’s language by speaking English, you’re ruining the Spanish language,” I have been accused by various Latinos and Latinas. Chicano Spanish is considered by the purist and by most Latinos deficient, a mutilation of Spanish.”
p. 81
Gloria Anzaldúa

8. Sherman Alexie From the Norton: “I’m a rez kid who’s gone urban.”
Native Americans “have a way of surviving. But it’s almost like Indians can easily survive the big stuff. Mass murder, loss of language and land rights. It’ the small things that hurt the most. The white waitress who wouldn’t take an order, Tonto, the Washington Redskins.”

9. ways of fighting the silences
Alexie: “the eternal football game”
I open the door and invite the wind inside
They can pay for the ashes, but not the man
“You think about things too much,” Victor said. “It’s just supposed to be fun…”
ways of fighting the silences

10. “…we tell ourselves stories in order to live…” —Joan Didion
“We are all given one thing by which our lives are measured, one determination. Mine are the stories which can change or not change the world. My father, he died on Okinawa in World War II, died fighting for this country, which had tried to kill him for years. My mother, she died giving birth to me, died while I was still inside her. She pushed me out into the world with her last breath. I have no brothers or sisters. I have only my stories which came to me before I even had words to speak. I learned a thousand stories before I took my first thousand steps. They are all I have. It’s all I can do.” …
So Victor drove his father’s pickup toward home while Thomas went into his house, closed the door behind him, and heard a new story come to him in the silence afterwards.”
—Sherman Alexie, 1993