Woman, native, other part 1

I have completed the first part of Trinh Minh-ha’s text, Woman, Native Other. The first two sections contained the conceptual framework for woman/women, language, writing, nativism, and science. Largely an anthropological perspective, this text begins to broaden the interdisciplinary purview of women’s history and the history of displacement. While I found these two chapters quite dense, there is a lively pulse to Minh-ha’s text. The narrative that is being written is also writing both the author and reader. Displacement is inevitable; however, I get the sense that the displacement is both the displacement of the native, woman, women, oppressed and the displacement of the one who has been managed by rationality, the masculine symbolic, and Father Culture.

In Commitment from the Mirror-Writing Box, echoes of French Feminist Theory [namely Kristeva and Cixous] are very present and help to buttress Minh-ha’s writing/feminine writing/woman writing. This chapter reveals the undercurrents [yes, she points to several] that oppress women’s ability to write: rationality, male dominance, and Father Culture are some to name. The following chapter on the Language of Nativism continues to unmask the binds of oppressions by considering the act and function of language. No longer can language be something that is passive; for Minh-ha, language is a birthing process, free from male/masculine rationality.

Writing is an act of envelopment; it is an act of labor and birth.