Blend New with the Old

Blend   New with the Old

So unfortunately I did not read Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” in full depth, so I had no idea what to do this post on. I decided to go back to the “Borderlands”, and compare it to Hak Kyung Cha,“Dictee”. I first should point out I have not read “Dictee” all the way through only about half way. But anyways I noticed something small but important that both of these texts have in common. There use of no punctuation. We will begin with Gloria Anzaldua, “Borderlands” in the chapter of ‘The Coatlicue State’ on pages 63 and 65.The First page is more like poetry and can get away with it without no one realizing what the author is doing, while the second is talking about ‘she’ and it’s so ambiguous, it could be ‘she’ the writer, the women, the land, or the Spanish language.

            Similarly in “Dictee” you can see this on page 15, number 5, with the same ambiguous ‘she’. It has almost the same content, the same feel, and the same rhythm. Instead of using the punctuation, they instead use space. Which make me think just by doing so, it put language on its side. It dismisses the rules of language. Maybe even the male dominance in language. Anzaldua state that ‘language is the male discourse’ (p76), which can be seen in the text and the use of not using punctuation is a way of taking some authority of what is being written and the language itself.

            However, there are some differences in these two texts. First in “Borderlands”, the use of apostrophe can be seen thought out this text. Now thinking about it, the use of apostrophe is to combine two words or have a possession. Which in fact, she wants to be seen in this book. She wants to combine things, people, land, and also show what is being possessed or who. In Cha work she has single period in her piece. I might be stretching it but it could mean the period that women have or an important period of time. She also goes further than Anazalua with the use of punctuation or the unused punctuation. On the very first page she spells out the punctuation. That kind of displaces the reader. Spelling the symbol out, is almost like taking control of it, and making it more feminine, and dismisses the rules.

            I can now understand why this type of from is so sparse in these two books. It is because it is hard to not do something you have been taught your whole life. We are just used to using punctuation. By them not using it takes a lot of will power and deleting. It is actually pretty powerful once the reader or I can absorb what and why they did this.