Since I’m dealing with hybrid literacy projects in my thesis work, I’m familiar with the Anzaldua piece “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” yet every time I come back to it, I’m struck by the power of her language.  She writes, “How do you tame a wild tongue, train it to be quiet, how do bridle and saddle it?  How do you make it lie down?” (2947).

With regard to the work that I do at Turning Point Girls House, I think of how many times the girls are told not to say something—I cringe at the time when I have had to, by necessity for the therapeutic effect of the program, encourage the omission of work that contributes to their acting out.  We are told to encourage them to reflect on their experience rather than valorize it, especially when they are speaking about gang activity or graphic violence.  I wonder, though, how do we negotiate between honoring home discourse and censorship when it works toward defining authorship and identity?

 For instance, there is a young woman in the program who is a prolific writer.  Last week she handed me an entire notebook filled with poetry and prose about her life:  the trauma, the victimization, the survival guilt.  She spends a lot of time reflecting (privileged position) on her family, all of whom identify as part of the juggalo community, a community which has been labeled as excessively violent and a facet of gang culture.  Still, because of her inclusion as member of juggalo/juggalette discourse, she often transitions between the space of identifying as member and owning the benefits of membership (security, inclusion, support) and denying aspects of the culture that has led to her own trauma (sexual violence, domestic violence, drug culture).  So in some ways, it seems that through her writing she is writing an identity, perhaps a hybrid identity, that works through her pain and speaks back to crucial critical issues.

 How do I ethically tell her that she can’t write this?