Summary: In Gloria Anzaldua's article, "Tlilli Tlapalli: The Path of the Red and Black Ink", she goes on to talk about how when she was a little girl, she had dealt with self imposed insomnia and would hide beneath the blankets as a child and would read stories. Her sister had begged that if she would not read stories to her, she would tell her mother and that is where she would begin to tell her stories and later on write them down and make the connection that writing co-existed within the night for her. She then goes on with the rest of the article to talk about Western Cultures and their writing styles because of the imagery they use within their work. Anzaldua says that "To write, to be a writer, I have to trust and believe in myself as a speaker, as a voice for the images. I have to believe that I can communicate with images and words and that I can do it well."(224) This says that she believes images are vital to create stories and other forms of work.
Synthesis: This article is like that of Sherman Alexie's article "The Joy of Reading and Writing" because each of the articles author's come from a Native American background and each of the author's explain their background and story within their articles. Both Anzaldua and Alexie make image connections with work where Alexie learned to read by using a Superman comic strip and Anzaldua used images to create her stories and thus began to write them on paper. When Anzaldua says "Picking out images from my soul's eye, fishing for the right words to recreate the images" (223), I go back to think on how this sentence ties with Alexie and how he learned to read because he had to use the images to understand what was going on inside of the comic.
Discussion Questions: Though I may not understand what the words have meant, my experience from reading this has changed for the fact that I don't understand what it meant. The words could have translated to something that was either important or could have some meaning to her article. I think that the words could have been something in her language that still had some contribution to imagery in words. The reason I believe she did that was to show how different cultures still use imagery in their texts and was showing this in that specific discourse community. Those passages show how she writes the way she does and this was a way of showing it to the audience reading this article.
Opinion: I thought that this article was beautifully written. Texts are more interesting in my perspective when you use your mind to create pictures. Stories are images in your head and I loved how she put that into the text of her writing. Her metaphors were beautiful and I respected how she portrayed writing should be and how she uses it in her writing. On page 222 she writes, "When I create stories in my head, that is, allow the voices and scenes to be projected in the inner screen of my mind, I 'trance'". These projections just prove that she is a very strong writer and it can be seen very well in her article and that is why I thought this article was one of the better readings we had for this class.
