Ellen Maxfield-Nagel is a writer, chef, skier, and mountain woman extraordinaire. She lives with her husband and her nephew among the moose, elk, and who knows what else in the mountains of Wyoming. ___________________________________________________________________________________________She 
She Says
“…si no hablas, no hablas.”
This is what a professor of mine once said to my Spanish oral proficiency class. In the context of trying to learn another language, she simply said that if you don’t talk (or practice speaking), you will not talk or speak. While that is self evident, those words jumped inside of me and shook me, terrified me, and I remember them still; I wrote them down in a small journal I brought to class. If I do not speak, I will not speak. If I do not have my say or speak what is in my heart for others to actually hear or read, I will never have spoken. To live my life out in silence…silence of body, of mind, of spirit; this would be a tomb.
There is a famous poem by Rosario Castellanos entitled, “Meditación en el umbral” (Meditation on the Threshold) in which a litany of women and their voices and their lives are held out as reminders that to be a woman that says or does in this life is dangerous. I wish I could share the poem with all of you, but I know most of you speak other languages besides Spanish (I am sure there must be good English translation out there). It’s a rending poem about the injustices women, who haven’t resigned themselves to absence, suffer for being and becoming. I’ll include it here, just in case you’d like to read it.
I am 37 and have carried my professor’s words with me now for probably a decade and a half. I still struggle to find this “other way of being” that Castellanos writes so poignantly about. Another way in which I listen to the truest part of myself, hear her out, let her tirades fly, feel her stabs of brokenness, rumble in her anger, recognize her tenderness, taste her salt, love her sparks, and then express, create, tell. Be. Perhaps it is not so important to whom the story would be of significance. Perhaps it is becoming of greatest importance to no one but me.
Hablo. Digo. Soy.
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Rosario Castellanos
Meditación en el umbral (en Otros poemas, 1972)
No, no es la solución
tirarse bajo un tren como la Ana de Tolstoi
ni apurar el arsénico de Madame Bovary
ni aguardar en los páramos de Ávila la visita
del ángel con venablo
antes de liarse el manto a la cabeza
y comenzar a actuar.
No concluir las leyes geométricas, contando
las vigas de la celda de castigo
como lo hizo Sor Juana. No es la solución
escribir, mientras llegan las visitas
en la sala de estar de la familia Austen
ni encerrarse en el ático
de alguna residencia de la Nueva Inglaterra
y soñar, con la Biblia de los Dickinson
debajo de una almohada de soltera.
Debe haber otro modo que no se llame Safo
ni Mesalina ni María Egipciaca
ni Magdalena ni Clemencia Isaura.
Otro modo de ser humano y libre.
Otro modo de ser.
Articles and Essays 