Word: kingstone
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Next month, Harvard's Committee on Degrees in Women's Studies turns 10 years old. Students and faculty members in the concentration have planned a year-long series of events, which kicked off with the appearance of author Maxine Hong Kingston earlier this month...
...next hour and a half, the audience listened enthralled as Kingston discussed the issues of boundaries, homes and belonging, all the while embellishing her lecture with many quotes from her books. Her innovative literary forms, and her obvious attention to descriptive detail, make her works accessible and easily appreciated by all. The first excerpt she quoted opened with this passage from her most famous book, The Women Warrior: "In the midnight unsteadiness we were back at the laundry, and my mother was sitting on an orange crate sorting dirty clothes into mountains -- a sheet mountain, a white shirt mountain...
...addition, much could be inferred about the meaning behind her works by simply listening to Kingston recount her stories using her own intonations and gestures. When she assumed the voice of her mother, she spoke in a soft lilting voice that was vaguely reminiscent of Mia Farrow: "I can't stop working. When I stop working, I hurt. My head, my back, my legs hurt. I get dizzy. I can't stop." However, in speaking as her younger alterego, Kingston acquired an oft-frustrated voice, touched with a confused innocence: "I don't want to hear Wino Ghosts and Hobo...
...Kingston's lecture was not composed of solely reading through her works, however. Whether explaining her books in more detail, or wandering through territory yet unwritten, her topics varied from Hawaiian mythology to redefining homelands and boundaries for immigrants. She covered the Vietnam war, and the reactions of Asian-American soldiers when faced with an enemy distinguished by their Asian ethnicity. She addressed, in personal and general terms, the tension created within personal ideologies when great forces such as state and ethnicity are obscured. Her subjects were not solely rooted in Asian-American culture; she repeatedly emphasized complete multiculturism...
...introduction of Maxine Hong Kingston, Susan R. Suleiman, professor of Romance and comparative Literature, correctly referred to Kingston as a "pioneer in the 'ethnic American' kind of writing; her work is truly 'between borders.'" Kingston's manner communicated the gentle vibrancy of a woman whose literature crosses the boundaries of fact and fantasy, mother and daughter, immigrant and native. Her magnificent lecture truly displayed a writer and her work at their best...