Writer's Creed

Writer's Creed

And this from an interview with Cecile Pineda:

“…I am viewed by people eager to claim me as a Latina writer,
and this acclamation certainly makes me proud. But it is not
entirely representative. My mother bore me. She was as mired
in the notions of the Old World, in its rationalities,
its explanations, its conventions, its certainties,
and its Protestantism, as my father was a product of his
Catholicism and of his own colonial past.

Perhaps in the tension between the two I managed to find a voice.
But more than more genetic or cultural considerations,
I claim necessity. I live in a world in which 40 men control
wealth equal to that of nearly 80 countries where,
to maintain their hegemony, countless acts of mayhem
and massacre must occur every day.

This is the reality that forms and re-forms my days as it does
those of all the people on this hapless planet.
I do not think anymore that writing—mine or another’s—can change
the world. Perhaps in their small way, writers can answer for
those who are voiceless in their extreme deprivation and
suffering. But at best, in the very smallest scheme,
writing can provide a moment of grace, both for her who writes
and him who reads, in a very dark world.”

Joy Harjo 2004

From The Bloomsbury Review Interview September/October 2004