Judith Ortiz Cofer Quotes

one year I was teaching world literary masterpieces, and I was beginning to feel frustrated because everybody had a speaking part except the women. Salome was the one who, shall we say, changed the life of John the Baptist, but she didn't get to speak. Neither did Judith. And why? How did they feel? I wanted to know.

In the United States, I was considered a Puertorriqueña; on the island, I was considered a little gringita.

Every great book contains matter that could be termed poetry. The Bible is a perfect example. So poetry, even if it's not what I'm doing, is my teacher.

for two years the manuscript was circulating around New York, and my agent was getting rejections like, "It's beautifully written, but who wants to read about poor Puerto Ricans?”

in my role as a teacher, I know who I am. But, of course, I look very Latina; I have an accent, and sometimes when I go places, people don't automatically assume, "Oh, an American citizen, probably an English professor." The first question is, "Where are you from?" And they're not satisfied if I say, "Athens, Georgia." That happens with great frequency.

One of my favorite quotations from Emily Dickinson is: "Tell truth / But tell it slant."

I feel the poet does write on memory but... Wasn't it Aristotle who said the historian keeps the factual record of mankind and the poet writes the emotional history of mankind? I think you can read a history of Vietnam and know that so many men under the age of twenty were killed, or you can read Tim O'Brien and you can "feel" those deaths. O'Brien is preserving the emotional history of Vietnam. A historian is preserving the facts.

Poetry teaches us how to deal with the economy of language, the concentration of language, the cautious use of metaphor.

Mixed cultural signals have perpetuated certain stereotypes-for example, that of the Hispanic woman as the "Hot Tamale" or sexual firebrand. It is a one-dimensional view that the media have found easy to promote. In their special vocabulary, advertisers have designated "sizzling" and "smoldering" as the adjectives of choice for describing not only the foods but also the women of Latin America. From conversations in my house, I recall hearing about the harassment that Puerto Rican women endured in factories where the "bossmen" talked to them as if sexual innuendo was all they understood, and worse, often gave them the choice of submitting to advances or being fired.

When you're an exotic and no threat, you're an interesting thing to have around; when there's a lot of you and you pose a problem, like "we don't want you in our neighborhood" or that sort of thing, the prejudice level rises. That's the basic thing I've learned in my lifetime.

the poem I wrote for my daughter is a warning that to deny your heritage is to deny half of your humanity.

I was born a white girl in Puerto Rico but became a brown girl when I came to live in the United States.

God is supposed to understand all languages. But it's like "silent dancing"-if everyone is acting like they don't understand you when you don't speak the language of the mainstream,

No matter how American I may feel-and I feel that culturally I'm more an American woman than a Puerto Rican woman, just having lived in this country for so long-I'm always reminded that people do not see me that way. And basically you are really not only a product of who you think you are but of how other people see you. So if you always have to trace your ancestry for other people, then you're not exactly feeling like part of the group. I don't see that as a problem, but I also see it as determining or defining the new race issue in the United States. When the Germans and the Irish first started coming to the United States, for one generation people asked about their accents. The next generation blended in. There is no way that I'm ever going to blend in, even if I start speaking English with a southern accent. So the color issue is always present there, for Asian Americans, for Native Americans, for blacks, for Latinos-there is no blending in, no melting into the melting pot.

I don't write poems that address the social issues in a very overt or propaganda-driven way, but I feel every poem that I write is political because if you write and you're engaged with life, where you write about people who suffer as a result of societal problems, then in fact it is political.