And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained. And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the shared identity and resilience of a group seen as marginalized, valuing their culture and experiences over societal norms.
In this quote, Dorothy Allison articulates the collective identity of displaced individuals, particularly from working-class backgrounds, who find strength and solace in their shared cultural heritage. She emphasizes the importance of storytelling, humor, and stubbornness as core values that define their experience, indicating a deep pride in their roots while also warning against the dismissal of their struggles and emotions. This mirrors a broader commentary on social divisions and resilience in the face of adversity.
In practice
In a speech about cultural pride at a community gathering.
Hunger makes you restless. you dream about food - not just any food, but perfect food, the best food, magical meals, famous and awe-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother's milk singing to your bloodstream.
Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.
I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.
I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself.
There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto-God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.
Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.
There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense.
Not only must we be good, but we must also be good for something.
The villany you teach me I shall execute; and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
There is no beauty in the finest cloth if it makes hunger and unhappiness.
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. A handsome woman talks nonsense, you listen and hear not nonsense but cleverness. She says and does horrid things, and you see only charm. And if a handsome woman does not say stupid or horrid things, you at once persuade yourself that she is wonderfully clever and moral.
It liberates the vandal to travel-you never saw a bigoted, opinionated, stubborn, narrow-minded, self-conceited, almighty mean man in your life but he had stuck in one place since he was born and thought God made the world and dyspepsia and bile for his especial comfort and satisfaction.
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