In the essay “Speaking in tongues: a letter to women writers of the third world”, published in 1981, Gloria Anzaldúa allowed me to discover and imagine with her writing a panorama of the erasures and resistances of the image of women, both in her trajectory and in her cultural context. The idea was to write a letter to women who resist somewhere in time. His restart writing the letter goes through the difficulty of the act of writing itself, it is perhaps the attempt to suggest a new beginning beyond the metalanguage of the text, a new milestone of a new idea of the world. Imagining possible worlds amid unavoidable dangers, impossible to erase. At the same time as the publication of Anzaldúa's text, there was a movement in contemporary art in New York known as Guerrilla Girls, with agendas very similar to the debate that the author brings, as we can see in the passage in which Anzaldúa says, quoting Alice Walker:

O homem branco diz: 

Maybe if they shave the brunette

of their faces. Maybe if

branquearem seus ossos. 

Stop speaking in tongues,

stop writing with

a mão esquerda. Não cultivem 

suas peles coloridas, nem suas 

tongues of fire if you want

thrive in a right-handed world.

“Man, like others

animals, is afraid and repelled

for what he doesn't understand, and a

simple difference is capable

to connote something evil.

Following this idea of contestation, disagreement, discomfort and rupture, we can perceive some resonances in the Guerrilla Girls group's manifesto:

“As vantagens de ser uma artista mulher: trabalhar sem pressão do sucesso. Não ter que participar de exposições com homens. Poder escapar do mundo da arte em seus quatro trabalhos como freelancer. Saber que sua carreira pode decolar quando você tiver oitenta anos. Estar segura de que, independentemente do tipo de arte que você faz, será rotulada como feminina. Não ficar presa à segurança de um cargo de professor. Ver as suas ideias tomarem vida no trabalho dos outros. Ter a oportunidade de escolher sua carreira ou a maternidade. Não ter que se engasgar com aqueles charutos enormes nem ter que pintar vestindo ternos italianos. Ter mais tempo para trabalhar quando o seu homem lhe deixar por uma mulher mais nova, ser incluída em versões revistas da história da arte. Não ter que passar pelo constrangimento de ser chamada de gênio. Ver sua foto em revistas de arte usando uma roupa de gorila.”

Percebe-se uma relação análoga entre as reivindicações e pautas, Anzaldúa e o Guerrilla Girls. Entretanto, ambas não são iguais. Pautas, pontos de dissenso e contrastes podem ser identificados. Anzaldúa olha para si, seu tigre, a escrita, como potência visceral contra a barbárie, contra o medo e o apagamento, ela mesma atravessa o tempo com sua escrita diante dos estratos sociais de seu contexto até o nosso tempo. Essa escrita rememora, particularmente outra escritora, Adrienne Rich, uma década antes da publicação de Anzaldúa: 

I put together words on the typewriter, late into the night, thinking about today. So well that we all spoke. A language is a map of our mistakes. Frederick Douglass wrote in purer English than Milton's. People suffer desperately in poverty. There are methods, but we don't use them. Joana, who could not read, spoke a peasant form of French. Some of the suffering is: it's hard to tell the truth; this is America; I can't touch you now. In America we only have the present tense. I'm in danger. You're in danger. The burning of a book does not awaken any sensation in me. I know burning hurts. There are napalm flares in Catonsville, Maryland. I know burning hurts. The typewriter is overheating, my mouth burns, I can't touch you now and this is the language of the oppressor. (Adrienne Rich, 1968).

In these three examples, the language incisively evokes an intimate tension for the search for freedom, not only expressed socially in each context, but also in the use of language itself, perhaps most explicitly in Rich's text. Even today we see the resonance of the strength of such authors in art and education. There still remains a question in the air of the increasingly rarefied atmosphere of these acidic days of the 21st century: if writing is our weapon of war, then when will the present make our lines less bitter?