Introduction (fragment)

We met in Nicaragua. Earlier, on a visit to Cuba, Ruth had tried to find Margaret and was told she had moved to Managua. Then, in 1983, both of us attended the meeting of artists and intellectuals hosted by the Sandinistas; some three hundred and fifty concerned individuals—writers, scientists, teachers, editors, religious, academic and political people—came together in Managua to look at the new revolution and try to understand what was happening there, what it meant. Late one afternoon Margaret said to Ruth: “Instead of going with the others on the bus, why don’t you come with me in my car? We’d have a chance to talk . . . “

We haven’t stopped talking. In one of her letters, Ruth remembers the immediate identification, how we both recognized the need to connect. Over the next four years our friendship has grown: in letters, phone calls, visits. In Boston for a reading or lecture, Margaret stayed with Ruth in Cambridge. Once, after a conference in Utah, Ruth stopped over and visited Margaret in her southwestern mountains. When the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) began deportation proceedings against Margaret, Ruth got together with a group of people in the Boston area and started a defense committee . . .

Sometime in 1986 we began to use the term insider/outsider. We saw that we are defined as insider or outsider by our country as a whole, by the cultural milieu in which we move, by our mentors and peers, by family (the one in which we grow up and the one we engender, if we do), and by colleagues and co-workers. The ways in which all of these people and groups of people see us affect how we define ourselves. And every possible combination of all these ways of seeing, defines the way we are . . .

These letters are about identity. Who are we? The un-aging white middle-class properly cleaned and pressed dependent and subservient slightly dissatisfied but striving females whose lives are mostly over. Or rebellious questioning angry joyous anguished strong women resisting the media hype offered as mirror, proud of the gray in our hair and vividly concerned with changing the world? When are we one, when the other, when some uncharted combination of both? . . .

Our conversation, which is this book, is built around examples, events, moments in our lives and the lives of others that illustrate how we have felt insider, outsider, or both. Our accounts are not analytical structures of definitions of “truth,” “that’s how it is.” We suggest openings, ways to organize experiences and think about them, ways to acknowledge and value them, whether they have felt good or bad, important or insignificant. We agree about most things. Where we don’t we have not tried to force a unified vision . . .

What you have here is not the shade of red, but the sound of red, the shape of red.

October, 1987.