sentipensante

In the past few days, I’ve felt constantly inspired and emotionally stimulated. From meeting amazing new people to further reading, writing, and exploring of Santo Domingo and my own thoughts and ideas – academic and otherwise – a lot of things are brewing in my mind and heart. I don’t know how I fall asleep at night at the rate I’ve been sentipensando (“The fishermen of the Colombian coast must be learned doctors of ethics and morality, for they invented the word sentipensante, or ‘feeling-thinking,’ to define language that speaks the truth.” —Eduardo Galeano, from The Book of Embraces).

One thing I’ve been contemplating is an issue to which I briefly referred in my previous post – that of negotiating what it means to be a feminist in a city where I can’t go a block without being made obnoxiously aware of my gender. How to handle this without getting sent to Dominican jail for attacking men on the street? I’ve decided to turn the irony of being a woman in Santo Domingo while doing research on gender mainstreaming, health programming and foreign aid policy into creative production. Now I’m adding a personal component to my academic exploration of gender, which I hope will ultimately take the form of a long reflection of some sort. How do I translate my feminism across the North-South divide, simultaneously surviving and thriving in this culture and remaining true to myself? What form will my resistance to oppressive power structures take in a society where my values (i.e., the worth of a woman as measured in units of mental fortitude rather than in inches of a waistline) no longer have external meaning? Thus I have yet another project that I am excited to tackle.

The academic and personal freedom afforded by Fulbright (especially having recently come from the rigid structure of full college course loads and dozens of extracurricular obligations) is delicious and daunting. A recently initiated, weekly writing/working group of fellow Fulbrighters (and one non-Fulbrighter) (all of whom are leagues ahead of me in terms of their careers) isn’t helping; hanging out with such brilliant minds only intensifies my mental hyperactivity. In a spurt of academic ADD, I’m reading five different books right now (and they are The Cairo Trilogy, by Naguib Mahfouz; Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, edited by Daisy Hernández and Bushra Rehman; The Healing of America: A Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care, by T. R. Reid; Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Dandicat; and Imagining Ourselves: Global Voices from a New Generation of Women, edited by Paula Goldman).

This is where my undergraduate lessons on self-organization come in handy. To-do lists, outlines of my ideas, and detailed breakdowns of all the projects I’m juggling have taken over my computer. Having a community of fellow scholars (including my *amazing* roommate!), most of whom are older and have therefore moved past the stage I’m currently in, is a great resource for navigating all of this. It would also be really nice to find a good yoga studio.