When We Dead Awaken: Writing As Re-Vision By Adrienne Rich Analysis

In this vein, representation and the attending need to revise, or rewrite women’s positions in history and in the present time has been at the center of the feminist literature since its beginning. In fact, one of the premises of feminist literary criticism, launched as an academic discipline in the early 1970s, is the need for a revisionist reading of the myths and traditions of Western culture. As Adrienne Rich writes in her essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”:
Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. . . . We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.
Rich is aware of the importance of revising the historical and the literary heritage as it was exclusive vis-à-vis women, and as it must be rewritten to include women’s (her) story and break up with the old stereotypes that were held on women. Rich adds in the same essay: For writers and at this moment for women writers in particular, there is the challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography to be explored. But there is also

Writing can be an empowering tool as it enables one to narrate the story from his or her own perspective. The same thing goes on the postcolonial feminist writers, as they give the floor to their female agents to counter the discursive structures and ideological assumptions that relegate the “other” women to the periphery. Leila Abouzeid and Assia Djebar are not exceptions, as they are themselves postcolonial agents who have sought to recuperate the female voices in their postcolonial countries. In fact, they do so through