"A Silence between Us like a Language": The Untranslatability of Experience in Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek

Abstract

scribe as the antagonistic yet potentially positive relationship of minority to dominant linguistic and cultural codes (153), are critical matters in Woman Hollering Creek. The text includes frequent references to the specificity and difference coded into any and all languages; to the violence of inadequacy of translation and interpretation; to the translator's and, by extension, the writer's unfaithful role as betrayer of the culture's inside secrets; and to the existence of encoded messages, which are more accessible to readers familiar with various insider codes and cryptographic devices deployed in the text. These attributes Cisneros's text shares with texts by other Chicano, Latino, and minority writers, who implicitly or explicitly refer to their own ambiguous relationships to both dominant and subordi