Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality
312
Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality
312Paperback(New Edition)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822360094 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/30/2015 |
| Series: | Latin America Otherwise |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Sales rank: | 411,964 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Light in the Dark = Luz En Lo Oscuro
Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality
By Gloria E. Anzaldúa, AnaLouise Keating
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 The Gloria E. Anzaldúa Literary TrustAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-6009-4
CHAPTER 1
Let us be the healing of the wound
The Coyolxauhqui imperative — La sombra y el sueño
The day the towers fell, me sentí como Coyolxauhqui, la luna. Algo me agarró y me sacudió, frightening la sombra (soul) out of my body. I fell in pieces into that pitch-black brooding place. Each violent image of the towers collapsing, transmitted live all over the world then repeated a thousand times on TV, sucked the breath out of me, each image etched on my mind's eye. Wounded, I fell into shock, cold and clammy. The moment fragmented me, dissociating me from myself. Arresting every vital organ in me, it would not release me.
Bodies on fire, bodies falling through the sky, bodies pummeled and crushed by stone and steel; los cuerpos trapped and suffocating became our bodies. As we watched we too fell, todos caímos. What occurred on September 11, 2001, to the people in the four hijacked airplanes, the World Trade Center twin towers of New York City, and the Pentagon happened to us, too. I couldn't detach from the victims and survivors and their pain. This wounding opened like a gash and widened until a deep chasm separated me from those around me.
In the weeks following éste tremendo arrebato, susto trussed me in its numbing sheath. Suspended in limbo in that in-between space, nepantla, I wandered through my days on autopilot, feeling disconnected from the events of my life. My house whispered and moaned. Within its walls the wind howled. Like la Llorona lost and alone, I was arrested in susto, helplessness, falling, sinking. Swamped with sadness, I mourned all the dead, counted our losses, reflected on our country's role in this tragedy and how I was personally responsible. It was difficult to acknowledge, much less express, the depth of my feelings — instead me lo tragé.
Now, months later, I'm still trying to move through my depression and into another state of mind. I'm still trying to escape my shadow beasts (desconocimientos): numbness, anger, and disillusionment. Besides dealing with my own personal shadow, I must contend with the collective shadow in the psyches of my culture and nation — we always inherit the past problems of family, community, and nation. I stare up at the moon, Coyolxauhqui, and its light in the darkness. I seek a healing image, one that reconnects me to others. I seek the positive shadow that I've also inherited.
With the imperative to "speak" esta herida abierta (this open wound) before it drowns out all voices, the feelings I'd buried begin unfurling. Vulnerable once more, I'm clawed by the talons of grief. I take my sorrow for a walk along the bay near my home in Santa Cruz. With the surf pounding in my ears and the wind's forlorn howl, it feels like even the sea is grieving. I struggle to talk from the wound's gash, make sense of the deaths and destruction, and pull the pieces of my life back together. I yearn to pass on to the next generation the spiritual activism I've inherited from my cultures. If I object to my government's act of war I cannot remain silent. To do so is to be complicitous. But sadly we are all accomplices.
My job as an artist is to bear witness to what haunts us, to step back and attempt to see the pattern in these events (personal and societal), and how we can repair el daño (the damage) by using the imagination and its visions. I believe in the transformative power and medicine of art. As I see it, this country's real battle is with its shadow — its racism, propensity for violence, rapacity for consuming, neglect of its responsibility to global communities and the environment, and unjust treatment of dissenters and the disenfranchised, especially people of color. As an artist I feel compelled to expose this shadow side that the mainstream media and government denies. To understand our complicity and responsibility we must look at the shadow.
Our government's hasty handling of the 9 / 11 terrorist attacks profoundly disturbs me. We are a nation in trauma, yes. I know that in sudden shocking, stressful situations, a person's or nation's habitual response (usually a variant of anger, fear, helplessness, and depression) overrides all others. When others wound us, we want to hurt them back. Like the terrorist we hunger for retribution, though for different reasons. In the beginning we're provoked into wanting to strike back with deadly force, but later, reason and compassion usually prevail.
However, reason and compassion did not prevail with our president, his right-wing allies in the media, and over half of the nation. In the guise of protecting our shores, Bush sought to shore up his image and our national identity. He didn't seek a deeper understanding of the situation; he didn't seek justice through international law. Instead, he engaged the terrorists in a pissing contest. Hiding behind the rhetoric of "good versus evil," us versus them, he daily doled out a racialized language attributing all good to us and complete evil to the terrorists, thus forging a persuasive reactionary nationalistic argument. If we didn't support the "war" to defend civilization, the war against terrorism, we were siding with the terrorists. This ruse threw dust in our eyes, preventing us from looking too closely at our foreign policies. We turned a blank eye (desconocimiento) to those we killed in other countries and had buried in our basement. I ponder what price this country will pay for the secret narrative of Bush and the other predators in power whose agenda allows them to act against the well-being of people in this nation and other countries and against the health of the planet. Abre los ojos, North America; open your eyes, look at your shadow, and listen to your soul.
On October 7, my country beat the drums of war; with military might we fell into barbarism. Championing the show of power and the use of fear and force to control, we became the terrorists. We attacked Afghanistan, a nation that had not attacked us — the nineteen terrorists belong to the transnational Al-Qaeda terrorist network, most from Saudi Arabia. The world's lone superpower swiftly shed civilians' blood, as well as that of the Taliban whose atrocities against women and ethnic minorities had been ignored by the U.S. until 9 / 11. Despite Afghani women's resistance against the Taliban, we had veiled our eyes to the role we played in their oppression. As Sunera Thobani (a Canadian immigrant who writes about violence against women and criticizes American foreign policy and the war against Afghanistan) put it, "Afghani women became almost the poster child for women's oppression in the Third World," a fact we also ignored.
Except for Congresswoman Barbara Lee (representing Berkeley/ Oakland), I have no respect for our government leaders. On September 14, she voted against the bill giving Bush carte blanche to deploy the military against those our government perceived to be responsible for the attacks. Out of a congressional body of 421 members, hers was the only dissenting vote. A real "hero" who throws into light Bush's false bravado, her courage made her a target of hate groups and could have cost her political career. In her address she urged that we step back a moment; think through and understand the implications of our actions; use restraint; and not rush to judgment, counterattack, or open-ended war.
By bombing "the enemy," we sentence to slow death by starvation 7.5 million Afghan refugees (thirty-five times the number that died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined) who rely on food and medical aid to survive; relief efforts are blocked by the bombings.
By dismissing them as "collateral damage," we regard their deaths as less valuable than those who died on 9 / 11. Our hasty retaliatory war against a small, impoverished nation, whose Taliban regime the U.S. formerly funded, shocked the world's conscience. The U.S. lost the world's sympathy; many now view us not only as imperialist neo-colonizers but also as terrorists. Many look at Bush / the U.S. as a modern Hitler, but the genocidal tally may triple Hitler's. Saying evil was done to us, our government claims the moral high ground and role of victim. But we are now, and have been for decades, the bullies of the planet.
Many accuse the U.S. of using the military to advance economic and political interests around the world and point to a history of colonialism, imperialism, and supporting right-wing dictatorships at the expense of freedom and democracy. The U.S. manipulated the overthrow of independent nations in Latin America, Asia, and Africa to establish puppet dictators, giving them military aid to fund corporate businesses and sweatshops. According to Sunera Thobani, the CIA-backed coup against the elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile resulted in the deaths of more than thirty thousand people. The U.S.-backed regime in El Salvador used death squads to kill seventy-five thousand people. The U.S.-sponsored terrorist contra war in Nicaragua led to the deaths of more than thirty thousand people. As a result of the United Nations–imposed sanctions (enforced by U.S. power), the initial bombings in Iraq in 1990 resulted in two hundred thousand dead. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimates that more than one million Iraqis have died and that five thousand more have died every month in the past ten years. One hundred fifty thousand were killed and fifty thousand disappeared in Guatemala after the CIA-sponsored coup in 1954. More than two million were killed in Vietnam. U.S.-backed authoritarian regimes include Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the apartheid regime in South Africa, Suharto's dictatorship in Indonesia, Marcos in the Philippines, and Israel's various occupations of Palestinian territories.
Osama bin Laden alludes to our support of Israel and our indifference to the plight of the Palestinians as the reason for his terrorist attacks on the United States. Others blame the U.S. for the worldwide abuse of globalization (destruction of traditional ways of living and exploitation of the poor by the wealthy). Whatever the reason, nothing can justify an act of terrorism, whether it's committed by religious fundamentalists or private militia or prettied up as a war of "just" retribution by our government.
"We're the victims here," the war-for-profit mongers proclaimed, pushing a nation-sponsored "war against terrorism" by invoking the names of the dead in New York City. By justifying the war they hope to veil their efforts to reestablish control in the Middle East and exploit its natural gas and oil reserves. They drove us into the "perceived" enemy's trap of exchanging one wound for another, of justifying the killing of women and children. To boost his cowboy self-image, Bush comes riding on his white horse, a gunslinger at high noon, bragging that he'll bring in Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" and save the world for us.
In a 180-degree turn, Bush assumes a feministic guise and intimates that he'll emancipate the Afghan women from their backward, uncivilized Third World culture. Yeah, sure he'll save these women behind veils whom our policies silenced, reduced to meeting in secret to learn and teach, diminished to begging in the streets. With his war toys he'll ejaculate bombs into their bodies, disremembering that the U.S. supported Pakistan's empowerment of the Taliban, which, in turn, silenced and veiled its women. He ignores our own culture's attempt to silence and gag women and men of color. Cable News Network (CNN) and most of the U.S. media disseminate Bush's savior perspective and the government's propaganda, which originates from the boardrooms of Texas oil companies and other corporations that thrive on a war economy, imperialism, and globalization. We remain un- and misinformed about the military's role in enforcing policies benefiting U.S. corporations while costing the lives of millions around the world.
All U.S. media (except for alternative) censors news of the massive opposition to the war in every country, including the United States. Bush and his administration accuse those who protest the war of being unpatriotic, an accusation tantamount to treason. You're siding with the terrorists, they tell us when we demand a peaceful resolution or protest the theft of our human rights in the name of fighting terrorism. No dissent is tolerated, especially if it comes from feminists, progressives, people of color, immigrants, and Arab and Islamic Americans. According to an October 2001 editorial in Sojourner, Bush's Justice Department and the new Office of Homeland Security could turn into a witch-hunting squad targeting peace and human rights activists, documented and undocumented immigrants, and those seeking alternatives to Bush's war agenda. His efforts to eliminate civil liberties such as legal and due processes puts many of us in danger of terrorist attacks from our own government. Attacks on activist organizations violate the First Amendment giving us the right to advocate for change and guaranteeing free speech. Illegal search and seizures violate the Fourth Amendment, and being forced to answer the FBI's or INS's questions violates the Fifth Amendment (the right to remain silent). When people are jailed without being charged and are indefinitely detained, the land becomes a police state invasive with security checks and surveillance.
Racialized language leads to racial profiling, which leads to targeting dark-skinned, Middle Eastern–looking, and other people of color earmarked as potential terrorists. So that white Americans can keep their illusions of safety and entitlement unmarred, our government sets up oppressive measures such as racial profiling, which make people of color feel disposable, perpetually unsafe, and torn apart like Coyolxauhqui. Bush's attempts to make the country "safe" from terrorism endanger some of our residents. Under martial law, we would lose most of our rights. In a television appearance, Barbara Bush, bearing limited knowledge of what goes on in this country, exhibited her singular and myopic reality by stating that after 9 / 11 Americans were no longer safe. She's oblivious to the fact that for women of color, home and homeland have not been safe places — our bodies are constantly targeted, trespassed, and violated. Poor white women and young Black and Latino men have never been safe in this country — a country that internally colonizes people of color, enforces women's domestication through violence, and continues the slow genocide of Native Americans.
By ignoring the ramifications of his headlong actions, Bush and his yes-men dishonored the 2,792 dead and the 300 firefighters and police who died saving lives. They betrayed the people killed in the hijacked jets and the towers; they sold out the children, families, and friends of these victims. They broke faith with the Ground Zero rescue workers who hunt through the burning rubble looking for the remains of the dead. They delivered into the hands of the "assumed" enemy the young men and women in our military who will become casualties of war. They abandoned the 574,000 workers who have lost their jobs since 9 / 11 when they gave IBM a $1.4 billion tax rebate and large sums to other corporations but refused to give unemployment insurance to those laid off from their jobs. Bamboozled, many Ground Zero rescue workers, as well as the recently unemployed, believe that Bush honors them. Unlike progressives and radicals, these "Bush-rescued" people turn their faces away from our collective shadow and pretend not to see how torn apart this country is internally. But I suspect that the masses have a growing suspicion that Bush is not acting in the best interests of this nation or of the world.
Bush and half of U.S. Americans fell into fear and hate. The instinct toward violence has become so normalized in this country that many succumbed, reacting inhumanely instead of responding compassionately. It's unfortunate that we get our national identity and narrative from this majority who refuse to recognize that conflict is not resolved through war. They refuse el conocimiento (spiritual knowledge) that we're connected by invisible fibers to everyone on the planet and that each person's actions affect the rest of the world. Putting gas in our cars connects us to the Middle East. Take a shower squandering water and someone on the planet goes thirsty; waste food and someone starves to death. Although we make up approximately 4.5 percent of the people on the planet, we consume 82 percent of its resources. And fear, ignorance, greed, overconsumption, and a voracious appetite for power is what this war is about. Our rapacious demands have made plunderers of us all. We allow predators like Bush to take control of our nation and kill off the dream (el sueño) of what our culture could be — a model of democracy. Similarly, western neocolonialism sucks the resources (life force) from Third World countries.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Light in the Dark = Luz En Lo Oscuro by Gloria E. Anzaldúa, AnaLouise Keating. Copyright © 2015 The Gloria E. Anzaldúa Literary Trust. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Editor's Introduction. Re-envisioning Coyolxauhqui, Decolonizing Reality: Anzaldúa's Twenty-First-Century Imperative ix Preface. Gestures of the Body—Escribiendo para idear 1 1. Let us be the healing of the wound: The Coyolxauhqui imperative—la sombra y el sueño 9 2. Flights of the Imagination: Rereading/Rewriting Realities 23 3. Border Arte: Nepantla, el lugar de la frontera 47 4. Geographies of Selves—Reimagining Identity: Nos/Otras (Us/Other), las Nepantleras, and the New Tribalism 65 5. Putting Coyolxauhqui Together: A Creative Process 95 6. now let us shift . . . conocimiento . . . inner work, public acts 117 Agradecimientos | Acknowledgements 161 Appendix 1. Lloronas Dissertation Material (Proposal, Table of Contents, and Chapter Outline) 165 Appendix 2. Anzaldúa's Health 171 Appendix 3. Unfinished Sections and Additional Notes from Chapter 2 176 Appendix 4. Alternative Opening, Chapter 4 180 Appendix 5. Historical Notes on the Chapters' Development 190 Appendix 6. Invitation and Call for Papers, Testimonios Volume 200 Notes 205 Glossary 241 References 247 Index 257What People are Saying About This
"Ready to move beyond identity politics? Beyond contemporary theories of globalization, decoloniality, feminism, Marxism? Then take this U.S. Third Space/Fourth World Feminist Liberationist ride on Anzaldúan rivers of thought. They carry away outmoded debris. Tributary streams nourish decolonial visions. Shimmering re-cognitions arrive. Perceptual light shifts, wreaking havoc, unleashing floods of liberation philosophy. Dizzy? Take the book’s medicine. It transforms refugees into citizen-chamanas, political co-creators of how we will be known. Anzaldúa wonders: Do you have the yearning, the energizing power of life, the courage to join us?"
"Gloria E. Anzaldua is one of the most generative and generous thinkers and storytellers in our times. In these rich auto-ethnographies she continues to search for what she calls the 'positive shadows' of personal and collective experience, spirit, and world. Anzaldua has the courage to write inside recesses and crevices to encounter what one does not necessarily want to know, but needs nonetheless to inhabit, tuned to change and possibility. In her unique speaking in entwined tongues, in Spanish and English, she is a multimodal guide in our hard times to 'active imagining' for worlds that may yet be. It is such a pleasure to see this book at last; it makes her legacy vivid when it is most needed."
