Memento

“I write the myths in me, the myths I am, the myths I want to become.”

In a world full of absurd repetitions, where each life reflects the life and the search of the other, in a world governed by corruption, superficiality and everything that defers our dreams, I do need a memento of why I do what I feel, of what I have to do, of what I try to mold through my insanity and wildness.

“Writing produces anxiety. Looking inside myself and my experience, looking at my conflicts, engenders anxiety in me. Being a writer feels very much like being a Chicana, or being queer – a lot of squirming, coming up against all sorts of walls. Or its opposite: nothing defined or definite, a boundless, floating state of limbo where I kick my heels, brood percolate, hibernate and wait for something to happen.” (72)

“When I write it feels like I’m carving bone. It feels like I’m creating my own face, my own heart – a Nathuatl concept. My soul makes itself through the creative act. It is constantly remarking and giving birth to itself through my body. It is this learning to live with la Coatlicue tht transforms living in the Borderlands from a nightmare into a numinous experience. It is always a path/state to something else. (73)

“She writes while other people sleep. Something is trying to come out. She fights the words, pushes them down, down, a woman with morning sickness in the middle of the night. How much easier it would be to carry a baby for nine months and then expel it permanently. These continuous multiple pregnancies are going to kill her. She is the battlefield for the pitched fight between the inner image and the words trying to recreate it. La musa bruja has no manners. Doesn’t she know, nights are for sleeping?” (73-74)

“The Writing is my whole life, it is my obsession. This vampire which is my talent does not suffer other suitors. Daily I court it, offer my neck to its teeth. This is the sacrifice that the act of creation requires, a blood sacrifice. For only through the body, through the pulling of flesh, can the human soul be transformed. And for images, words, stories to have this transformative power, they must arise from the human body – flesh and bone – and from the Earth’s body – stone, sky, liquid, soil. This work, these images, piercing tongue or ear lobes with cactus needle, are my offerings, are my Aztecan blood sacrifices.” (75)

Gloria Anzaldua - Borderlands/La Frontera

Borderlands/Meraki

“Educated or not, the onus is still on woman to be a wife/mother – only the nun can escape motherhood. Women are made to feel total failures if they don’t marry and have children.”  (Gloria Anzaldua)

Non serviam. Some of us choose to be our own creations, what we make ourselves in the end. We rebel from the beginning. In front of families, religions, nations. We run away from the stories encrusted in our skins in childhoods. We abandon that cruel, meaningless God, with which we have been raised and listen to our voice within. To reason. We search for our own language, playing with words, searching. We search for our own people, our own families, despite our misanthropy and our inheritance of lack of trust. Because this is what we have inherited. And even in our wilderness, our wild nature, we are haunted by our past – how couldn’t we, living, growing so much under so powerful myths? No matter how many myths we deconstruct, no matter how up we go, how many theses we write, no matter how successful we are, we are failures in the face of some cultures, some families. 

“There is something compelling about being both male and female, about having an entry into both worlds. Contrary to some psychiatric tenets, half and halfs are not suffering from a confusion of sexual identity, or even from a confusion of gender. What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other. It claims that human nature is limited and cannot evolve into something better. But I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the hieros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within.” (Gloria Anzaldua)

I have always searched for androgyny in literature, in the style of a writer. I have always searched for wholeness in a person. I have always tried to understand, to see the whole picture.

"I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture – una cultura mestiza – with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture.” (Gloria Anzaldua)

I have found the other days a world with which I fell in love: meraki – “to do something with soul, creativity, or love; to put something of yourself into your work.” I think this is the word that characterizes my workaholic nature, my stuborness and my wilderness. Meraki. 

Or, on the same note, 

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.” (James Joyce)