Sunday, January 01, 2006
Gloria Anzaldua: The personal is political is spiritual
Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldua died prematurely in 2004, of diabetes. She had no health insurance, despite her great influence on an entire generation of feminist literary theorists and writers. Having just come back from the Modern Language Association annual convention in Washington DC, where I spoke at a panel on "The Legacy of Gloria Anzaldua," I am moved to dedicate my inaugural post in this blog to her memory, and I'd like to use this space to explore one of her key ideas: spiritual activism.
This is not the idea of hers that has received most attention in academia to date--that honor would go to her theory of the borderlands. The chapters of her ground-breaking 1987 volume Borderlands/la frontera that are most frequently anthologized are the ones that discuss her queer Chicana identity and the stresses of living in the linguistic, psychic, and physical borderlands of South Texas, where she was born and bred. But re-reading the book through the lens of one of her last essays, "now let us shift...the path of conocimiento...inner work, public acts," it is clear to me that what she was reaching for in Borderlands was a way of describing her own process of "conocimiento," or coming to a spiritual and political awareness that moves from, as the title of her late essay suggests, inner work to public acts.
What is conocimiento? Anzaldua describes it as a seven-stage spiral process without start or end point, moving forward continually and non-chronologically--something hard for our linear minds to grasp. It starts with a jolt of awareness, a crash of emotional or physical sensation that throws us into the second stage, "nepantla," a liminal space of openness to new perspectives. The third stage, the "Coatlicue state," named for a dark Mexican goddess, represents the turmoil that such new perspectives or ideas can often provoke. Growth is not easy or neat, and one of Anzaldua's central insights has to do with the importance of PAIN in the process of coming to awareness. In our Prozac Nation today, I think this can't be stressed too much: psychic pain has to be worked through; or as Jean Houston puts it, pain is the entrance to the sacred. On the other side of that threshold, we'll find a "call to action," and ways to act productively in the world will open before us. The inner work will lead to public acts, in other words--among them the "crafting of a new personal narrative" that reflects our new awareness.
But we're still not done in this process of conocimiento, or coming to awareness. With our new personal narrative in hand, we'll take it out to test it in dialogue with others, a dangerous process, fraught with risks of rejection and conflict that could send us spiraling back down into Coatlicue again. But if we work through this stage, we can find ourselves in the glory land of the seventh stage, where we're able to make "holistic alliances" with other individuals and groups, in order to further our collaborative productive engagements with the world. And then it's back into nepantla again, to grow and learn and develop and start all over again.
It's pretty plain how this process is both personal and political. How is it spiritual as well?
I would say that spiritual activism is any form of engagement with the world undertaken out of love, compassion and the desire to collaborate with others in a common project of highlighting the interconnection of all beings on our planet, and perhaps in our universe as well. "Love thy neighbor as thyself" and other conventional formulations along these lines contain the essential kernel of spiritual insight, which is that we are all sparks of a divine flame and the positive forces in our world pull us toward unity and harmony and the apprehension of our interbeing.
What makes Gloria Anzaldua such a wonderful model for spiritual activism and the process of conocimiento (coming to awareness, and then taking action on that new awareness) is that she somehow manages to balance the spiritual and the material, the intellectual and the emotional, the theoretical and the pragmatic. These are the strands she is weaving together so brilliantly in her texts and in her lifework, and we women of the world must take note, and gird ourselves to continue her important project in her absence.
As we continue to think and work and act in the wake of her legacy, we will find that she is not really gone at all.
Best wishes for a peaceful and productive New Year to Gloria and all my other sister nepantleras....
You can read Anzaldua's essay "now let us shift...the path of conocimiento...inner works, public acts" in the anthology she co-edited with AnaLouise Keating entitled This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation" (Routledge, 2002). Another good discussion of spiritual activism can be found in M. Jacqui Alexander's book Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred (Duke UP, 2005). More on Jacqui's book to follow.
--JBH
This is not the idea of hers that has received most attention in academia to date--that honor would go to her theory of the borderlands. The chapters of her ground-breaking 1987 volume Borderlands/la frontera that are most frequently anthologized are the ones that discuss her queer Chicana identity and the stresses of living in the linguistic, psychic, and physical borderlands of South Texas, where she was born and bred. But re-reading the book through the lens of one of her last essays, "now let us shift...the path of conocimiento...inner work, public acts," it is clear to me that what she was reaching for in Borderlands was a way of describing her own process of "conocimiento," or coming to a spiritual and political awareness that moves from, as the title of her late essay suggests, inner work to public acts.
What is conocimiento? Anzaldua describes it as a seven-stage spiral process without start or end point, moving forward continually and non-chronologically--something hard for our linear minds to grasp. It starts with a jolt of awareness, a crash of emotional or physical sensation that throws us into the second stage, "nepantla," a liminal space of openness to new perspectives. The third stage, the "Coatlicue state," named for a dark Mexican goddess, represents the turmoil that such new perspectives or ideas can often provoke. Growth is not easy or neat, and one of Anzaldua's central insights has to do with the importance of PAIN in the process of coming to awareness. In our Prozac Nation today, I think this can't be stressed too much: psychic pain has to be worked through; or as Jean Houston puts it, pain is the entrance to the sacred. On the other side of that threshold, we'll find a "call to action," and ways to act productively in the world will open before us. The inner work will lead to public acts, in other words--among them the "crafting of a new personal narrative" that reflects our new awareness.
But we're still not done in this process of conocimiento, or coming to awareness. With our new personal narrative in hand, we'll take it out to test it in dialogue with others, a dangerous process, fraught with risks of rejection and conflict that could send us spiraling back down into Coatlicue again. But if we work through this stage, we can find ourselves in the glory land of the seventh stage, where we're able to make "holistic alliances" with other individuals and groups, in order to further our collaborative productive engagements with the world. And then it's back into nepantla again, to grow and learn and develop and start all over again.
It's pretty plain how this process is both personal and political. How is it spiritual as well?
I would say that spiritual activism is any form of engagement with the world undertaken out of love, compassion and the desire to collaborate with others in a common project of highlighting the interconnection of all beings on our planet, and perhaps in our universe as well. "Love thy neighbor as thyself" and other conventional formulations along these lines contain the essential kernel of spiritual insight, which is that we are all sparks of a divine flame and the positive forces in our world pull us toward unity and harmony and the apprehension of our interbeing.
What makes Gloria Anzaldua such a wonderful model for spiritual activism and the process of conocimiento (coming to awareness, and then taking action on that new awareness) is that she somehow manages to balance the spiritual and the material, the intellectual and the emotional, the theoretical and the pragmatic. These are the strands she is weaving together so brilliantly in her texts and in her lifework, and we women of the world must take note, and gird ourselves to continue her important project in her absence.
As we continue to think and work and act in the wake of her legacy, we will find that she is not really gone at all.
Best wishes for a peaceful and productive New Year to Gloria and all my other sister nepantleras....
You can read Anzaldua's essay "now let us shift...the path of conocimiento...inner works, public acts" in the anthology she co-edited with AnaLouise Keating entitled This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation" (Routledge, 2002). Another good discussion of spiritual activism can be found in M. Jacqui Alexander's book Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred (Duke UP, 2005). More on Jacqui's book to follow.
--JBH
