Email:ct2994@nyu.edu

‘Let’s stop giving energy to only one side of our instinctual nature, to nega­tive consciousness. When we own our shadow, we allow the breath of healing to enter our lives. (P61)’

A shadow is an image of us. Sometimes a shadow can show us more about us than we can.  If I move in a certain way the edge of a shadow can make movement clearer than my lit body in all its tones can display. This starved image, the shadow, becomes somewhat more material than me.

Gloria E. Anzaldua, in Light in the Dark, rewriting identity, spirituality and reality, argues that imagination and fiction can, if done spirituality, not for ego,  ‘reconstruct’ us, healing us from trauma and injuries that ‘split us, scatter our energies, and haunt us.’ (P.40). Reconstruction for Anzaldua requires shifting consciousness, of one’s own narrative.  ‘My job is not just to interpret or describe realities but to create them through language and action, symbols and images.’ (P.46)’.

The writing made me think of Frida Orupabo’s images. ‘I hear the snake warn me, “You’re leaking energy, and parts of your spirit have gone missing. Get back the miss­ing pieces of your soul.’ (p.27)

In Frida Orupabo’s narratives archival black women, I would argue ‘own there shadows’ through reconstruction, ‘shapeshifting’ (p.71).  Tuning in to the “other” mind or “other” self.  Frida Orupabo’s women don’t deny the dark that allows for light. ‘Creation is really a rereading and rewriting of reality—a rearrangement’ (P79)

My main question for this book would be if we need to wake up from the dream state or if ‘“active imagining,” ensueños (dreaming while awake)’ (p.5), can be incorporated into daily life. When this ‘liminal space’ (p 67) is described as the process of writing, and reading, the lines of flight our imagination takes it makes me wonder if this space should be reserved for sacred rituals that end, wake up into clarity and conscious mind. Should the unconscious not always be with us? Is clarity and awakening necessary?