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Gloria Anzaldúa translates, or understands, trauma as a form of arrebatamiento (35). Arrebatar is to take something away with violence and force. Arrebatamiento is also the Christian theological concept of rapture, according to which, when Jesus descends, believers who are alive will be “raptured” or taken to Heaven to meet God. This duality of trauma, physical and spiritual, goes along with Anzaldúa’s thinking: for her, the imaginary/creative is another kind of reality; the spiritual manifests itself in the physical just as the physical plane feeds the spiritual (37).

Perhaps the trauma she describes is not as violent as the Holocaust that Hirsch explores or the rapes that Hermon works on. Perhaps both violences can be summed up in the term “dislocation” she uses (35). For Van der Kolk, trauma implies a disconnection, so recovery implies a “(re)connecting with our fellow human beings” (247-248). Anzaldúa is not far from this perception. However, she adds something attractive: traumatic events are “initiatory ordeals” (35). If the traumatic “triggers” the “imaginal” and if the “imaginal” is the “unconscious” (27) but also the “spirit” (4), each trauma is a “crack” in our world (16) and at the same time a reconnection with our interiority. Anzaldúa, inspired by indigenous epistemologies, does not see the world in a binary but dualistic way: that is why in her poem “Healing Wounds,” she can affirm that there is no healing without wounds, “for light there must be darkness” (249). Light in the Dark is informed by that same duality: the “inner wholeness” she seeks is multitudinous (40); it is composed of the “many members, imaginal figures, that compose a psyche” (36). Trauma is disconnection and reconnection at the same time: an event that both violently grabs something from us and, at the same time, can remind us of our connections with the world and with ourselves; it can elevate us to “God.”