Reading Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro, made me think about the war between Israel and Palestine. When Anzaldúa is talking about the need for the US to acknowledge the harm the country inflicted in many parts of the world with its colonialism – this past week we heard president Biden repeating the phrase he first said in 1986 that if Israel didn’t exist, the US would have to invent it, relating to the American imperial interest in the region. I kept thinking how chocadaAnzaldúa would be now with all the images of the conflict and especially of the dead children on social media. And as she stated back then about the first lady Bush, myself, as a Black Brazilian woman, still can’t let go of the images of our youth, killed every 23 minutes, in the silently loud war against people of color in Brasil. I too hear the drums played for Yemanjá, “calling our souls back to our body”.
The part of the text that I believe takes me back to my zone of interesse, is when Anzaldúa affirms that writing for her begins with the impulse to puch boundaries, shape ideas, images and words, writing as “a gesture of the body, a gesture of creativity, a working from the inside out”.
In the poem Healing Wounds we find the inevitable fragmentation: “Coyolxauhqui represents the psychic and creative process of tearing apart and pulling together
(deconstructing/constructing)”. And when we are putting ourselves together after a trauma, even though the image we see in the mirror reminds us of who we once were, we can’t ever return to be our old-selves again.