We can get an idea of the content of Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s Light in the Dark – Luz en lo Oscuro (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015) by its subtitle: “Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality.” In this proposition of new ethics, aesthetics, ontology, and epistemology, she highlights the importance of the body: “For me, writing is a gesture of the body (…) My feminism is based not on incorporeal abstraction, but on corporeal realities. The material body is center and central. The body is the basis of thought” (IX). Starting from “conocimiento,” Anzaldúa creates a series of concepts for themes such as activism in art, imagination in creating new worlds, and the connection between personal and social healing.
She begins the book by discussing the attack on the Twin Towers to investigate the paradox of the country that proclaims itself the largest democracy in the world but continues to be a great oppressor of other peoples and its own people. Despite the already long episode, the topic remains relevant, as shown by the growing empowerment of the extreme right today and its necropolitical nationalism. “The survival of the human species depends on each of us connecting with our vecinos (neighbors), whether they live across the street, across national borders, or across oceans” (p. 20). President Gustavo Petro’s speech could be from Anzaldúa: “La única manera para que los niños israelíes duerman en paz es que duerman en paz los niños palestinos.”
To transform reality, it is necessary to imagine new worlds and epistemologies. “Creation is really a rereading and rewriting of reality—a rearrangement or reordering of preexisting elements” (p. 40). To do this, we must engage our imagination and believe in its creative potential: “We must redefine the imagination not as a marginal nonreality nor as an altered state but, rather, as another type of reality” (p. 37). I understand reality as a human narrative that seeks to attribute meanings to fact. Narratives are linguistic creations that record human experiences. In this sense, imagination, dreams, and artistic creation, as a human experience, can be integrated into reality like any other type of experience. If art enables the collective understanding of human experience through its language, it can shape the world – hence the decolonial power of art.
“If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound if no one is there to hear it?” (p. 38). Yes, says Alzaldúa. I arrive at the same answer as her, although I start from different assumptions – the difference between real as an event and reality as a narrative. My difficulty academically embracing Spirituality as a worldview probably means I am trapped in an “intellectual imperialism.” Anzaldúa asks (and I with her): “How to write (produce) without being inscribed (reproduced) in the dominant white structure and how to write without reinscribing and reproducing what we rebel against.”
Since the beginning of the European self-awareness of modernity that colonized the world, the successive narratives that naturalize the idea of separation will be articulated with the division between the Western-European-modern-advanced in opposition to the “others” – the rest of the peoples and cultures of the planet. This is how the separation between the sacred, the human, and nature occurs. This perception generates a movement in me to leave the separation brought by colonization and seek the place of my “árbol de la vida.”
As the preface states, Anzaldúa does not speak about decoloniality but from within decoloniality. This is the key to what makes this exciting and complex book so disturbing. Anzaldúa works with the indigenous mythical figures of la Llorona and Coyolxauhqui, which embodies her “desire for epistemological and ontological decolonization” (XXI). La Llorona, who kills her own children, is a story that adults tell children (?!). Coyolxauhqui is beheaded and torn into pieces by her brother because she tried to kill her mother – what would become of us without a man to punish bad girls and save us from ourselves. They are highly sexist portraits of female figures: out of control, crazy, dangerous, vengeful. This critical movement to affirm indigenous culture makes me wonder to what extent it is possible to give new meaning to mythology and whether an epistemology loaded with machismo can be considered decolonial.
I look for my roots but need to find out where they are. Part of this I owe to colonization, which erases our origins. Part, to the patriarchy, which turns a blind eye to men who abandon their daughters (my mother never knew her father; her stepfather left forever when his only son died). The fact is that I don’t know my ancestors other than my grandmothers. I would like to find this place of ancestral healing, but I don’t know where to stand. “We always inherit the past problems of family, community, and nation” (p.10). The only place I know I speak from is as a woman. Ultimately, my only certainty is that reading this book will open the doors of Nepantla for all of us.