Email: nh923@nyu.edu

In reading Gloria Anzaldúa’s work Light in the Dark, I found myself oscillating between a feeling of warmth and welcoming and rejection not so much because of specific intellectual thoughts, but because of an uncomfortably visceral response in my gut (which I will return to later) specifically around ideas of spirituality.

One idea in Anzaldúa’s writing that I found particularly interesting was the use of the story of Coyolxauhqui as an image for the healing process. I found myself drawn to this image because through Coyolxauhqui, healing is not seen as a return to a previous state, but rather a reimagining or a reintegrating that creates a new world. “The Coyolxauhqui imperative,” Anzaldúa writes, “tells us that chaos and disintegration will lead to a reorganization, to a new order and anew kind of being in the world” (92).

This idea reminds me of a talk I was listening to by Gracen Brilmyer called “Cripping Absence: Thinking through the archival erasure(s) of disability.” In the lecture Brilmyer proposes a rethinking of the idea of provenance in archival practices and calls for a reorientation, away from a goal of recreating a past history and towards a question of what these materials can tell us about the past and how they can come together to create a something new in the present. Both Anzaldúa and Brilmyer are pushing for a memory or remembering that is invested in movement, acknowledging change, and creating space and access points for more voices, bodies, and identities.

Another aspect of the text that I was drawn to was the way that Anzaldúa seems to perform the nepantla position, one of liminality, in the actual writing of the text by shifting between English and Spanish with varying levels of translation or parenthetical commentary. My Spanish reading skills are okay enough to understand the general idea of many of these sections, however, there was a certain amount of imagining or creating that I had to do in these spaces of not knowing. While I enjoyed this experience, I was able to read some of the posts before writing this, and I found Monika’s point about what languages can be used in this way, while still remaining legible to many people, interesting and important to consider.

I want to return now this this embodied sense of unease I found myself in at times throughout the text. Towards the end of the book, Anzaldúa, recalls an earthquake, and describes the way in which it “jerks you from the familiar and safe terrain and catapults you into nepantla, the second stage” (122). Anzaldúa continues describing nepantla caused by the trauma of this earthquake, as “a zone of possibility” (122). I think it is this idea, of trauma as possibility and the romanticization of spirituality, that makes me viscerally uncomfortable. I know this to be directly connected to my own experiences of trauma and a shift into an in between space. During this time, spirituality often felt like it was being used as a way to erase my pain, which resulted in feeling more isolated and invisible. I also found myself surrounded by narratives of healing that spoke only to the possibilities of this trauma – of all the good that can come of it and the perspective that can be gained – with little to no mention of the devastation. While I do not feel like Anzaldúa is espousing this kind of spirituality, my own personal experiences made it difficult to see beyond. A found the moment when Anzaldúa introduces the notion of choice in becoming nepantleras (93) to be the one way of starting to reconsider this idea of spirituality that allows the subject to maintain agency and power.

Regardless I do believe that Anzaldúa demonstrates, through both form and content, that “writing is nothing if not a bodily act” (105).