1. Healing Wounds (the poetry)
The last few sentences of this beautiful poetry hit me; it says, “to heal, there must be wounds; to repair there must be damage; for light there must be darkness.” While the sentences before this part seems to be written to express agony in the most vivid way possible, this part just shifted the focus of this piece to a different level. It can be said to present a logical thinking which a lot of people might not be conscious of: that is, we can only “truly” understand the value of light after we experienced the pain of darkness. This is an optimistic attitude to treat the misfortunes we’ve been through by precipitating our emotions of rage, grievance, despair and turn them into nutrients for personal growth. Or, the interpretation of this part can be gone even further that we hold gratitude to what/who brought darkness to us, thanking them for giving us a chance to become stronger.
Furthermore, I found an interesting article from a reputed Taiwanese online media in which the writer quoted from his interviewee, a Taiwanese psychological therapist Si-Jie Chen (“陳思杰” in Chinese characters) working in South Shore Mental Health (SSMH), that “fixing a mental problem follows the same logic as muscle training – you have to go through the damage first.” He also explored this concept from the perspective of Asian religious philosophies, Hinduism as an example, the Hindu trinity who stand for the universe is: Shiva, responsible for destruction; Brahma, creation; and Vishnu, maintenance. From a mythological viewpoint restoration starts with destruction, first destroying, then creating, and at last maintaining, which is similar to the case of muscle building, destroying muscle fibers and then letting them grow back. I personally like this type of interpretation connecting to religious thinking, thus I shared it here.
2. Light in the Dark
After quick browsing of this book, I found that it basically consists of poetic narrations by Anzaldúa about events happening and things existing around her; not only those which we can see and feel, but also those which root in the spirituality, the higher dimension, the “unseen and unfelt existence”. According to what I have read in details, Anzaldúa seems to be fond of the idea of “connection”. In the beginning of chapter 1, she already explicitized that she “couldn’t detach from the victims, survivors and their pain.” (p.9) In addition, she proposed the term “el conocimiento” meaning “spiritual knowledge”, “we’re connected by invisible fibers to everyone on the planet and that each person’s actions affect the rest of the world.” (p.15) Based on these statements, it can be said that the content of connection Anzaldúa claimed is far more than empathy; I would like to compare it with “Butterfly Effect”, the effect under the framework of chaos theory indicating that “small changes in initial conditions can trigger long and large chain reactions throughout the system.” However, I would assume that these “small changes” in Anzaldúa’s content does not fit in its origin of meteorology, but tiny, daily actions any person does every day can affect others whether this person is aware of it or not.
On the other hand, when I read to El árbol de la vida/the tree of life and the serpent appearing in Pregnant with Story in chapter 2, I immediately thought of an exhibition I walked through just then in the Met, “Tree and Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India”. Comparing the positioning of trees and serpents in the two contexts is actually interesting. To begin with, Anzaldúa stated the belief that everything has “spirit” which normally exists in shaman traditions. The fact that that she put the faith in la Virgen de Guadalupe (Saint Mary, mother of Jesus) and the “la Virgen’s tree” together in her writings can be viewed as an example mentioned to support this point. Interestingly, in Buddhism, the “Bodhi” tree is said to be the sacred tree since Buddha reached Buddhahood under this tree, and it became the symbol of enlightenment in Buddhist teachings ever since. La Virgen and Bodhi at this point actually can be said to share a level of similarity in the holiness they can represent. Surprisingly, the image of serpents in two contexts are sort of under the same circumstances: serpents, “naga” in Sanskrit, in Buddhist stories were said to be the semidivine creatures protecting Buddha during his meditation. It also symbolizes “rebirth” because of its natural habit of molting. As for Anzaldúa, her mother used to intimidate her not to go out at night or otherwise a snake would get into her vagina and make her pregnant (p.26); after she grew up, she got to understand that the term of “snake” her mother used in fact is a replacement of “man”, and the action of snake entering vagina is an implication of raping. Nevertheless, even she already realized it, she somehow had her own imagination of snakes; through her imagination, snakes were given new mythological images which can be even morphed, added body parts of other species and becoming a figure beyond most readers’ imagination (just a personal assumption). Can this be also called a “rebirth”? I do not know, but it is so inspiring to see this comparison in my opinion.