In my response to Gloria Anzaldúa’s text, I will allow myself to write from a similarly personal perspective as the author, experimenting with the discursive mode phrased by Anzaldúa as “autohistoria” which fuses “personal narrative with theoretical discourse” (p.6). I will describe the affect that her writing creates in me which will serve as a starting point for a critical response.
As I am reading “Light in the Dark,” I am noticing that a frustration is arising when I see the frequent usage of Spanish in the English version of the text. My knowledge of Spanish is advanced enough that I understand the Spanish elements of the text without having to use the dictionary. The words in Spanish are not there because they are untranslatable to English, as the following quote can make apparent: “We are connected to el cenote via the individual and collective árbol de la vida, and our images and ensueños emerge from that connection” (p.5). I understand that the presence of Spanish words is rooted in Anzaldúa’s cultural context, but I begin wondering, why am I so bothered by the choice to include Spanish words in the English version of the text?
The reason for my frustration is that the presence of Spanish words acts as a reminder that the usage of words in my native tongue, Polish, could never occur in an academic text in a similar manner as Spanish in “Light in the Dark.” Spanish, as one of the most popular languages in the world, and as the most learned language other than English in the US, and as a language with a close proximity to Latin, can be easily mixed with English with no fear of leaving the reader helpless (or losing the reader completely).
On the other hand, am I a pies ogrodnika for thinking like that? (Pies ogrodnika is a Polish expression which translates to “the gardener’s dog”, meaning that a person wants to prohibit the other from doing what they don’t want to or can’t do.)
My father’s parents spoke Łemko. Łemko people are a small ethnic minority in the Carpathian Mountains between Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine, who were brutally displaced and experienced ethnic cleansing by the Soviet forces, causing the Łemko language to almost disappear. Of course, I could not use Łemko words the way Anzaldúa uses Spanish. Due to Anzaldúa’s US-centrism and despite her attempts to formulate a theory of “new tribalism” that would include everyone, I find it very difficult to find an entry point to her conceptions of interconnectivity from where I am positioned. Is it because my ancestors’ oppressor (Russia) had been a political enemy of Anzaldúa’s peoples’ oppressor (USA) that I struggle to feel included in the “new tribalism”?
I am doubtful about the term “new tribalism” because it can be appropriated to align oneself with indigeneity while having no connection to or knowledge of what it is.
Anzaldúa’s proposal that leading our activist and political work should be accomplished through spirituality is powerful, but at the same time comes across to me as a romanticization of spirituality as an unquestionable solution to the world’s problems. Whose version of spirituality shall we follow? Haven’t various forms of spirituality led to the establishment of patriarchal, racial, and extractivist capitalism?
Lastly, I would like to point to what I believe is a serious misreading of Deleuze and Guattari’s work in “Light in the Dark.” Anzaldúa proposes a tree with roots as a symbol of ancestral and racial origins, and writes that “Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use a similar structural model, the rhizome, for the self” (p.68). This is a misinterpretation, because the basic idea behind Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a rhizome is that it is not a tree (which is hierarchical), but a multiplicity with many entry and exit points, therefore these two models are not similar. In Deleuze and Guattari’s words, “the rhizome is an anti-genealogy”, so suggesting that a theory of ancestral heritage symbolized in a figure of a tree bears similarities with the concept of a rhizome is a misuse of the term.