ABlog

It’s late and I’m weary—teaching tomorrow—but wanting to write something in the way of idiosyncratic personal tribute to Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. I’m reading the book right now with my class “Reading the Queer Renaissance.”

I couldn’t, or let’s say didn’t, read Borderlands for a long time after it was published in 1987. Well, maybe I read some of it. It came out in the same year I “came out” as a hasbian. It seemed yet another emissary from the world of lesbian feminism that was both too much and not enough with me. I needed to direct my attention elsewhere for a while. I needed a break.

In fact, Borderlands, although explicitly by a lesbian and a feminist, is not “lesbian-feminist”—i.e. steeped in the particular milieu within which I met and vaguely knew Gloria in the first year or two of the 1980’s. Rather, it’s centered in the valley of the Río Grande. (In the fascinating interview Karin Ikas did with the author that’s included in the second edition, there’s a characteristically tart yet generous comment on a group of lesbian-feminist writers Gloria encountered in the Bay Area: “Everybody would talk about the white problems and their white experiences. When it was my turn to talk, it was almost like they were putting words into my mouth. They interrupted me while I was still talking or, after I had finished, they interpreted what I just said according to their thoughts and ideas. They thought that all women were oppressed in the same way....I mean, somehow these women were great. They were white and a lot of them were dykes and very supportive. But they were also blacked out and blinded out about our multiple oppressions” (Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Aunt Lute Books, Second Edition, pp. 230-231).

The book not only isn’t especially lesbian-feminist, it really isn’t all that queer if one refers to explicit content by percentage (though by the grand old Bertha Harris definition –sentences that refuse to behave are lesbian sentences—it’s very queer indeed). No matter. In 1987, I was headed for the hills. As I say, I had known Gloria, distantly, in her unhappy Brooklyn time (in the Ikas interview she refers, pointedly, to how uncomfortable she was in Brooklyn)—the time right after the publication of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, which she co-edited with Cherríe Moraga. “We” had published her work in Conditions—“Holy Relics,” the eerie poem about St. Teresa that’s in the poetry section of Borderlands; the gorgeous “El Paisano Is a Bird of Good Omen,” about a Tejana marimacha, which Gloria billed at the time as a chapter from a novel—a novel never, so far as I know, completed. (I’m not sure if “El Paisano” itself was ever reprinted or if it simply languishes there in back issues of Conditions, waiting for the entrepreneurship of some future literary gold digger to turn it into, say, the Chicana equivalent of Zora Neale Hurston’s “The Gilded Six Bits.”)

It’s a strange experience to watch someone you know turn into an ancestor. Become immortal, in a sense. These words are wrong, but I mean: to go away permanently and yet be so present in their works, whose dimensions seem to expand before one’s eyes. Why is it that it seems one can pay more attention to the essence—the creative residue—now that the changeability of the persona—her fallible humanity—is out of the way? It is not, I maintain, that the memory of who the person was becomes flattened, sentimentalized. That can happen but shouldn’t. No need to make quirky women warriors into plastic superheroes. Rather, it’s something about not having to bump into their personalities anymore. One sees more clearly, without the sort of sibling rivalry that most living humans tend to have with each other.

Audre Lorde is the other writer with whom I’ve experienced this phenomenon most strongly. I was personally drawn to Audre—knew her a little better, only marginally better, than I did Gloria—did not feel especially interested in Gloria the woman, the person I might have tried to arrange to have coffee with, just once, one-on-one, but of course never did. In both cases, I’ve encountered, afterwards, the unending complexity and resonance of the work, on a level that makes me feel connected in a way I never did during the woman’s life. It’s a feeling of we didn’t know who was here—again, not in a worshipful sense, out of awe at stereotyped “greatness,” but out of the kind of awe that comes from being able, finally, to step back from something monumental and understand scale.

The “spiritual” dimension of Gloria’s writing is probably the hardest thing about it for me to access, because of my own conflicted orientation towards the notion of extra-rational forces at work in the world. I am not by any means willing to say there’s nothing out there. Yet I’m uncomfortable, don’t know how to react, in the face of other people’s relationship to a more definite something. I always feel, on the one hand, inferior (there is a distinct human capacity—a mystical sense—evidently very developed in some people, that I obviously lack); on the other hand, I’m embarrassed at the possibility of entering into belief. (Why? Oh Unitarians, you have much to answer for.) I do very much like what Gloria has to say about the problem with personifying these forces: “I personally don’t like the word goddess. To me these are figures which embody an awareness that is divine. A divine consciousness to which people just have given different names.... Because what happens if you give these forces a human figure and a name is you start limiting them and their power. Therefore I just call them cultural figures, like la Llorona, Coyalxauhqui, the moon goddess and la Virgen” (241).

As I read this book for the first time truly deeply, I’m almost overwhelmed by the many levels of its daring: its relentlessness in going up against so many prohibitions and restrictive ways of thinking—about identity, history, race, class, language, genre, and of course sexuality. When Gloria writes in one of the final poems, “mine the hand you chop off while still clinging to it” (“this dark shining thing,” 193), I don’t feel that she is necessarily speaking about a martyr complex—although she could certainly have had one, and if so she wouldn’t be the first highly creative woman to suffer, as Adrienne Rich wrote of Marie Curie, from “wounds that came from the same source as her power.” I take the poem to be speaking about a facet of the author’s emotional reality, and one that was indispensable in order for her to push as far as she did.

In purely formal terms, I find Borderlands an ungainly, at times even “ugly” book overall: an ugly book that contains many passages of wonderful writing (for instance, the lyrical, broken-line descriptions of “the Coatlicue state” at the beginning and end of Chapter 4, or the poems “sus plumas el viento,” “El sonavabitche,” and “Holy Relics”). I conjecture that this is because the necessary, radical, deliberate combinations of exposition, invocation, storytelling, theory, accusation, self-reflection, and so on cannot by definition be fully integrated into a seamless pattern. (Perhaps cannot be so integrated at this stage of things.)

I ask myself if this is a patronizing conclusion: am I implying this is a book important “merely” for its content? I don’t think that is in fact what I’m saying; rather, I think that in some way this book and the importance, difficulty of the subject matter take form seriously enough to break it, and break it repeatedly. (A book title pops into my head: English Is Broken Here by Coco Fusco: yes, English is broken, and a lot more is broken.)

This book is so much the record of a struggle; that’s another way to put it. How could it possibly be perfectly proportioned? The struggle was not a struggle for aesthetic perfection. It was..."vida o muerte.”

I mark how beautifully, for me, the book’s few but strong personal associations inflect my reading, adding yet another layer of “aura.” (Who says a work of art can’t still have soul in the age of mechanical reproduction?) There’s a dim memory of Gloria at a Conditions meeting in the apartment on Eleventh Street; some holiday meal, maybe a Christmas dinner, with some of the crowd around Conditions, This Bridge, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Rereading “Holy Relics,” I remember that we published it in Conditions—can’t really remember what I thought of it at the time, it’s the least characteristic of the poems in Borderlands in that it’s the only one to treat a “European” theme—and I see that its vision of the ghoulish, predatory veneration of the wise woman’s dead body (a veneration by grave robbers) is perhaps one of the sources of my imagination of what happens to Paula Schweike’s relics in The Company of Cannibals. I hear, once again, the voice of Mariana Romo-Carmona reading “El Sonavabitche” at the small Goddard residency memorial she organized after Gloria’s death in 2004—a memorial I went to somewhat reluctantly, out of a sense of duty, not really wanting to cram an over-full week with yet another people-filled event. I think of one of the women present at that gathering, an older student from the Santa Cruz women’s community who’d known Gloria, saying Gloria had had so many unfinished products on her computer, and it wasn’t clear what was going to happen to all that, she’d died so suddenly....