Borderlands

In this seminal text, Gloria Anzaldua writes about the difficulty of straddling multiple identities that overlap in various ways and contribute to her alienation. She is of the Chicana ethnicity, and that excludes her from the white narrative of North America. She is a woman, and that leaves her battling her own culture in confronting its patriarchal traditions. She is a lesbian, and that prevents her from truly acclimatizing with other women or the expectations imposed upon her. It is at the intersection of all these identities that she feels lost, but it is also here that she finds herself.

In particular, Anzaldua identifies language as the chief means through which one knows both themselves and others, as well it being the vehicle through which one understands the world. It is more than communication in the simple sense but rather it is something that involves and informs every facet of our being, as language is one of the key tenets of our humanity. Anzaldua, speaking on how Western thought and language has dominated native modes of thought, and it is that liberation that is perhaps most important. She claims, “Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself.” She is vocal about embracing all different parts of herself i.e. her ethnicity, her voice as a woman, confident in herself and her sexuality, and she vows to “overcome the tradition of silence.”

She immerses herself in the culture that she felt alienated from by consuming Chicana literature, film, music, art, and went on to insert these parts of herself in her lectures at university. Even after being admonished by the administration for doing this, she continued to slip her students extracts of Chicana poetry and stories in the hope of breaking the domination of one stream of thought, one system of being, one way of existing.

For Anzaldua, as well as for other thinkers we have studied in this course, true decolonization does not exist as a duality. It does not exist merely as opposition to the colonial ways. If decolonization is to bring forth genuine change and inspire a new way of inhabiting the world then it must move on beyond binaries of black and white, Mexican and American, and so on. It must acknowledge that there no one singular way of being in this world, and that any genuine movement that seeks to counter the effects of colonialism cannot resort to reinstating the binaries and divisions that characterized it in the first place. Anzaldua insists that, “it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank.” She compels us to reach an understanding that is not marred and limited by reacting, as that is fundamentally restricted in what it can hope to achieve. Cesaire championed negritude as cleansing blackness of negative implications. Fanon argued that reaction could never be enough, because an attempt to cast blackness in a positive light still played the game by the same rules and restrictions that were established by colonialism in the first place, when it opined that blackness was indeed something separate, and a distinct, disparate identity that was unlike whiteness. Similarly, Anzaldua argues that it will never be enough to claim these identities as being distinct and unlike each other. She believes that moving away from this polarity of action and reaction will actually open up a world of endless possibility, and allow us to develop a “tolerance for ambiguity.”

Anzaldua describes this realization as quite difficult for the mestiza, who has only ever known absolutes and limits and boundaries. To be confronted with the possibility of flexibility in the face of such a history is overwhelming, but the transition must be made, for, as Anzaldua says : “rigidity means death.”