This is the fourth letter in the series of letters to people who have most influenced my theology and world view.
Querida Gloria,
Me has enseñado a abrazar mi violencia y usarla para gemir y golpear contra aquellos que invaden las fronteras y tienen la intención de diezmar a las personas y los lugares que amo. My professor, Dr. Butler, believes that “viewing oppression as an organism accepts oppression as dynamic and fluid, structured and alive.” Cuando me mostraste cómo “[w]estern culture made ‘objects’ of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing ‘touch’ with them…[and] this dichotomy is the root of all violence.” We have to undo the ways we make objects of people while also treating oppression as the adaptable, parasitic organism it is. Veo la verdad que “borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.”
Tú me enseñaste estrategias para desbaratar los sistemas de opresión. Debemos liberar nuestras propias “Shadow Beast” y confrontar las formas en que somos cómplices de la misma violencia cultural que impacta los mismos problemas que buscamos remediar. Su modelo para la disrupción interna nacida de la disrupción externa puede servirnos a todos.
“There is a rebel in me- the Shadow-Beast. It is a part of me that refuses to take orders from outside authorities. It refuses to take orders from my conscious will, it threatens the sovereignty of my rulership. It is that part of me that hates constraints of any kind, even those self-imposed. At the least hint of limitations on my time or space by others, it kicks out with both feet. Bolts.”
This resembles the soul of my faith’s heretical and blasphemous roots. My goal is to fully embrace the Shadow-Beast within as a disruptive, non-conforming catalyst. En una tradicion that is not bound to traditional ideas of divinity, I long to violently tear down the existing model of church. In speaking about my faith tradition, Dr. Julie Todd una vez me dijo, ”I long for them to return to their roots...there is a certain liberal, white Unitarian Universalism status quo that begs to be blasphemed from within.”
I hope to someday learn to embody the Transformative Justice ideal of addressing harm without causing more harm, but still struggle to tease out what that looks like in the context of cultural violence. I find I am willing to use violence within certain parameters, particularly since my understanding of what is violence continues to shift. Siento violencia en mi sangre. Quiero que mi iglesia transmit for “las atravesadas” and wail along with you in order to break free of our privileged, watered-down heresy.
You inspire me to want to “engage in the violence of being yourself.” You understand the continual insistence of our world to put up arbitrary and damaging borders…is a call to demand the most of what makes you you while engaging in the absolute violence that dismantles the system…being one’s self is a mode of violence… it becomes an epistemological affront to pro-normative modes of existence. Colonial frameworks work in the binary. Revolt spirituality works in the multivariate.”
Entiendes por qué I couldn’t write just an academic paper about my struggle with (non) violence because the very academic structure and vernacular are part of structural violence. Irónica, ¿eh? I live in a sort of borderlands of church, school, and my own radical need to destroy the systems of academic hierarchies and religious harm. Me estoy abriendo camino a través de estos sistemas para encontrar formas de destruirlos.
Tu hermana en disrupción,
Beth
Gloria Anzaldúa, a self-described “chicana dyke-feminist, tejana patlache poet, writer, and cultural theorist,” was born to sharecrop- per/field-worker parents on September 26th, 1942 in South Texas Rio Grande Valley. She worked to educate college students about feminism, Chicano studies, and creative writing at a number of universities, including the University of Texas at Austin, Vermont College of Norwich University, and San Francisco State University. Anzaldúa died of diabetes complications on May 15, 2004.
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