splits me, splits me

“What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be one or the other”

Anzaldúa, describes the tendency to force people to fit into one category or the other based on nature, culture or identity. This cartesian duality of mind and body, represented as culture and nature, man and woman, white rationality and indigenous savagery and in other various forms carries with it the reduction of possibility of other ways of being. It deems all that is not “natural” as deviant. Anzaldúa mentioned how women themselves have limited possibilities because there is no room for different ways of being. Those who don’t fit into these binaries are those who are on the borderlands, they are those that are considered subhuman, inhuman and nonhuman.

These borderlands are created not only physically, but also sexually, psychologically and spiritually. Those who belong to the half and half, and those who do not align with these binaries are in the struggle of mitigating their duality. Of having to live with the fear of not belonging and the trauma of being silenced and the immobility associated with that. There is a turmoil that this process of violence causes, where language and identity continues to change.

There are ways that those on the borderlands come to terms with their situation and location. Anzaldúa referred to the use of Chicano Spanish that is born out of the need to have a distinct language. Those on the borderlands make ways for the alien to become familiar but it stays uncomfortable at the same time. The history of conquest, imperialism, displacement, genocide, and war have led to the production of borderlands, it has allowed for the borderlands to be separated from identity and history. The discomfort and the pain due to living on the borderlands is expressed by Anzaldúa:

“staking fence rods in my flesh,

splits me splits me”

Her own experiences as a Chicana, lesbian woman of colour placed her in a vulnerable position where she faced rejection. She described the possibility within the borderlands of finding home, where there is room for her and those who are half and half: “this is my home, this thin edge of barbwire.”

Anzaldúa, in her life seems to strike that balance between the universal and the particular. While holding onto her Chicana identity, she is able to distinguish between the injurious aspects of her culture but at the same time not does not immerse into whiteness. She is called a sell out, a betrayer by her own, but they are also those who silenced her. It is this silence that Audre Lorde refers to:

“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”

The transformation of this silence to language is important and through her writing Anzaldúa breaks this silence and  her beautiful instructive wisdom is encapsulated in her words:

“And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture – una cultura mestiza – with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture”