Half and Half

Over the span of this course one of the things we have repeatedly come face to face with are boundaries. Boundaries of admission, of colour, of gender. Boundaries that seek to separate the self from the body, the ghetto from the white man’s world. And woven into the stories of these walls, both literal and metaphorical, are the stories of the people who tried to find ways around them, through them and sometimes even over them. Malcolm Little broke through the wall separating him from the life he knew he deserved by becoming Malcolm X. Martin Luther King dealt with his boundary through a policy of non-violence. Fanon found that his freedom “was…given to… [him]… in order to build the world of the You”. For Toni Morrison language was the answer. For these figures the act of breaking through the boundaries confining them is a way of reckoning with the scars and wounds that history has inflicted upon them. They are looking for home.

 For Gloria Anzaldua, her home is the borderland, an open sore created at the point where “the Third World grates against the first and bleeds”. And what I find most remarkable about her is the way that she finds home in discomfort so that the power of the word is nullified. In a way, like Morrison, her way of being directly conflates with language. After all, what is discomfort when you’re used to it? How can a “thin edge of barbwire” hurt you when it is your “home”? It is important to realise that Anzaldua is not propagating a life where pain is second nature to you, nor is she promoting passive acceptance of your fate. Home means more than that. It is more than that.

There are borderlands within the borderland. The sexual politics of the world Anzaldua inhabits threaten to estrange her from her home. Living in the borderlands is not easy. It “means you fight hard to resist the gold elixer beckoning from the bottle, the pull of the gun barrel, the rope crushing the hollow of your throat.” It means living in conflict with your self because you realise that it doesn’t exist as a singular entity— you are a composite of all the worlds that collide to create the borderland you live on. And when that collision creates a wound— as all collisions inevitably will— living in the borderlands means growing up in the midst of broken things, half things. It means living in the realization that it is not always the third world or the first world that chafes against the scar tissue that is your home, causing it to burst open— it is your self.

A border signifies the beginning of one thing and the end of another. And as Fanon says, “no attempt must be made to encase man, for it is his destiny to be set free”. But for Anzaldua the borderland can be liberating because it allows for a transformation of self— it allows her to become a crossroads. And this is what makes her work truly remarkable.