not here, not this, but something different elsewhere

It feels right to end here, at this point, as we stand at the close, hoping with a childlike wish in our hearts that it isn’t over, that somehow, this will go on. This is a feeling we all know, it is instinctual, natural, embedded in our muscle memory, and in our very essence and being. An irrational ideal, to keep moving without stopping, to never have to anticipate the end of the day, and to just continue on with what fills our hearts with content. It is a hope that the Black radical tradition was built on, a beautiful prayer for an endless trail of beginnings and no ends. Why? Because it was necessary to start from a point of possibility and not loss. To read their story as one of resilience and not abjection. To see their history as one that is not rife with despair, but alive with promise.

The Black radical tradition, to me, is a new Enlightenment, a Black Renaissance, which left behind in its wake a place for everyone. It is a movement that focused on the deconstruction and reordering of the world on different terms. On magic and enchantment, rationality and irrationality, on love but also loss, for the dead and the living. It sought to create a world that did not exist in binaries, but multiplicities; to render each, the black, the white and the grey their due. And in many ways to simply see the world very much through a child’s eyes; benign and uncorrupted by the logic of power.

It is imbibed with a certain ethic, in tune with the idea of a world that is for everyone and so speaks through a secret code, one that is unclaimed and undiscovered because it belongs to everyone and therefore, does not exist in one form. It exists for all of us. The Black radical tradition communicates in a language that does not emerge from violence, but from a place of innocence. Like a prayer, it does not have a definite form, it can be a string of consciousness that speaks exactly as it feels, unfiltered and free. It can be disjointed and eloquent both at the same time, it can defy logic and reproduce it, all on its own terms. But in each case, its form is representative of the larger project, which is not to redefine the world according to a specific structure, rather, to open the world to more than one form of expression.

So then, like when a child is born in to this world and a prayer is said for them, that the world be kind to them, and create a space for them where they can unapologetically be themselves; that world, the multi colored black world, the world of Morrison, Lorde, hooks, Fanon, Cesaire, Du Bois, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and so many more; that is the world the black radical tradition leaves behind to us. A world where you are not a problem, where you can see through the veil that seeks to blind you, where the color of your skin does not determine your destiny, where your anatomy does not limit your horizon, and where you don’t have to worry about who is better than you, but rather, worry about how you can become the best version of you. A world where you can simply just be. 

And so, as we began with a prayer, let us end with one;

I am. We are. And that is enough.

Yes, in a few years or centuries  la raza will rise up,                                                          tongue intact carrying the best of all the cultures.                                                                  That sleeping serpent, rebellion- (r)evolution, will spring up.                                            Like old skin will fall the slave ways of obedience, acceptance, silence.                    Like serpent lightning we’ll move, little woman.                                                                  You’ll see.

Gloria Anzaldua speaks from a site of irresolvable longing. Her project of imagining, or rather, re-imagining the Borderlands poses a question to the impossibility of her condition, that is, of invisibility. What must that be like? A crippling feeling, to wake up knowing you have no place in this world. To be resigned to the recesses; your emotions, thoughts, experiences all become invalid and like the rest of yourself, they die in silence. As if you never existed.

This is her reality, but it is not the only one.

She is a product of the Borderland and in situating herself within it, Anzaldua prescribes it with a new meaning. She transforms it; drawing potential from a site of failure (like the Borderland), she is reckoning with the past, present and future, and through writing, she creates the possibility to begin not from a point of loss, but recovery. Her motive is simple; she demands to be seen, she demands to be heard and therefore, imposes upon the reader a responsibility to bear witness. To what? A new way, a different way, a third way.

In her conception, the Borderland is not limited to a physical space, rather she expands it to an experience. Transcending material reality, the Borderland also exists in our imaginations, our hearts and our memories. It is everywhere and nowhere at once, and malleable to our individual experiences. It is hers, mine and yours and never confined to just one thing. It is a reflection of what is feared- in this case a homosexual Chicano woman-  and a site of confrontation – where all injustices are meted out and grievances are voiced. It is a holy space- the point where the worldly and divine meet- and a dimension where the irrational can prevail. It is a way of living in fear, in a state of constant danger and reaction. A ‘half and half’ life, never whole and always lacking in some way. But above all, the Borderland is a zone of healing, it takes what is confined to the zone of ‘non-being’ and elevates it to a state of recognition. It mends the ‘split’ by merging and celebrating two opposing forces and gives birth to a new consciousness, a mestiza consciousness.

La mestiza has gone from being the sacrificial goat to becoming the officiating priestess at the crossroads.

Anzaldua does not engage in a simple telling of the Borderlands. She is embodying an ethic which renders the Borderland as a location of restoration, not just for herself, but for everyone. By employing elaborate descriptions of the mestiza and Chicano tradition and interchanging between the multiple languages she speaks, Anzaldua is giving the reader a sense of her reality. There is a complexity in her dialogue which, to my reading, has a twofold effect. She gives herself uncluttered space to express herself fully; going back an forth between prose and poetry, mixing languages and conducting monologues in Chicano Spanish. Yet at the same time, while she accommodates herself, her writing has a reflective element as well. In adopting an interchangeability between languages, Anzaldua is embodying for the reader the limitations and obstructions she faces in reality, within her writing. The struggle of getting through half understood sentences and pages of indecipherable words are meant to invoke within them an experience of life in the Borderlands. But there is a purpose in this. By embedding her struggle within her writing, Anzaldua is able to show how the trouble with being our true selves is one we all share. The denial of one of us means the denial of all of us and the violence within this is seen in how people like Anzaldua, despite making themselves visible, remain invisible.

La Frontera is an attempt to preserve and provide evidence of historical invisibility, but with that it also displays an effort to shift our understanding from an economy of loss, to an economy of abundance. Anzaldua calls for an acknowledgement of the struggle. She calls for a uniting of all those who live in the Borderlands, to come together and repeal our lifeworlds. To draw from one another and build a common culture because without that we will have nothing to hold us together.

Before establishing Senghor’s position on Negritude as a universal ethic, it is necessary to situate negritude in itself, that is, as an alternative. Although it is historically contextualized within a certain framework of Black identity, it may be useful to read it simply as another way of being. It offers a different vantage point from which to imagine the human, not the black, but the human. A distinct point of origin, it is the re imagination of oneself in terms of their own authentic being and traces itself back to a beginning.

Negritude is an acknowledgement by the individual to find within themselves the possibility of moving beyond the state of object-hood. And in the case of the African, to embody an ontological resistance. It is a sense then, reactionary. Senghor’s vision speaks largely to Cesaire’s; a resurgence of black existence before the white man. They hearken to an African rhythm, one that roots nature to man, and man to God. A synthesis between the spirit and body, it enables a transcendent connection to the source of ‘life forces’ as he puts it. Senghor sees the African as sensitive to the external world, to the material aspect of beings and things. Beyond this there is also a deliberate emphasis placed on myth, magic and folktale. Art becomes a method through which to assert this rhythm, this uniqueness of blackness. It embodies a conception of ‘self affirmation’, of a previous model which needs to be reinstated, it is therefore tied to a past.

But whose past? This becomes a point of contention for the modern negro. Where does this past exist and who is it now for? This quality of Senghor’s and even Cesaire’s vision places Negritude on a relatively more particularistic plane, whereby it becomes slightly difficult to access. The past they are trying to reawaken is no longer in existence. It has fallen into the recesses of time, pushed out of the collective black conscience. However, one can argue that this is precisely the point. Senghor’s description of Negritude speaks to Cesaire’s because he is trying to rebirth the elements that made the past their own. His attempt in establishing the African as more wholesome than the white man, being able to pass from ‘existing to being’, is rooted in a concept that is inherently linked to the mystic past. One that although difficult to remember can be re imagined and instilled in the contemporary memory of the African.

He speaks of re creating the universe and contemporary world in a more harmonious way by making use of African humor, to adopt a different aesthetic, a new standard of beauty. Such a conception of negritude is what establishes it as universal. The African rhythm expressed through the harmony of color, movement and shape within art, incorporates a new face of the universe, extending beyond the continent and reaching the diaspora. This new face carries new meaning, instilling a common spirit within the children of Africa, wherever they may be, bringing them back home to the life forces embedded within the land. Thus, it is through Senghor that Africa is discovered, brought into the black conscience and forced through.

However, it is also important to respond to the criticism against Senghor, of Negritude being built solely as a response to Western humanism. Reducing the invocation and celebration of African art as a source of the white man’s pleasure, as if the black man has to prove himself and will never measure up to the intellectual freedom, is ignorant. To follow such a pattern of thought is to overlook the nuance in black reality, and the nature of the violence that took place. By labeling Senghor as nativist and narcissistic, one risks reducing other such decolonizing attempts of creating new humanisms as futile. Of course to a great extent this is a response to the other, but it is solely the other in question which has inherently been the nativist.

Negritude in Senghor’s mind adopts the universal through the particular. He shows how this magical African rhythm sets into motion a process whereby art is able to culminate a sense of harmony; connecting man to god, nature to man, and nature with itself. It seeks to make the world whole again, showing another way out. This takes Negritude beyond just being a reaction to the white man, the other. It sets for itself a place in the universe, it becomes recognizable for those that yearn for some African identity, it invokes pride in blackness. It ensures that in the end … there is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory.

It is insufficient to state that third world women need to be versed and schooled in the ethos of Western Feminism, because it risks the likelihood of solidifying a limiting perception of their experience.  Even the use of the term ‘third world’ woman functions to restrain the possibility of imagining a woman from a post colonial context as anything but. Instead, there remains attached to it a conception of lack, whereby the subject is not evolved enough and so the danger of this association is that it authorizes Western notions of Feminism to voice their experiences.

Mohanty speaks precisely of this overpowering effect of the White voice within the archive of women’s experiences and expresses the danger of clustering women of the ‘third world’ under broadly stereotyped characterizations. She accurately points out that such efforts are reminiscent of imperialist traditions, except in only a more contemporary period. Therefore, now, to blindly attribute such an enfeebling attitude of Western Feminism to a higher mission of empowerment is only to accommodate a new version of imperial conquest, an attempt to control the heart and mind. 

However, it is also crucial to note that these are not isolated instances. Mohanty emphasizes how Western Feminism has developed a very binary understanding of women which is attached to the compartmentalization of the post colonial world into very limited frames of being. It is in fact through a very deliberate act of power and rooted in a unique political context, that this happening. In most cases, women in the post colonial world are seen as extensions of men or religion. That is to say, never as in or of themselves. They are the other and not complete in their own. The effect of this can be traced along a very deep tradition of Sati where Lata Mani talks about how these women were remembered as only either ‘heroines’ or ‘victims’. So as the fate of a Sati is limited to an either/or conception, therefore,  all possibility of recognizing or expressing each woman’s individual experience is foreclosed.

In much the same way, White feminism operates to foreclose any nuanced understanding of the complexity of women in the post colonial world. It functions as a part of the wider power structure that dictates the placement of individuals into groups and groups into nations, all as part of one collective whole with a single identity. As Mohanty explains, “third world women as a group or category are automatically and necessarily defined as: religious (read “not progressive”), family-oriented (read “traditional”), legal minors (read “they-are-still-not-conscious-of their-rights”),illiterate (read “ignorant”), domestic (read “backward”) and sometimes revolutionary (read “their-country-is-in-a-state-of-war-they-must-fight!”).”  What is associated with the the third world woman is a sense of regression, or a state of immobility which is the exact opposite of the White woman. What then conflicts with the supposed aim of White Feminism, to cast all women under the universal umbrella of the female experience of a ‘shared oppression‘, is exactly how divided their experiences are. There is no sisterhood, or at least not an equally accessible one. White Feminism, by its very existence argues against it.

On this premise of sisterhood thus, Mohanty sums up quite clearly the discrepancy in White feminism. First world woman, third world woman; its not so much a matter of both surviving together, fighting against the same oppression. Rather, its more that one enables and sustains the other. They exist on different planes, coming together as a whole ever so rarely; the first world woman thrives on the third world woman, she derives her strength from otherising her. She is doubly marginalized, cast on the outer folds of history and left to fight on her own.

I wish, for the time being, to suspend the concept of temporality as linear and impose upon us a disjuncture with our past, for there is a haunting among us- an ending that refuses to end- which demands to be heard. For me, it is difficult to locate the spirit in our material present without resorting to our past. And I admit, it would be too reductive to diminish Sukarno and Dada to the transcendental realm, where they may only exist as unfinished dreams. But my recourse to the spiritual is not meant to render them into some less and other-worldly form of existence. They are very much part of the here and now and I need them to establish what I interpret as a reconciliation between the jaggedness of colored time and our own ontology. I find my own existence intermingled with theirs and believe that only by inserting ourselves into the equation, can we finally lay them to rest.

I write with a heavy feeling when I allude to the waiting room of history that we still reside in and find myself questioning the extent of the moral depravity of human beings that both Sukarno and Dada speak to in their writings. As they stand, both of them connect across time and space through the same experience of being colonized and testify to the cognitive damage that has been done by man’s conquest of man. Yet, in their act of questioning;

How is it possible to be disinterested about colonialism?… No people can feel themselves free, so long as part of their motherland is unfree. (Sukarno)

How did the Soviet system come about in the backwardness of Czarist Russia? … Why could we not do the same in India? (Dada)

they represent a resistance to that damage, a complexity which we all possess but do not conjure. In their own, it is exactly this devastating reality, the death of human conscience and the willful ignorance towards it, to which they collectively return.

But when locating this moral indifference, it seems that the problem becomes bigger than ourselves and it is perhaps in that, where we can find the solution. Both Dada and Sukarno long for a moment where the oppressed come together and see past their material realities, skin, religion and language and evoke a common desire to settle their ruptured past. In either of their circumstances, it is not possible to achieve complete emancipation without it.

I will call them my people, which were not my people;

and her beloved, which was not loved.

Romans 9:25

Dada speaks of an urge to go to India; a place that has given him no material or intellectual wealth. But his journey in the Soviet Union marks the coming together of diverse races, classes and genders and the end of the individual. He sees it as his duty to let go of what could have been a comfortable alternative, as a seaman. He forgoes familiarity, when his African American comrades call on him to overcome the humiliating handicaps that come with being colored in America. Instead, he is overpowered by a sense of solidarity towards the place he is only connected to by birth.  Breaking the bonds of class and spreading the communist dream in India become his chosen path.

Similarly, Sukarno celebrates Afro-Asian independence by resonating to a past in which they are held as the natural centers of faith and ideas. He too alludes to an overwhelming sense of solidarity that crosses over distances and differences. For him, humanity is rooted in diversity and Bandung marks the moment the colonized world embarks on the path of self actualization, together. For both of them, although they are divided in their political leanings, their hearts yearn for the same realization; a unity that inspires an image in which the individual can see in him/herself the collective and the possibility of inaugurating a new way forward- a new time.

I do not speak for the many that have been lost in the void of colonialism, but I do write in their memory as their existence has informed mine. In my own being I possess some measure of responsibility to reconciling the circumstances we now live in with the past. And upon introspection I can see the choices that were made and the paths that were chosen inform our consciences of the moral agency we possess. They come back to us again and again, haunting us as we live in the shadows, as we wait for that moment where we take up the reins and embrace our own humanism and embody the change that Dada and Sukarno sought for us. Until then they remain with us, two souls, expunged from physical existence, but inhabiting our social imagination, calling for us to wake up and prepare ourselves to forgo all else at the inevitable call for departure.