The
actual physical borderland that I’m dealing with in this book is the Texas-U.S
Southwest/Mexican border. The psychological borderlands, the sexual boundaries
and the spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest.
(…)
I
am a border woman. I grew up between two cultures, the Mexican (with a heavy
Indian influence) and the Anglo (as a member of a colonized people in our own
territory). I have been straddling that tejas-Mexican border, and others, all
my life. It’s not a comfortable territory to live in, this place of
contradictions. Hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominente features of
this landscape.
However,
there have been compensations for this mestiza, and certain joys.
(…)
Books
saved my sanity, knowledge opened the locked places in me and thaught me first
how to survive and the how to soar. La madre naturaleza succored me, allow me to grow roots that
anchored me to the earth. My love of images – mesquite flowering, the wind, Ehécatl, whispering its secret knowledge, the
fleeting images of the soul in fantasy – and words, my passion for the daily
struggle to render them concrete in the world and on paper, to render them
flesh, keeps me alive.
(…)
After
each of my four bouts with death I’d catch glimpses of an otherworld Serpent. Once,
in my bedroom, I saw a cobra the size of the room, her hood expanding over me. When
I blinked she was gone. I realized she was, in my psyche, the mental picture
and symbol of the instinctual in its collective impersonal, pre-human. She, the
symbol of the dark sexual drive, the chthonic (underworld), the feminine, the
serpentine movement of sexuality, of creativity, the basis of all energy and
life.
(…)
Four
years ago a red snake crossed my path as I walked through the woods. The direction
of its movement, its place, its colors, the “mood” of the trees and the wind
and the snake – they all “spoke” to me, told me things. I look for omens everywhere,
everywhere catch glimpses of the patterns and cycles of my life. Stones “speak”
to Luisah Teish, a Santera; trees whisper their secrets to Chrystos, a Native
American. I remember listening to the voices of the wind as a child and
understanding its messages. Los espíritus that ride the back of the south wind. I remember their exhalation
blowing in through the slits in the door during those hot Texas afternoons. A gust
of wind raising the linoleum under my feet, buffeting the house. Everything trembling.
We’re
not supposed to remember such otherworldy events. We’re supposed to ignore, Forget,
kill those fleeting images of the soul’s
presence and of the spirit’s presence. We’ve been thought that the spirit is outside our bodies or above our heads somewhere up in the sky with God. We’re supposed
to forget that every cell in our bodies, every bone and bird and worm has
spirit in it.
(…)
White anthropologists claim that Indians have “primitive” and therefore deficient
minds, that we cannot think in the higher mode of consciousness – rationality. They
are fascinated by what they cal the “magical” mind, the “savage” mind, the participation
mystique of the mind that says the world
of the imagination – the world of the soul – and of the spirit is just as real
as physical reality. In trying to become “objective”, Western culture made “objects”
of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby loosing “touch”
with them. This dichotomy is the root of all violence.
(…)
So
I grew up in the interface between trying not to give countenance to el mal
aigre, evil non-human, non-corporeal
entities riding the wind, that could come in through the window, through my
nose with my breath. I was not supposed to believe in susto, a sudden shock or fall that frightens the
soul of the body. And growing up between such opposing spiritualities how could
I reconcile the two, the pagan and the Christian?
No
matter to what use my people put the supranatural world, it is evident to me
now that the spirit world, whose existence the whites are so adamant in
denying, does in fact exist. This very minute I sense the rpesence of the
spirits of my ancestors in my room. And I think la Jila is Cihuacoalt, Snake Woman; she is la Llorona,
Daughter of Night, travelling the dark terrains of the unkown searching for the
lost parts of herself. I remembre la Jila following me once, remembre her eerie lamente. I’d like to think that
she was crying for her lost children, los Chicanos/mexicanos.
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