Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity Spirituality Reality
Excerpt - Gloria E Anzaldua
There’s something epistemological about storytelling. It’s the way we know each other, the way we know ourselves. The way we know the world. It’s also the way we don’t know: the way the world is kept from us, the way we’re kept from knowledge about ourselves, the way we’re kept from understanding other people.
When writing at night, I’m aware of la luna, Coyolxauhqui, hovering over my house. I envision her muerta y decapitada (dead and decapitated), una cabeza con los parpados cerrados (eyes closed). But then her eyes open y la miro dar luz a los lugares oscuros, I see her light the dark places. Writing is a process of discovery and perception that produces knowledge and conocimiento (insight). I am often driven by the impulse to write something down, by the desire and urgency to communicate, to make meaning, to make sense of things, to create myself through this knowledge-producing act. I call this impulse the “Coyolxauhqui imperative”: a struggle to reconstruct oneself and heal the sustos resulting from woundings, traumas, racism, and other acts of violation que hechan pedazos nuestras almas, split us, scatter our energies, and haunt us. The Coyolxauhqui imperative is the act of calling back those pieces of the self /soul that have been dispersed or lost, the act of mourning the losses that haunt us. The shadow beast and attendant desconocimientos (the ignorance we cultivate to keep ourselves from knowledge so that we can remain unaccountable) have a tenacious hold on us. Dealing with the lack of cohesiveness and stability in life, the increasing tension and conflicts, motivates me to process the struggle. The sheer mental, emotional, and spiritual anguish motivates me to “write out” my/ our experiences. More than that, my aspirations toward wholeness maintain my sanity, a matter of life and death. Grappling with (des)conocimientos, with what I don’t want to know, opening and shutting my eyes and ears to cultural realities, expanding my awareness and consciousness, or refusing to do so, sometimes results in discovering the positive shadow: hidden aspects of myself and the world. Each irritant is a grain of sand in the oyster of the imagination. Sometimes what accretes around an irritant or wound may produce a pearl of great insight, a theory.