Finally Separate, Yet Always Non-Identical in Multiple Ways to the Self”

(W)holistic Feminism: Decolonial Healing in Women of Color Literature

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Yu-Chen Tai

Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies

The Ohio State University

2016

Dissertation Committee:

Guisela Latorre, Advisor

Mary Thomas

Christine (Cricket) Keating

Yu-Chen Tai

2016

Abstract

This dissertation explores healing subject formation in women of color self-narratives vis-à-vis delineation of a decolonial spatiality of differences at ecological, embodied, and coalitional levels. I examine self-narratives written by feminists of color across racial and cultural divides, focusing on Linda Hogan’s memoir, Gloria Anzaldúa’s autohistoria, and

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s autobiography. I argue that in order to resist and recover from the colonial violence done to women of color, the authors in the selected writings point to a shared feminist and decolonial approach to healing that involves a continuous praxis of liquefying the space between differences to catalyze decolonial healing. I argue that liquefying the space of differences means disrupting a colonial spatiality that categorizes, compartmentalizes, contains, and dominates differences. While the colonial spatiality demarcates solid borders which prevent differences from getting in touch with each other, a liquefied decolonial spatiality highlights permeable boundaries of differences so that the other can interact with the self and the self with the other in a mutually flourishing fashion. Porosity, multiplicity, and mutual flourishing constitute the three crucial dimensions of decolonial spatiality; these conditions are conducive for subjects to transform the wounded self into the healing self.

Dedication

To my mother

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Acknowledgements

M dissertation and myself as a scholar could not blossom without the intellectual, material, and emotional nurture from many sources. The Department of Women’s,

Gender and Sexuality provided me an intellectually challenging and financially secure soil to grow as a scholar. My project would be difficult to materialize without the support from Coca-Cola Critical Difference for Women Graduate Student Research Grant on

Women, Gender and Gender Equity, Elizabeth D. Gee Grant for Women’s, Gender and

Sexuality Studies Research, and L.A.S.E.R. (Latino & Latin American Space for

Enrichment and Research)/Humanities Institute Graduate Fellowship at OSU.

A big thank you goes to my committee members who provided me constructive feedback and guidance on how to turn my nascent research ideas in my prospectus into the current full-fledged dissertation. I also thank you for spending your precious time in the already busy schedules writing me recommendation letters for grant and job applications. I could not have wished for a more caring advisor than Dr. Guisela Latorre, who played many roles in my academic journey. As a mentor, you generously invested in me much of your time and energy to guide me intellectually and collaboratively out of the labyrinth of graduate school. I appreciate that you accompanied me at the last stage of completing this dissertation as a writing partner. I thank you for being a friend with whom I could confide my vulnerabilities in life. Thank you Guisela for everything you

have done for me. I am also grateful to have the unwavering support from Dr. Mary

Thomas, especially in the early years of my graduate career. When I first navigated the unfamiliar realm of graduate school in the U.S. as an international student, your trust in me really eased my insecurity and boosted my confidence in myself. I also want to thank

Dr. Cricket (Christine) Keating for your encouragement and optimism that always made me hopeful for the future of my intellectual pursuit. I want to express my gratitude to Dr.

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Dr. Lynn Itagaki for introducing me into the Asian American intellectual community at OSU. And without the feedback from the editors of Speaking

Face to Face/Hablando Cara a Cara: The Visionary Philosophy of María Lugones, chapter 3 of this dissertation could not be as polished as it is now. Dr. Jennifer McWeeny,

Dr. Shireen Roshanravan, and Dr. Pedro DiPietro, thank you for your revision comments on the first draft of my work.

My gratitude also goes to my WGSS colleagues. Deema, without your introducing Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands to me, I would probably still be left as an orphan without finding my intellectual maternal genealogy. I also thank you for your comradeship that lasts longer than our graduate careers. Dong, thanks for being a close friend and mentor who worries, laughs, and dreams together with me. I am thankful for having Ally as a friend who nurtured me with bountiful food and who told me that there would always be a home where I can return in the U.S. I am also grateful to spending time with Hyejin and Sarang. All the Korean food you cooked for me and the joys I received from playing with Sarang comforted my increasing anxiety in the last year of writing my dissertation. And Erin, thank you for bouncing back research ideas with me in the last semester of my graduate career. Working with you in the office was relaxing and

intellectually stimulating. Lauren, thank you for supporting me in my low time and celebrating with me whenever my milestones were achieved.

My intellectual life could not prosper without having a functional and balanced personal life. I want to thank my Taiwanese friends in Columbus, OH: Tina, Hao-Ting,

Devin, Linda, Ka-Un, Yi-Li, and Tzu-Hsuan. Thank you for hosting social events regularly to help me relax and for providing a safety net when I needed assistance. I particularly want to express my gratitude to Tina and Hao-Ting. Tina, you cured my homesickness with your hand-made Taiwanese food from time to time. I am thankful that you and Hao-Ting kept me accompanied and comforted me whenever I encountered difficulties in life. I also thank my best friends Carol and Amigo in Taiwan. Chatting with you regularly kept me in touch with Taiwan and less lonely in the foreign land.

My deep gratitude goes toward my family. Mom, thank you for always respecting my decision and sharing my joys and struggles in life. I’m grateful that you let me fly away to pursue my dream rather than kept me tied near you. I know you felt very lonely in the past seven years when I was away from home. But without your unwavering support and sacrifice, I could not become who I am now. My achievement is always yours, too. Dad, thank you for teaching me life lessons and encouraging me to change perspectives on life. Sister, thank you for assuming the responsibility of taking care of

Mom when I could not be on her side. Lastly but not least, I want to express my appreciation to my partner Chia-Chuan. Your patience and trust in me kept our long- distanced relationship alive and healthy. I thank you for everything you have done for me in the past eleven years.

Vita

June 2008 ...... B.As. Drama and Theatre/Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University (Taipei, Taiwan)

June 2008 ...... Women’s and Gender Studies Program Certificate, National Taiwan University (Taipei, Taiwan)

June 2011 ...... M.A. Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, The Ohio State University

2010 to present ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, The Ohio State University

Publications

Tai, (Brena) Yu-Chen. “(Re)Making Neoliberal Ideal Girl Subjects through Round-the- World Travel.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Forthcoming.

Tai, (Brena) Yu-Chen. “The Ripple Imagery as a Decolonial Self: Exploring Multiplicity in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée.” Speaking Face-to-Face/Hablando Cara-a-Cara: The Visionary Philosophy of María Lugones. Ed. Jennifer McWeeny, Pedro Di Pieto, and Shireen Roshanravan. Accepted by editors.

Fields of Study

Major Field: Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Specializations: Chicana Feminism, Women of Color Feminism, Women of Color Literature

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Dedication ...... iii

Acknowledgements ...... iv

Vita ...... vii

Table of Contents ...... viii

List of Figures ...... x

Introduction ...... 1 Self/Other: The Straightjacket of the “Us versus Them” Mentality ...... 4 Unnaturalizing the Divide: Interconnectivity Across differences ...... 12 Bridging the Divide: Politics of Memory, Love Politics, and Healing Wholeness ...... 17 Decolonial Translation as a Methodological Framework ...... 25 Research Methods ...... 32 Chapter Overview ...... 36 Toward a (W)holistic Feminism: From Self/Other to Self~Other ...... 40

Chapter 1: Decolonial Healing: An Ecological Self in Linda Hogan’s The Woman Who Watches Over the World ...... 45 The Road Map of a Native Life ...... 47 Colonial Wounds and a Glimpse of Healing ...... 51 Decolonial Healing ...... 61 Ecological Wholeness from an Indigenous Perspective ...... 68 Homecoming to the Continent ...... 76 An Ecological Self ...... 85

viii

Chapter 2: The Porous and Permeable Body in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Work ...... 89 Body as the Soil of Transformation ...... 91 The Symbiotic Body ...... 94 The Bleeding Body ...... 101 The Writing Body ...... 117 The Permeable Body as an Embodied Decolonial Spatiality ...... 131

Chapter 3: The Ripple Imagery as a Decolonial Self: Exploring María Lugones’s Multiplicity in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée ...... 136 The Relation between Multiplicity and the Decolonial Self ...... 137 The Colonial Context in Dictée ...... 144 Decolonial Selves in Dictée ...... 161 The Ripple Imagery ...... 171

Cyclical Conclusion as a New Beginning: On Eye, I, Ai, and Collective Healing ...... 181 My Coatlicue State ...... 182 Eye/I Crisis ...... 186 Decolonize Darkness ...... 190 Homecoming ...... 193 A Sign ...... 195 From Whirlpool to Ripple ...... 198 A Healing Vision ...... 206

Bibliography ...... 210

List of Figures

Figure 1: Tai Chi Yin Yang Figure ...... 42 Figure 2: An anthropomorphic figure drawn by Gloria Anzaldúa in 1987 ...... 135 Figure 3: "Waiting for BART" drawn by Gloria Anzaldúa in 1978 ...... 135 Figure 4: A biomedical diagram of the larynx in Dictée ...... 179 Figure 5: A diagram of Chinese medical acupuncture body in Dictée ...... 179 Figure 6: A photo of execution in Dictée ...... 179 Figure 7: Chinese calligraphic characters in Dictée ...... 179 Figure 8: English Translation of Figure 7 in Dictée ...... 180

Introduction

Human beings seek integrity like water seeks its level, grow toward creative and just solutions like plants grow toward sunlight, sometimes by crooked paths, but always reaching. -Aurora Levins Morales

In women of color feminist literature, we witness numerous severed or wounded bodies that symbolize the dismembered womanhood and fragmented identities of women of color who reside in geographical, physical, and temporal liminality. For example, we encounter Dana’s lost arm in Octavia E. Butler’s time-travel novel Kindred, Audre

Lorde’s severed breast in her non-fictional work The Cancer Journals, maquiladora women workers’ mutilated and sexually violated bodies in Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s detective novel Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders, and the murdered, assaulted, and poisoned women’s bodies in Ana Castillo’s magic realist novel So Far from God. The violated bodies in women of color literature represent viscerally the violent social reality that women of color and their communities experience on a daily basis. Using writing as their political weapons to catalyze social justice, feminists of color writers depict in their narratives the precarious situations that women of color encounter. However, these writers also envision alternatives of living, thinking, and interacting with differences as potential ways of healing which resist the fragmenting forces that cause the dismemberment of women of color’s bodies. It is important to note that healing does not always involve eliminating all wounds. Instead, in an interview with Irene Lara, Gloria

Anzaldúa suggested that health is not defined by the absence of disease but rather by a state that involves “learning to live with disease, with dysfunction, with wounds, and working toward wholeness” (“Daughter of Coatlicue” 51). In the same interview,

Anzaldúa said, “Health also has to do with holism. . . . I believe in holistic alliances, holistic health where you consider the whole, not just the part” (Lara, “Daughter of

Coatlicue” 51). For Anzaldúa, holism is an integral part in health. But how can wholeness be formed alongside the wounds and the dysfunction? How does the healing that acknowledges vulnerability, as Anzaldúa tells us, depart from the liberal possessive individual that constantly seeks enclosure? What characterizes the holistic cosmology, ontology, and epistemology required to conceptualize wholeness and healing? What kinds of feminist politics capable of facilitating individual and collective healing can emerge in the process of creating wholeness and resisting the debilitating forces that many women of color experience?

My dissertation is inspired first and foremost by Anzaldúa’s work on wholeness as both individual desire to healing and as a holistic feminist politics. To capture this particular understanding of wholeness promoted by Anzaldúa and envisioned by other women of color feminists, I use (w)holistic feminism in this project as an umbrella term to capture those feminist praxes and theories that adopt holistic cosmologies, epistemologies, ethics, and politics to create a dynamic and transformative wholeness as ways of healing the wounds caused by a colonial spatiality and mentality that segregates, alienates, and dominates differences. In this project, I focus on the praxis of decolonial healing as an interventional point to tease out the intricate relation between wholeness, healing, decolonial spatiality, and women of color feminist politics in (w)holistic

feminism. I look into self-narratives written by feminists of color to explore the ways in which they construct decolonial healing selves in their search for wholeness at colonial reduction of humanity and multiplicity. Decolonial healing, I argue, can never be achieved once and for all as an end product. Instead, it requires a continuous praxis of liquefying the space between differences in order to create psychological, spiritual, epistemological, and political wholeness in a dynamic and transformative sense that is not the same as the static unity created by the oppressive logic of purity. To liquefy the space of differences is to disrupt a colonial spatiality that categorizes, compartmentalizes, and contains differences. While the colonial spatiality demarcates solid borders to police differences from getting in touch with each other, a liquefied decolonial spatiality highlights permeable boundaries of differences to allow the other to interact with the self and the self with the other in a mutually flourishing fashion. I contend that only in this decolonial spatiality of differences, a healing subject can emerge; this subject strives to transform the wounded self caused by the antagonistic “us versus them” mentality into a self that embraces wholeness that acknowledges multiplicity. In this project, I illuminate decolonial healing subject formation vis-à-vis decolonial spatiality of differences to highlight that our subject formation not only occurs in the interior psyche but is always embodied, and therefore, taking place in a particular spatiality. To mobilize the formation of a decolonial healing subject who searches for wholeness within the communal requires not only our dismantling of the problems caused by an antagonistic self/other mentality but also our willingness to cultivate a fluid interdependent “self~other” relationship in which the boundary between differences is porous in order to cultivate a healing consciousness. I offer the visual vocabulary of the “self~other” relationship in this project

to articulate a decolonial subject formation conducive to collective healing that occurs in a permeable spatiality of differences. The tilde symbol in the “self~other” expression suggests a wave-like liquid porous boundary between non-dichotomous differences that not only sustains multiplicity in the formation of a healing self but also allows for mutual transformation between differences. In my research and through the examination of selected feminists of color self-narratives, I delineate a holistic cosmological, ontological, and epistemological framework where a decolonial healing self can emerge within the violent structures of oppression to substantiate the visual vocabulary of “self~other” relationship. The framework is characterized by multiplicity, permeability, and mutual transformation of differences. Before laying out the pillars that contribute to a (w)holistic feminist framework, I revisit the liberal tradition of a possessive self and its ramification in feminist politics to identify the problems of the “us versus them” mentality from which a (w)holistic feminism strives to dislodge.

Self/Other: The Straightjacket of the “Us versus Them” Mentality

In Methodology of the Oppressed, Chela Sandoval points out that “the first world is undergoing a democratization of oppression that none can escape” (36). The boundary between the First World and the Third World in the new millennium becomes blurry. In

“Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy,” Andrea Smith identifies three pillars1 of white supremacy to highlight that the line between those who are oppressing and those who are oppressed gets muddy. According to Smith, without recognizing the fact that white supremacy functions under multiple logics, people of

1 Smith’s three pillars of white supremacy refer to slavery/capitalism that mainly targets black people, genocide/colonialism that targets indigenous people, and Orientalism/war that targets immigrants of color. 4

color are often complicit in each other’s oppression without knowing it. In addition,

Anzaldúa suggests that our bodily identity markers are not always in line with our political consciousness when she writes, “some whites embody a woman-of-color consciousness, and some people of color, a ‘white’ consciousness” (“now let us shift”

570). Even though there is no longer unquestionable correspondence between geography, bodily identity markers, and political consciousness to delineate the boundaries of differences, the mentality of “us versus them” that sustains structures of oppression still exists widely in the U.S. society, which means that such structures can also plague some people of color and their scholarship.2

I trace the problem of “us versus them” mentality to liberal possessive individualism that is still prevalent in many aspects of the society, such as legislation.

The liberal individual is constructed as a rational self-enclosed autonomous unit seemingly untouched by any material, historical, and political influences. Neutrality characterizes the liberal individual. Ironically, the neutrality relies on constant evocation of differences as accidental or disadvantageous. That is, the alleged neutral individual who claims to be untouched by historical and political influences can only legitimatize his neutrality through others’ claims of differences vis-à-vis the neutral individual at the same time (Lugones, “Purity” 131). Similarly, critiquing from the perspective of disability studies, Bill Hughes argues that in “a world dominated by possessive

2 For example, Patricia Penn-Hilden’s “How the Border Lies: Some Historical Reflection” critiques the problematic “us/them” divide between American Indians and Chicanos. Penn-Hilden argues that the quarrel over who can represent more authentic Indian leads both sides, Indians and Chicanos, to essentialize “Indianness.” Penn-Hilden contends that Chicanos shun away from their complicity in the colonization of Indians through the historical amnesia of Spanish colonization of the Southwest. The collective amnesia in Chicano appropriation of American Indian history is to maintain the “us versus them” borders and to protect Chicano power over Indians (Penn-Hilden 155).

individualism, the vulnerable do not possess themselves and, therefore, must be reinvented as dependent relative to those who are whole and healthy” (401). It is the articulation of differences as contingent, discrete, and disadvantaged rather than crucial constituent in the construction of our subjectivities that exposes the historical dimension of the alleged universal neutrality. Moreover, Shannon Winnubst points out that the relation between the neutral individual and those who are marked with differences is about ownership and enclosure (42). To put it differently, in the liberal model of the self, the other is always required in order for the self to demarcate a boundary that establishes its own enclosure. In the process, the other is put into an inferior status in comparison to the self.

The liberal legacy of possessive individualism deeply confines our current thinking of the self-other relationship in a dichotomous fashion. Instead of helping us to recognize the interconnectivity among all beings, liberal possessive individualism leads us to “fragmentation and isolation” (Keating, Transformation Now 157). AnaLouise

Keating uses the term, “Me consciousness,” to capture the epistemology that emerges from the liberal possessive individualism. According to Keating, “Me consciousness” is

“an adversarial framework that valorizes and naturalizes competition and self- aggrandizement” (Transformation Now 172); this framework is conflict-driven and follows a zero-sum game. The “Me consciousness” maintains the “us versus them” social mentality that assumes an antagonism between the self and the other. Those who are viewed as “not me,” such as women, people of color, and LGBTQ populations from the sexist, white supremacist, and homophobic viewpoints, are often marked as deviants from the norm and put into inferior positions in the current hierarchies of differences. The

creation of the liberal subject thus goes hand in hand with the establishment of static hierarchies of differences that continuously draws the border between the self and the other rather than bridges the distance between the two.

The rigid hierarchies of differences established in the construction of the liberal possessive individual have their impact on feminist transracial alliance. In Power Lines,

Aimee Carrillo Rowe points out that although women of color are not always considered to be deviants by white women along the racial line, they are often perceived as less important than their white counterparts because of their fewer institutional resources to exchange with their white counterparts. Therefore, alliances with women of color may be undesirable for some white women. Rowe locates the difficulty in building transformative feminist transracial alliance in the problematic zero-sum approach some white women take in alliance building. The zero-sum approach limits our understanding of resources and often leads to the reproduction of white feminist hegemony. The approach suggests “a frame in which the resources available for exchange are, from the outset, fixed, knowable. . . . such a frame precludes an expansive approach to the multiple resources that allies may have to offer. Zero-sum logic renders women of color unintelligible as allies” (Rowe 148; original emphasis). Due to the intersection of racism and sexism in the academy, women of color often have less institutional power in comparison to their white peers. Oftentimes, women of color’s less institutional currency is equated to fewer meaningful resources to bring into alliance building within the zero- sum frame, which leads white women to “retain an affective distance and/or cultivate ambiguously fraught relationships with their women-of-color colleagues” (Rowe 150).

Women of color’s alternative resources potential to nurture transracial feminist alliance

are often ignored, such as their intergenerational memory and strategies of fighting against racialized sexism, gendered racism, and multiple forms of colonialism. If we fail to broaden our conception of what resources are conducive to transracial feminist alliance and only focus on increasing women of color’s institutional power while elevating their status to be equal to that of white women in academia through a liberal feminist framework, it is very likely that we will encounter political impasse because the liberal model of equality has its limitations.

I contend that the liberal model of equality fails to lead us to social justice because it cannot escape a binary and hierarchical framework of understanding differences. The discourse of equality is often evoked in liberal legislation to seek social justice for liberal feminists, such as anti-discrimination laws. The term equality implies that there are always two or more parties involved in a single-axis comparison. To be equal to one another, one of the two must be the reference point for the other marked as lacking or disadvantaged. Then, the gap between the two parties is required to be closed up in order to achieve the liberal sense of equality, namely, to erase the differences and to render them unmarked or neutral once again. Furthermore, the one who demands for equality in the liberal legal system is often the one who believes he/she lacks some attributes the neutral individual has. Thus, within the legal system, the solution to redress inequality is often through restoration to the original state before being wronged or to the ideal neutral state that everyone should be equal in a homogeneous way. However, as

Kimberlé Crenshaw reminded us in her keynote speech in the Gender and States of

Emergency Symposium at The Ohio State University (2011), restoration does not mean improvement or structural change. This demand for restoration lies at the core of the

limits of the liberal sense of equality. The obsession with equality withers our imagination, preventing us from moving beyond neutrality no matter how it is defined.

The question for feminists is whether we really want to return to the neutral state if the neutral state itself is already full of inequality and injustice. Therefore, when a group of individuals who claims the differences they embody to be neutral becomes the only reference point for others who cannot escape identity markers of differences, the demand for equality in the liberal legal system is never an adequate solution to injustice because the discourse of equality only recreates and sustains the myth of the liberal neutral autonomous subject. What we might achieve at best is returning to the norm but never moving beyond it.

Crenshaw’s critique of the liberal model of equality is echoed by Elizabeth

Grosz’s view on the future direction feminists should pursue. In “Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom,” Grosz argues, “the challenge facing feminism today is no longer how to give women a more equal place within existing social networks and relations but how to enable women to partake in the creation of a future unlike the present” (154). For Grosz, what is at stake is not to “give women more adequate recognition (who is it that women require recognition from?), more rights, or more of a voice but how to enable more action, more making and doing, more difference” (“Feminism” 154). That is, the feminist agenda Grosz calls for is future-oriented rather than past-oriented in the sense that we need to break from clinging to the trope of restoration to the original state and move to a collective dreaming of a future unlike the present whose materialization requires direct action rather than passive waiting. Taking the cue from Grosz, my project aims to contribute to the nurturing imagination for social justice. In addition to deconstructing the

“Me consciousness” undergirding liberal possessive individualism which straitjackets our understanding of the self-other interactions and social justice as shown in the previous pages, I take Anzaldúa’s reminder to heart. Anzaldúa reminds us that “[c]hallenging the old self’s orthodoxy is never enough; you must submit a sketch of an alternative self”

(“now let us shift” 559), which inspires me to explore women of color self-narratives so that I draw the contour of an alternative self. The emergence of the alternative self examined in this project is driven by a strong longing to be connected to others rather than to establish clear borders to prevent others from getting in touch with the self. The self I endeavor to delineate in this work is a healing self who strives to heal from the wounds caused by the violent chasm in the “us versus them” mentality and its practices manifested in physical, epistemic, and spiritual violence. The formation of a healing subject in the social reality of fragmentation, alienation, and mutilation is guided by a

“politics of integrity, of being whole” that Aurora Levins Morales calls for (5).

I use the terms “whole” and “wholeness” with caution. I recognize that the terms may alarm scholars when they are conflated with the meanings of homogeneity, unity, fixity, and normalcy. For example, cultural anthropologist Katherine Ewing argues that the coherent and timeless wholeness experienced by the self is illusionary because there are always shifts and inconsistencies in the process of subject formation. Furthermore, the use of wholeness without clarification will be subject to poststructuralist critique. Tru

Leverette also recognizes the potential poststructuralist response to her exploration of womanist wholeness in African American literature: “The idea of a center, an idea that relies on fixity, unity, and full presence, is an awkward one for poststructuralists, who would argue that such characteristics are mythical. There is no fixity. There is no unity.

There is no full presence” (44). Poststructuralist suspicion of wholeness is legitimate when the concept is associated with fixity, homogeneity, and unity.

Moreover, disability studies scholars caution against the oppressive use of wholeness to understand embodiment (Moultrie 2007; Ghai 2002). When physical wholeness becomes the norm of our articulation of embodiment, people with disabilities are considered to be lacking and therefore, aberrant and inferior to people without disabilities. To become “normal,” a disabled body is expected to be prostheticized in order to restore the lacking body to “some semblance of an originary wholeness”

(Mitchell and Snyder 6). Within the ableist structure of oppression, the wholeness of a disabled body facilitated by prostheticization aims to control deviation rather than to catalyze transformation. As David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder insightfully argue, to prostheticize is to “institute a notion of the body within a regime of tolerable deviance”

(6-7). Disability studies scholars eloquently articulate that the language of wholeness is problematic when it is configured into the discourse of ableism. The particular form of wholeness poststructuralist and disability studies scholars legitimately critique is normative wholeness that is ahistorical, static, homogenous, and predetermined. I visualize normative wholeness through the metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle with a predetermined image which can be broken into pieces with clearly-cut boundaries and can be reassembled again without producing something new in the process.

Although normative wholeness helps maintain structures of oppression, there is another conceptualization of wholeness that has liberatory and decolonial potential. It is the latter form of wholeness my project attempts to theorize. Recognizing that the terms whole and wholeness bear a burden, many women of color still reclaim, affirm, and use

the vocabulary in their writing, scholarship, and activism. For example, the notion of becoming whole lies at the core of Anzaldúa’s Coyolxauhqui imperative, Alice Walker’s womanism, Morales’s politics of integrity, and Native American cyclical ceremonial and literary structure that Paula Gunn Allen identifies in The Sacred Hoop. Instead of giving up the concept entirely, I think it will be more productive to further unpack the notion of healing wholeness in women of color literature and theories. I distinguish my use of healing wholeness conducive to the decolonial self that invites border liquefaction conceptualized in women of color writings from normative wholeness that reinforces the liberal and ableist construction of the self that continuously seeks enclosure. In order to pave a ground for my analysis of the decolonial healing self formation in feminists of color writings in the following chapters, I am going to first lay out the theoretical topography in feminist scholarship that helps lift the slash in the “self/other” mentality that fragments women of color in multiple aspects by affirming the ontological interconnectivity and interdependence of differences. I argue that shifting the focus from border demarcation to border liquefaction can enable the healing process to begin.

Unnaturalizing the Divide: Interconnectivity Across differences

Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion. -bell hooks

Interconnectivity of differences is one of the central concepts feminist thinkers have attempted to theorize in feminist ontology, ethics, epistemology, and politics concerning healing in the communal. To dislodge an illusionary authority over one’s action from an individual as in the liberal formation of the self, several feminists emphasize the shared vulnerability and precarity among beings as the foundation to conceptualize a relational

subject formation that defies the “us versus them” approach to differences. The ontological sociality in the construction of our subjectivity has been theorized from multiple angles.

Some feminists approach the interconnectivity of the self and the other from the aspect of psyche interiority. For example, Judith Butler proposes a model of relational subject formation built from an ontological sociality and precariousness that disrupts any claim of an autonomous and self-enclosed subject formation. In Giving an Account of

Oneself, Butler argues that the other is not derivative but primary to subject formation.

The self is never autonomous and transparent but vulnerable and partially opaque because one’s coming into being is triggered by unwilled impingement and address from the other in discourse. The preconditioning of the other in subject formation denotes an inherent sociality in the subject. The preservation of the entwined tie between the self and the other grounds the foundation of Butler’s feminist ethics and responsibility.

While Butler theorizes the relational subject formation within the interior psyche through locating ontological precariousness in the involuntary impingement and interpellation from the other in discourse, Elizabeth Grosz, Margrit Shildrick, and

Suzanne Bost approach ontological vulnerability through the lens of corporeality. Their works displace the centrality of the mind, the interior, and the psyche with an emphasis on materiality when theorizing relational subject formation. Both Grosz’s Volatile Bodies and Shildrick’s Leaky Bodies and Boundaries adopt postmodern theoretical frameworks to theorize a “volatile” or “leaky” nature of the female physical body as the basis of feminist ethics. It is important to note that the body being volatile and leaky in Grosz’s and Shildrick’s works does not indicate a notion of lack or insufficiency. Instead, the

terms highlight the “radical openness to the multiple possibilities for becoming”

(Shildrick 212), and the continuous response and responsibility for “the intimate other, never fully and finally separate, yet always non-identical in multiple ways to the self”

(Schildrick 217). In other words, they insist on understanding difference and identity through a new reconfiguration of the body. The body they theorize emphasizes radical openness to others and welcomes unpredictable change to occur in the interaction both within and between bodies. In Volatile Bodies, Grosz works against the understanding of the body within dichotomous dualism, such as mind/body and interior/exterior. She draws from several philosophers’ non-dualistic frameworks, such as Baruch Spinoza,

Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan, to explore the body from both the inside out and the outside in. Grosz argues that bodies are interfaces that are being pressed and are pressing at the same time. Through the interaction between the exterior and the interior in the surface of the body, unpredictable changes can occur. While Grosz and Schildrick approach corporeality from the post-structuralist perspective, Bost adopts a disability studies framework to provide a model of identity based on corporeal body experiences rather than relying on sociopolitical forms of identity, such as gender, race, and sexuality.

In Encarnación, Bost investigates the permeable body in Chicana feminist literature. Bost contends that the permeability of the body with disability in the works of Anzaldúa,

Cherríe Moraga, and Ana Castillo serves as the crux for alternative formation of community, which opens up new possibilities of subject formation. Recognizing and valuing the uncontainable and unstable nature of the body, Grosz’s conception of volatile bodies, Shildrick’s leaky bodies, and Bost’s permeable bodies all suggest that the ontological sociality between the self and the other hinges on one’s corporeal

vulnerability. The shared vulnerability of our existence in the living body succumbing to change, disease, aging, wounding, and transformation allows for a feminist ethics of care to emerge. Such an ethics demands our responsibility to create communal support for each other at both material and immaterial levels to maintain a political sense of wholeness alongside the existence of suffering.

Other feminist thinkers, such as Anzaldúa and Jacqui Alexander, take a step further to conceptualize the notion of wholeness from the perspective of spirituality.

Spirituality brings in another dimension beyond the theorization of the self and the other in the interior psyche, beyond a human embodiment in previous literature on body politics, and beyond a feminist politics surrounding identities. Scholars who engage spirituality in feminist politics acknowledge the limitation of theorizing interconnectivity only between humans; they extend the scope to include non-humans. For example,

Anzaldúa defines spirituality as a “relational activity leading to deep bonds between people, plants, animals, and the force of nature” (“Foreword to Cassell’s Encyclopedia”

229). In “Pedagogies of the Sacred,” Alexander also emphasizes spirit as the immortal core that links energy of creation together when she says, “It is that living matter that links us to each other, making that which is individual simultaneously collective” (326).

In other words, spirit as the shared energy moving between all beings weaves differences together into a web of interconnectedness. Theorizing ontological interconnectivity from the perspective of spirituality allows us to conceptualize a loving sociality occurring in our ontology, which departs from feminist psychoanalytical and corporeal feminist approaches that start from impingement, harm, and precarity. It is from the work on spiritualized relational subjectivity, holistic epistemology, and spiritual activism

theorized mainly in Anzaldúa’s work and also in other women of color writing that I begin to recognize a (w)holistic feminism that is existing but that is subordinate in the academia, which prompts me to conduct this project.

The radicalness of feminist writings on spirituality not only lies in their resistance to a humanist approach to the concept of interconnectivity between differences but also in their mobilization of spirituality in feminist politics. For example, spirituality lays the ground for Anzaldúa’s radically inclusive coalitional politics, namely, spiritual activism.

It is a politics that moves beyond an identity-based and binary-oppositional framework of politics. Spiritual activism requires us to “leave the opposite bank” to lift the slash between nos/otroas3 [us/them] to re-connect with each other in order to heal (Borderlands

100). Building coalition only along the line of physical and social identities is too limiting for Anzaldúa. She says, “For the politically correct stance we let color, class, and gender separate us from those who would be kindred spirits. So the walls grow higher, the gulfs between us wider, the silences more profound” (Anzaldúa, “La Prieta” 47).

Hence, Anzaldúa calls for a politics built from a shared spiritual belonging to create a holistic alliance across differences.

While Anzaldúa affirms and centers on the existence of spirituality in her work and politics, she never gives up the material corporeal body. Spiritual activism is immaterial as well as material. Laura Pérez also argues that the politics of the spiritual relies on embodiment and materiality; politics of the spiritual is the “manifestation on the

3 Nosotras refers to the feminine “we” in Spanish. Anzaldúa inserts a slash as “nos/otras” to refer to the divisiveness we feel in contemporary world where we feel alienated from each other because we are categorized by different labels and suffering oppressions, such as racism, sexism, and homophobia. For Anzaldúa, to heal is to join together to be “nos+otras” based on the ground of previous unrecognized commonalities and connections instead of sameness (Keating, “Shifting Worlds” 7). 16

earthly plane in acts of goodness with respect to real bodies in human societies, in nature, and on the globe, rather than in vague, abstract, and binary notions of goodness,

God/gods, s/Spirit(s), and spirituality” (297-8). Spiritual work is “a type of body praxis” as Alexander highlights (297). The body serves as the medium that senses and communicates with the spiritual and the spirits of other beings to catalyze our perspective and social change. For instance, Anzaldúa adopts a holistic epistemology that affirms non-scientific and non-rational modes of consciousness and ways of knowing in order to allow spirituality to not only “[transform] our perceptions of ‘ordinary’ life and our relationships with others, but also [encounter] with other realities, other worlds”

(“Foreword to Cassell’s Encyclopedia” 229). Anzaldúa values daydreaming, dreaming, trance states, and other non-scientific modes of knowing in her writing process to explore other realities unseen by the rational eye. Alexander also suggests that a sacred subjectivity is characterized by inherently pluralistic sensibilities that are able to sense those “who [walk] with you” in a spiritual realm in order to acknowledge the already existing community that we forget (300). What Alexander calls for is a politics of memory that goes hand in hand with a politics of spirituality. Without historical memory, we are left alone and alienated when our ontological and spiritual ties to others are severed by the matrix of power.

Bridging the Divide: Politics of Memory, Love Politics, and Healing Wholeness

Although ontological sociality prompts our subject formation, we cannot deny the reality that interconnectivity of differences can be forgotten and even broken by mechanisms of oppression. When the interconnectivity becomes oblivious and damaged,

the chasm between the self and the other widens. Then, a subject is split by opposing forces as if he/she stands across two precipices originally from a big rock, which leads to the physical and psychological alienation and dismemberment experienced by the subject. In order for a subject who experiences the fragmenting forces to transform into a healing subject who desires interconnectivity, a politics of memory is required because historical amnesia keeps the colonized oppressed. Paula Gunn Allen says it well: “the root of oppression is loss of memory” (213). Similarly, in “Age, Race, Class, and Sex:

Women Redefining Difference,” Audre Lorde analyzes the relation between memory and oppression. She argues that generational historical amnesia often serves as a mechanism for those in power to maintain domination. Failing to remember collective history of past and present struggles and activism, the oppressed have to re-invent the wheel every time we seek to liberate ourselves. In other words, historical and generational amnesia not only causes a drain on our political energy but also puts us into a predicament of repetition without being able to move forward. The politics of memory then becomes one of the crucial coalitional strategies for feminists to re-build interconnectivity between similarly broken worlds, which enables us to weave individual, communal, historical, and spatial fragments into a healing wholeness. To practice politics of memory, spatial transgression and creative literacy are required.

To resist walking within the line of the compartmentalized spatiality drawn by those in power, Cherríe Moraga suggests that we need to adopt a politics of memory by getting in touch with those people who we are not supposed to remember in order to build connection with them. Those people who we are taught to look down or ignore are often the ones marked as the other by the society, such as those from racial minorities, the

poor, and LGBTQ community. In Moraga’s words, remembering is an act of “[d]aring to recognize each other again and again in a context that seems bent on making strangers of us all” (Xicana Codex 278). Through subversive remembering, the supposedly despicable others could become our potential allies who struggle and endure together.

In addition to Moraga’s politics of memory, María Lugones’s influential concept of “world”4-traveling can also be read as a spatial strategy to perform a politics of memory. Through transgressing the oppressive spatiality that compartmentalizes us, we remember not only the parts of our selves perceived by others that we suppress or forget but also others’ own perceptions of themselves in their “worlds” that we refuse to recognize. It is important to note that Lugones’s notion of “world”-traveling is driven not by colonial curiosity and consumption of differences but by coalitional responsibility and appreciation of differences. We may experience a sense of insecurity because we risk our ground in the process of “world”-traveling, but the work must be done in order to make ourselves “fully subjects to each other” (Lugones, “Playfulness” 97). By remembering both the selves we suppress and the others we ignore, “world”-traveling can help us catalyze a shift from being one person to a different person in terms of perception and consciousness, through which we also allow new interactions between the self and the other to take place. “World”-traveling then permits us to recognize each other’s humanity and to build affinity between different “worlds.” Lugones believes that traveling to other’s “world” can facilitate identification with one another because we can understand

4 “Worlds” defined by Lugones must be inhabited by “some flesh and blood people” or by imaginary people, or by people who are dead (“Playfulness” 87). A “world” needs not to be a whole construction of a society and can be occupied by only a few people. A “world” may be rudimentary, which allows for nascent transformative possibilities to grow full-fleshed in the future. In Lugones’s own words, a “world” may be “an incomplete visionary non-utopian construction of life, or it may be a traditional construction of life” (“Playfulness” 88) 19

“what it is to be them and what it is to be ourselves in their eyes” (“Playfulness” 97; original emphasis). Through “world”-traveling, we carry out the rebellious act of recognizing each other through and through as Moraga’s politics of memory does.

“World”-traveling helps us locate a linkage that weaves differences together in order to establish a common ground without presuming any sense of sameness. In addition, identification achieved through “world”-traveling encourages epistemic quilting work that links the “worlds” together and bridge the “us versus them” chasm.

In politics of memory, I suggest that epistemic quilting and world bridging facilitated by spatial transgression goes hand in hand with creative literacy to perform subversive remembrance. As Theresa Delgadillo argues, “remembrance is an act of interpretation and self-creation” (184). Moreover, the ability to re-narrate the self, the body, and social reality is an integral part to healing. Judith Farquar points out, “Illness alters a sufferer’s perceptions and practices of embodiment, and therapy, if it works at all, alters them again” (69). Healing therefore involves a capability of creative literacy to practice an “epistemology out of the fragments” that Martha Chew Sánchez articulates in order to construct a dynamic and transformative form of wholeness out of the current broken states. Moreover, the self and the body can be remade and re-narrated in the process of healing reveals a historical dimension of wholeness that is not a timeless one.

In “Textual Healing, Claiming Black Women’s Bodies, the Erotic, and Resistance in

Contemporary Novels of Slavery,” Farah Jasmine Griffin points out that re-narrating and re-inventing become possible because the scarred and mutilated black women’s bodies are historical rather than essential (534). To enact a politics of memory for the purposes of healing the fragmented self and the alienated community to conceptualize a wholeness

that invites openness and multiple possibilities to future (re)making, we need to craft

“retrofitted memory” in Maylei Blackwell’s notion. Blackwell proposes the concept of retrofitted memory to denote “a practice whereby social actors read the interstices, gaps, and silences of existing historical narratives in order to retrofit, rework, and refashion old narratives to create new historical openings, political possibilities, and genealogies of resistance” (102). I read Blackwell’s practice of retrofitted memory as an act that cultivates creative literacy in multiple dimensions. That is, retrofitted memory requires visual, acoustic, and instinctual sensibilities to read the generational memories falling into the shadowy interstices, listen to the faint storytelling of the marginalized, and follow the instinctual direction where our sense of belonging drives us.

Politics of memory aims to weave the fragmented worlds, selves, and perceptions together in order to unfold alternative ways of living, acting, and dreaming when the ontological interconnectivity is forgotten. On the one hand, subversive remembrance involves deconstructing the colonial grammar of spatiality through individual and collective transgression against the unnatural compartmentalization of people to get in touch with each other and to recognize each other’s humanity. On the other hand, to enact politics of memory requires our practice of creative literacy to conceptualize a form of

“playful wholeness” to borrow Tru Leverette’s words. Building from Alice Walker’s womanism, Leverette proposes “playful wholeness” to describe “wholeness through multiplicity” (46; original emphasis). Playful wholeness welcomes surprise, uncertainty, and infinite interpretations and possibilities. I argue that the yearning to remember comes from recognition of the fundamental interdependence between oneself and others as well as a desire to become whole within the communal.

I contend that the politics of memory driving the creation of wholeness that consists of multiplicities and openness rather than sameness and closure is motivated by love. To practice love is to recognize that we are in each other’s struggle and to ensure that the self is always in the other and vice versa. Love as a praxis involves the work of weaving, quilting, and connection. As bell hooks emphasizes, “The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other” (93). Both Moraga's politics of memory and Lugones's "world"-traveling can be viewed as the praxis of love politics conducive to create healing wholeness. Through the practices, we can broaden our political community to heal the alienation between differences caused by the "us versus them" mentality, which is one of the defining characteristics of love politics. As Jennifer

Nash points out, love politics emphasizes a process of remaking the self that continuously pushes the limitations of the self and orientates the self toward differences in order to expand the scope of who we are in our political communities. Embracing differences is the foundation to rework the self into a healing self through non-identitarian politics. As

Nash argues, "The self is then able to recognize the possibility of a politics organized not around the elisions (and illusions) of sameness, but around the vibrancy and complexity of difference" (11).

It is important to note that when love serves as a politics and an ethics, it is not so much about a feeling as about “an action” that always “assumes accountability and responsibility” as hooks informs us (13). hooks associates love with the political project of social justice when she writes, “Awakening to love can happen only as we let go of our obsession with power and domination” (87). Love politics is about letting go of mastery and control to allow for an originality of relation between actors to change themselves

and to re-invent their relationship with each other. Chela Sandoval also sees the integral part love plays in coalition building. Sandoval sees love as a social movement enacted by

“revolutionary, mobile, and global coalitions of citizen-activists who are allied through the apparatus of emancipation” (184). Building from the works of Chela Sandoval,

Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and Junot Díaz, Yomaira Figueroa argues that decolonial love as a praxis involves efforts of recognizing the humanity of the colonized that is reduced by the colonial matrix of power. It also requires our willingness to build affinity across differentially and different violated, wounded, and traumatized bodies. I suggest that decolonial love can serve as one driving vision and momentum for future feminist direction on creating “a future unlike the present” that Grosz calls for (“Feminism,

Materialism, and Freedom” 154).

Love politics is vision-oriented. Theorizing black feminist love-politics, Nash argues that love-politics is “staunchly utopian” (17). Rather than clinging to a wounded attachment in Wendy Brown’s term, Nash points out that love-politics focuses on dreaming “a yet unwritten future” (18). Nash contends that what distinguishes black feminist love politics’ “utopian impulse” from identitarian politics like intersectionality lies in its “interest in ‘collective escape,’ in the visionary dreaming about ‘going off script’” (17). Nash points out that black feminist love-politics recognizes that “changing the grammar of our contemporary political moment will not remove us from the script that is always already in place” (18). Nash’s warning echoes Lorde’s well-known maxim,

“the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (“The Master’s Tools” 112; original emphasis).

Love-politics is not only utopian but also future-orientated in the sense that the perseverance of practicing love in the face of suffering involves hope. hooks argues,

“Without hope, we cannot return to love” (219). Hope is not only about our own faith in our ability to unfold a future different from the present that causes our suffering but also about the expectation for the following generations to continue our struggle. Analyzing the concept of decolonial reparations in relation to decolonial love, Figuero suggests that one integral component of decolonial reparations includes “hope in future generations’ abilities to continue the struggle for reparations in the face of coloniality” (55). The hope in the future generations to continue our struggle indicates a realistic dimension of healing social wounds in the sense that the centuries-old harm, such as sexism, racism, classism, homophobia and colonialism, requires a long time to heal. None of us possess any magic wand to heal the social wounds; it takes time and multi-generational efforts. It is from this realistic understanding of hope in love politics that we can better grasp Leela

Fernandes’s provocative view on utopia. Fernandes argues that utopias are not impossible but only “inconvenient because they necessitate deep-seated changes in ourselves and in the way in which we live our lives. The irony here is that such ‘theoretical’ utopias require labor” (19; original emphasis). Fernandes continues, “A central part of this labor involves the creation of transformative forms of knowledge” (19). My theorization of a decolonial healing self is motivated by the love-politics that calls for both collective dreaming and transformative forms of knowledge in order to move us closer to the visionary hope for decolonial healing wholeness desired and envisioned by many feminists of color. To theorize the healing wholeness that refuses to walk along the line of unnatural divides of differences to construct a healing self within the communal, we

need an epistemological framework that values the work of bridging, weaving, and quilting.

Decolonial Translation as a Methodological Framework

In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins identifies four5 interrelated domains of power that maintain social hierarchies and injustice; these include the structural, the disciplinary, the hegemonic, and the interpersonal domains. My project focuses on the third domain of power, the hegemonic one that serves as a link between the other three domains. As Collins points out, “[t]he significance of the hegemonic domain of power lies in its ability to shape consciousness via the manipulation of ideas, images, symbols, and ideologies” (285). To resist this particular domain of power,

Collins suggests that we deconstruct hegemonic ideologies and then come up with new knowledges that can provide us with alternatives to the status quo. Following Collins’s advice, this project aims to offer alternative interpretative frameworks and epistemological models inspired by women of color writings to decolonize our ways of thinking the relationship between the self and the other and to excavate counterhegemonic epistemologies conducive to social transformation. I adopt a conceptual framework I call “decolonial translation” informed particularly by decolonial

5 Collins identifies four interrelated domains of power that oppress Black women and Black women’s corresponding resistance strategies. The first domain of power is the structural one with “its emphasis on large-scale, interlocking social institutions” (Collins 277). The second domain of power is the disciplinary one that manages power relations established in the structural domain through surveillance and other mechanisms. The third domain is the hegemonic domain of power that justifies other domains of power. The fourth domain is the interpersonal domain of power that functions through “routinized, day-to-day practices of how people treat one another (e.g. micro-level of social organization)” (Collins 287). The oppression in the interpersonal domain of power occurs at a daily basis, so it often goes unnoticed.

theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos to tackle the hegemonic domain of power in order to look for decolonial options.

I recognize that using the term of translation could be problematic at first glance because it is burdened with a long colonial and imperial history of subsuming the colonized or those who are marked as others into the hegemonic interpretative and epistemological framework of the colonizing self through translation practices. As Paul

Patton identifies, a problematic parallel exists between colonization and translation:

“Colonization is a means of bridging this division between the domestic and the foreign.

It is a means of translating the foreign into the domestic and the metaphoric into the proper” (25-26). Incorporating the foreign, the unfamiliar, and the colonized into the domestic, the familiar, and the modern is an act of “translation as erasure” in Rolando

Vázquez’s words. According to Vázquez, classification and incorporation are mechanisms of translation as erasure that appropriate and subsume the histories and cultures of the colonized into the corpus of modern/colonial matrix of power in order to justify the colonized as “the backward, the savage, the primitive other” for domination and subordination (32). In addition, Vázquez argues that translation as erasure aims to expand epistemic territory of modernity; only those that can be included in the regime of visibility are regarded as the real. It is in this sense that translation of erasure is ruled by

“a single economy of truth” (Vázquez 39). A single economy of truth refers to that those who are marked as the past, the savage, and the backward are unnamed, and therefore, nonexistent in the regime of colonial intelligibility. When translation is in the colonial service, it becomes translation as erasure guided by a politics of reduction, erasing the plurality of colonial experiences and realities.

The act of translation in a colonial context causes even more repercussion within the colonized community when it is enacted and facilitated by the minority within the oppressed, such as colonized women. Malinche6, a key mythical figure whose representation many Chicana feminists have re-worked in cultural production, embodied the internal expulsion within the colonized community due to her translation of languages and cultures between conquerors and the conquered. Malinche was said to be born in the late 15th or early 16th century into a noble family but was sold into slavery by her mother after her father’s death. Malinche later became a mistress of Hernán Cortés, who led the conquest of the Americas. She also served as a translator between indigenous people and the Spanish conquerors during the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Because of her roles as translator and Cortés’s mistress birthing mestizo children, according to the dominant representation, Malinche was portrayed as a traitor to her indigenous community. She was accused of selling out her people to the Spaniards and turning her back to the men in her community, which begot her infamous epithet La Chingada, which literally means

“the fucked one.” The accusation of betrayal and treachery against Malinche due to her role of translator hints at a presumption of purity and authenticity in languages and cultures, which still sustains a “single economy of truth” that Vázquez critiques in the colonial use of translation discussed earlier (39). The discourse of betrayal to one’s community in the act of linguistic and metaphorical translation prevents us from recognizing the possibility of our multiple loyalties and our potential transgression through the very act of translation.

6 Malinche’s birth name was Malintzin. She was called Malinche by the natives during Spanish conquest of Mexico. She was also called Marina, a name given to her by the Spaniards. Malinche was also known as “la lengua, literally means the tongue,” “the metaphor used, by Cortés and the chronicles of the conquest, to refer to Malintzin the translator” (Alarcón 59). 27

Several Chicana feminists, especially those who support coalitional politics across racial, gender, and sexual identities, reclaim Malinche as one of their foremothers and subvert the sexist representation around her. For example, alluding to the myth of

Malinche, Anzaldúa proclaims several times in the second chapter of Borderlands/La

Frontera: “Not me sold my people but they me” (43). In Anzaldúa’s interpretation,

Malinche saw the brutality of her own cultures as well as those of the colonizers; she was exploited by both sides. Resisting to read the mythical figure of Malinche as simply as either a victim or a traitor, Martha Cutter calls for an alternative reading of Malinche’s translation work in order to recognize the potential of using translation to serve resistant, subversive, and transformative goals. Cutter argues that translating between at least three languages (Nahuatl and Mayan tongues and Spanish), Malinche “cannot easily be allied with either a ‘pure’ indigenous discursive presence or a colonizing voice” (2). Malinche is not a passive or treacherous translator but an active mediator between cultures and languages. Cutter argues, “Malinche represents a language that is both intercultural—in that it moves between cultures—and interlingual—in that it meshes and mixes tongues in provocative ways that force rereading of both source and dominant texts” (9). Cutter clarifies that by the practices of translation, an interlingual translator exemplified by

Malinche can “actually facilitate language change, producing dissident translations in which the ‘dominant’ text is undermined or reconfigured; he or she can also produce new expressions, new syntactical constructions that mix both languages to produce something new” (3). Cutter’s re-interpretation of Malinche’s translation practice informs us that although translation may help maintain colonial power, it can also open up decolonial possibilities by forming alternative consciousness not limited to the ones we translate

between. In other words, although translation carries colonial, imperial, and patriarchal historical burden, it can also be used subversively to facilitate decolonial projects. It is within this transgressive and generative reading of translation that I situate decolonial translation as a methodological framework in this project.

My use of decolonial translation is inspired mainly by Santos’s theory of translation. Translation is one of the strategies Santos proposes in his influential article,

“A Critique of Lazy Reason,” to cultivate alternative reason to confront Western modern epistemology and to recover the waste of experiences. In the article, Santos is concerned with the way in which our challenge to Western modern epistemology can offer an alternative to coalition, survival, and social transformation. Santos proposes three approaches to achieve “cosmopolitan reason” that creates a rationality conducive to the recognition of the inexhaustible social experiences through expanding the present and contracting the future (“A Critique of Lazy Reason” 158-9). The three approaches include the sociology of absences, the sociology of emergences,7 and the work of translation. Translation renders the former two approaches coherent. The translation work is “work of epistemological and democratic imagination, aiming to construct new and plural conceptions of social emancipation upon the ruin of the automatic social emancipation of the modern project” (Santos, “A Critique of Lazy Reason” 189).

Cultivating plurality of epistemic locations and emancipatory options is crucial in the decolonial sense of translation.

7 The sociology of absence confronts metonymic reason by expanding the present through the disruption of Western totality, recognizing the waste of experiences, and legitimatizing the experiences rendered nonexistent within the hegemonic production of knowledge. The sociology of emergences aims to deconstruct proleptic reason by contracting the future through putting the future in the logic of care and possibility rather than necessity and unavoidability. 29

Building from Santos’s notion of translation, Vázquez illuminates the underlying politics that guides decolonial translation through his concept of “translation as plurality.”

In contrast with translation as erasure governed by an economy of truth mentioned earlier, translation as plurality is guided by “a politics of difference, an ecology of difference” (Vázquez 41). Vázquez captures the essence of translation as plurality as follows: “Translation as struggle, translation not as border keeping but as border breaking, not as erasure but as the preservation of difference, speaks of a movement of recognition, remembrance and emergence” (42). Translation as erasure subsumes differences into the colonial frame of intelligibility to police the border of differences through violence or neglect; by contrast, translation as plurality values recognizing differences on an equal term thus allowing for creative interaction, regeneration, and transformation between differences.

Moving from translation as erasure to translation as plurality is to shift from the

“abyssal thinking”8 that Santos criticizes to “an ecology of knowledges” that Santos advocates. An ecology of knowledges recognizes a plurality of knowledges and incompleteness of any specific knowledge. It requires radical co-presence of knowledges without subsuming one under the other. Moreover, Santos argues that knowledges should serve as praxis in an ecology of knowledges rather than merely as representation of

8 According to Santos, abyssal thinking is an epistemological system of “visible and invisible distinctions, the invisible ones being the foundation of the visible ones” (“Beyond Abyssal Thinking 45). An epistemological line created by a matrix of power divides two sides of the line in spatiality and temporality in abyssal thinking. One side is resided by those in power; Santos calls it “this side of the line.” The other side of the line is where the oppressed are situated. The main problem of abyssal thinking lies in the fact that the hegemonic power on this side of the line turns the simultaneity of the two sides into “noncontemporaneity” (Santos, “Beyond Abyssal Thinking” 50). The other side of the line where those who are deemed as subhumans is turned into the past of this side of the line. Then, the two co-existing realities are conceptualized into a single linear reality. The other side of the line is subsumed by this side of the line through appropriation and violence. The “impossibility of the copresence of the two sides of the line” characterizes abyssal thinking (Santos, “Beyond Abyssal Thinking” 45). 30

reality. That is to say, knowledges should intervene in social reality to catalyze change and to make the colonized intelligible when the representational framework is limited and insufficient to comprehend the realities of the colonized.

Decolonial translation guided by an ecology of knowledges involves epistemological and political communication between differences to find commonalities as points of translation. In this sense, translation labor works for decolonial politics. As

Santos suggests, “The points in common represent the possibility of a bottom-up aggregation or combination, the only possible alternative to a top-down aggregation imposed by a grand theory or a privileged social actor” (“A Critique of Lazy Reason”

183). Ultimately, decolonial translation strives for facilitating conversation9 between differences with an attempt to build a common ground for community for transformation rather than conversion of differences into a single hegemonic ideology to maintain the status quo that divides and hierarchizes differences. Locating commonalities in decolonial translation work is to practice an ecology of knowledges as “interknowledge” that searches for intersubjectivity (Santos, “Beyond Abyssal Thinking 66).

The search for interknowledge and intersubjectivity is also a search for wholeness in the process of decolonial translation. Santos contends, “[t]he idea and feeling of want and incompleteness create motivation for the work of translation” (“A Critique of Lazy

Reason” 181). This feeling of want for mutual intelligibility across differences not only characterizes the very drive for translation between differences but also facilitates epistemological decolonization and social transformation. It is from this crucial feature of

9 The contrast between conversation and conversion is clearly elucidated in Santos’s thinking: “In the West, in conversation and in such legal dealings, we tend to be linear and management led, aiming at conversion of others to our own point of view. Consultation becomes a pretense at conversation when all the time it is actually converting” (Phipps 94) 31

desiring wholeness in the work of decolonial translation that I connect the methodological framework of translation with the central theme of decolonial healing, something I explore throughout the project. In sum, what informs my methodology in the project is the decolonial form of translation driven by a desire of becoming whole, guided by a politics of plurality, and manifested in the active search for the creative intersubjectivity among differences for decolonial goals. Decolonial translation is a strategy of relation that regenerates lives in a broken world. It is also a potential strategy for alliance building because it locates a common ground of struggle between differences with the purpose of arriving at collective healing. The decolonial form of translation guides my selection of the literary texts I examine in this project as a whole as well as my exploration of different aspects of healing as a means of becoming whole in each of the following main chapters.

Research Methods

To explore decolonial healing emerging in feminists of color literature, I adopt textual analysis as my main research method. My supplementary methods include iconographic analysis of visual imagery found in primary and secondary texts as well as archival research in Gloria Anzaldúa’s archive housed in the Benson Latin American

Collection at the University of Texas—Austin. I look into literature as my main site of analysis because literature is both representational and visionary. That is, literature not only captures the reality of how people live and experience in real life but also provides alternatives to conceptualize the world differently. As Aurora Levins Morales argues,

“Cultural work, the work of infusing people’s imaginations with possibility, with the

belief in a bigger future, is the essential fuel of revolutionary fire” (4). Reading literature written by the oppressed offers us valuable opportunities to understand the social reality from a new light.

My dissertation centers on three self-narratives written by women of color.

Chicana feminist Anzaldúa’s works across her entire career, Korean American feminist

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s posthumous experimental autobiography titled Dictée, and

Native American feminist Linda Hogan’s memoir entitled The Woman Who Watches

Over the World are the three main texts that I have selected for this project. While the three works are dissimilar at the first glance, they share commonalities. First, the three authors are all colonial subjects who live in more than one world and who engage in decolonial struggles. Anzaldúa was a Chicana, an identity that hinges on the continuous resistance to the internal colonization of the Southwest by the U.S. nation-state after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1948. As Alfredo Mirandé and Evangelina

Enríquez argue in La Chicana: The Mexican American, “Internal colonization means that

Chicanas are free to be Mexican or American but not Chicana, since Chicanos are nonentity in colonial America. In other words, she may be Mexican (i.e., foreign) or

American—a noncolonized non-Chicana” (12). Anzaldúa’s claiming a Chicana identity and her work on breaking down the unnatural physical, bodily, and spiritual boundaries manifested her decolonial consciousness. As for Cha, she was a colonial subject first as

Korean and second as Asian-American. Her resistance to the history and legacy of

Japanese colonization of Korea and to the structure of white supremacy in the U.S. marks her decolonial struggle. In addition to Anzaldúa and Cha, biracial Chickasaw writer

Linda Hogan strives for decolonizing the indigenous land, body, consciousness, and

spirituality from the legacy of settler colonialism in the U.S. in both her writing and her activism. Moreover, the three authors are all subjects residing in in-between places in terms of geographical locations, racial identities, and cultural influences.

I choose the three texts as my main sites of analysis not only because the authors are all colonial subjects struggling between multiple realities but also because their texts fall into the genre of autohistoria, a concept first proposed by Anzaldúa. Autohistoria

“goes beyond the traditional self-portrait or autobiography; in telling the writer/artist’s personal story, it also includes the artist’s cultural history” (Anzaldúa, “Border Arte”

183). In other words, by blending “cultural and personal biographies with memoir, history, storytelling, myth, and other forms of theorizing,” authors of autohistoria aim to create “interwoven individual and collective identities” (Keating, Introduction 9).

Approaching the selected writings in this project from the genre of autohistoria, we will be able to recognize that the healing selves emerging from the self-narratives of

Anzaldúa, Cha, and Hogan are not only about the individual selves but always relational selves amid collective communities and cultural memories. Moreover, I see the genre of autohistoria a form of “medicinal history,” to borrow Morales’s term. According to

Morales, “Medicinal history does not just look for ways to ‘fit in’ more biographies of people from under-represented groups. It shifts the landscape of the question asked” (27).

That is, medicinal history is an inclusive as well as a transformative approach to knowledge production. Reading the autohistorias of Anzaldúa, Cha, and Hogan as medicinal histories, I look into the ways in which the authors adopt politics of memory not only to undermine the colonial histories, legacies, and mentalities but also to create ecological, spiritualized, and coalitional selves in their process of decolonial healing.

In terms of my approach to literature, I do not assume women of color’s literary texts to represent transparent experiences. Instead, I read literature as theory. Kandice

Chuh suggests that to read literature-as-theory is to resist the tendency that presumes

“minoritized literatures as seemingly transparent vehicles of authentic otherness, and the unbounding of ‘theory’” (19). Instead of reading women of color literature as texts for aesthetic appreciation or transparent representation of women of color’s experiences for a curious colonial gaze, I read Anzaldúa’s numerous writings, Cha’s Dictée, and Hogan’s

The Woman Who Watches Over the World as battlefields for disruption of the hegemonic discourses. These texts reject the truth claims attached to these discourses in order to create an alternative reality toward healing. As Anzaldúa says, “I write not just to escape reality but to create a new reality” (“When I Write I Hover” 238). Anzaldúa firmly believes that creativity is a political endeavor; for her, “[c]reative acts are forms of political activism employing definite aesthetic strategies for resisting dominant cultural norms and are not merely aesthetic exercises” (“Haciendo caras” 135). Shared with

Anzaldúa’s view on creativity, Moraga also regards creativity as a communal act and imbues imagination with the potential to catalyze material and political change. For

Moraga, writing is “an act of justice that can generate justice”; through writing and re- writing, we practice a politics of memory to prevent cultural genocide (Xicana Codex

96). Following both Anzaldúa’s and Moraga’s insistence on the interdependent relation between imagination and social transformation, I read literature in this project as theory to see what alternative epistemic and political possibilities the selected creative writings in this project unfold.

By bringing the texts written across racial, ethnic, geographical, and cultural divides onto the same analytical landscape, I see my intellectual role as that of a nepantlera in Anzaldúa’s concept (“(Un)natural Bridges” 248, note 1) or what Moraga calls a welder (“The Welder” 219) to practice decolonial translation. Both nepantleras and welders are bridge persons who work within an impure terrain with blurry boundaries in order to make an effort to communicate between different worlds and realities.

Disrupting disciplinary, cultural, and racial boundaries is an integral part of any decolonial project. As Morales powerfully articulates, “Borders are generally established in order to exercise control, and when we center our attention of the historical empowerment of the oppressed, we inevitably swim rivers, lift barbed wire and violate

‘no trespassing’ signs” (38). Although bridge persons may risk being called traitors from all of the sides they attempt to bridge, I firmly believe that bridging is a crucial step toward epistemic decolonization in order to conceptualize a (w)holistic feminist thought.

Chapter Overview

The three main chapters of the project all focus on the ways in which feminists of color writers conceptualize dynamic wholeness. Their projects are to construct decolonial healing selves in the midst of enduring and defying colonial fragmentation, dehumanization, and alienating forces manifested in different ways in their lives. In the following pages, we will witness various formations of decolonial healing selves in women of color's autohistorias, including Hogan's ecological self, Anzaldúa's spiritualized self, and Cha's coalitional self. Although Hogan, Anzaldúa, and Cha deploy different strategies to create a transformative wholeness in a state of brokenness, all of

them rely on the creation and sustaining of a decolonial spatiality characterized by permeability, multiplicity, and mutual flourishing. I argue that the authors liquefy the solid and enclosed boundaries of differences to map isolated individual wounded self onto an interconnected field of differences for collective healing. The liquefaction of the boundary between differences is a decolonial effort to disrupt colonial spatiality of differences characterized by compartmentalization, fragmentation, and domination of differences that continuously wounds women of color at multiple levels.

Decolonial spatiality is explored in various levels and scopes in this project.

Chapter 1 looks into the cosmological and ecological dimension of decolonial spatiality that facilitates a healing self to emerge. In the chapter titled “Decolonial Healing: An

Ecological Self in Linda Hogan’s The Woman Who Watches Over the World,” I look into

Hogan’s memoir to illuminate the way in which she adopts indigenous ecological cosmology and nature ethics to reveal and reaffirm a suppressed spatiality that is always co-existing with the colonial one. The indigenous spatiality Hogan reclaims is characterized by sustainable exchange and transformation between differences whose boundary is permeable to create a dynamic wholeness with multiplicity. Within this particular spatiality, Hogan constructs a healing self that also has strong ecological implications and whose formation involves an ongoing process of mutual flourishing, regeneration, and transformation between differences and across species. Reclaiming the indigenous spatiality that emphasizes interconnectedness and mutual flourishing of differences, Hogan walks away from a colonial grammar of the space that fragments and dominates differences and moves toward what she calls a geography of healing that democratizes and connects differences in her homecoming journey.

Chapter 2 shifts the scope of decolonial spatiality from a larger ecological one to an embodied one. Chapter 2 is entitled “The Porous and Permeable Body in Gloria

Anzaldúa’s Work.” I look into Anzaldúa’s writings on the body across her entire career to theorize her spiritualized permeable body paradigm that is deeply informed by

Mesoamerican indigenous cosmology. By examining Anzaldúa’s writings on the dimensions of her ecological body, bleeding body, and writing body, I identify three levels of permeability in her body paradigm: ontological, social, and epistemological permeability. I argue that Anzaldúa’s permeable body paradigm can liberate our conception of the body from a sealed vacuum—as the body is imagined in the paradigm of liberal possessive individualism—to a porous field of energy. The permeable body embodies a decolonial spatiality that not only blurs boundaries of dichotomies but also connects the individual with the collective, the material with the immaterial, and the mundane with the spiritual. I contend that only when we re-think the body as a permeable interface that can potentially merge the self and the other can we grasp the inseparable yet invaluable interconnectivity among all beings to heal the suffering caused by the prevalent “us versus them” mentality that exists within the matrix of oppression.

While permeability characterizes decolonial spatiality, it is important to note that making the boundary of differences porous does not lead to the collapse of differences into undistinguishable unity in the formation of decolonial healing selves. In chapter 3 titled “The Ripple Imagery as a Decolonial Self: Exploring María Lugones’s Multiplicity in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée,” I perform a (w)holistic reading of Cha’s experimental autobiography whose narrative structure is highly fragmented. Through the reading, I propose a ripple imagery to illuminate a decolonial memory landscape at the

coalitional level to conceptualize a wholeness that respects the permeable boundary of differences. On the one hand, I adopt decolonial feminist philosopher María Lugones’s theory of multiplicity to illuminate the construction of a decolonial healing self who is both multiplicious and coalitional in Korean-American writer Cha’s Dictée. I show that multiplicity of such a self can exist not only in one body but also across different bodies, separated by culture and time. On the other hand, I use the image of a series of concentric circles as the underlying tenth structure in Dictée to propose a ripple imagery that visualizes Lugones’s notion of multiplicity in her decolonial feminist thought. The ripple imagery delineates a decolonial spatiality from which a coalitional healing self is formed.

The imagery also helps us better grasp the construction of a healing wholeness that can maintain multiplicity both within a body and across bodies in the process of

(re)membering resistance to oppressive powers at different temporal and spatial moments. The three main chapters highlight that decolonial healing as a praxis of creating dynamic wholeness with multiplicity requires a re-worlding process in the aspects of cosmology, ontology, epistemology, and politics to re-conceptualize the spatiality and the relationality between differences that affirms interconnectivity and interdependence.

It is important to note that the examination of the three selected self-narratives in the project is not meant to be exhaustive but inspirational and instrumental in the sense that these narratives help me articulate the (w)holistic cosmology, ontology, epistemology, and politics that is central to the formation of decolonial healing subjects who strive for becoming whole. The framework can be used to analyze other texts and experiences beyond the three exemplified self-narratives analyzed in the project. As my

concluding chapter will demonstrate, the characteristics of permeability, multiplicity, and flourishing of differences in the construction of a decolonial healing self theorized in the main chapters can be applied in real life as praxis. In the concluding chapter titled

“Cyclical Conclusion as a New Beginning: On Eye, I, Ai, and Collective Healing,” I share my own personal narrative about my search for healing my eye/I during the dissertation writing process. I reveal my process of creating a healing self within the intellectual and personal community not to stray away from my research but to build affinity with the decolonial healing selves the authors in the main chapters delineate. By doing so, I emphasize that my role as a researcher is never that of a detached analyzer but rather that of an engaged bridger who not only connects texts written across cultural and racial divides but also links the analytical and the personal.

Toward a (W)holistic Feminism: From Self/Other to Self~Other

In this project, I focus on the exploration of decolonial spatiality when theorizing decolonial healing because the creation of a healing wholeness never occurs in vacuum but always takes place in a concrete land, lived body, and/or landscape of memory.

Therefore, transforming the spatiality where a wounded self is currently located is the first step to catalyze a process of healing. Throughout the project, I argue that decolonizing the enclosed colonial spatiality where the suffering colonial subjects are prisoned requires liquefying the boundary between differences in order for colonial subjects to rebirth themselves. The process of regeneration involves broadening the contour of an individual self through reconnecting with the differences the self used to be alienated from in order to create an interrelated field of healing selves.

To capture the characteristics of non-dichotomous and non-dominant differences, porous boundaries of differences, and transformative wholeness in the making of decolonial healing selves, I propose the visual expression of the “self~other” relationship to decolonize the “self/other” dichotomy. Inspired by Anzaldua’s “Metaphors in the

Tradition of the Shaman,” I see the potential that a metaphor can serve as a meeting point for different texts written across racial groups, cultural traditions, and narrative genres examined in this project. I do so to articulate a common worldview and a similar politics of healing across differences. Anzaldúa articulates clearly the responsibility of writers as shamans as well as the transformative power in images and metaphors for collective healing:

Like the shaman, we transmit information from our consciousness to the physical body of another. If we’re lucky we create, like the shaman, images that induce altered states of consciousness conducive to self- healing. If we’ve done our job well we may give others access to a language and images with which they can articulate/express pain, confusion, joy, and other experiences thus far experienced only on an inarticulated emotional level. From our own and our people’s experiences, we will try to create images and metaphors that will give us a handle on the numinous, a handle on the faculty for self-healing, one that may cure the depressed spirit, the frightened soul. (“Metaphor” 122)

To participate in the collective healing project that Anzaldúa calls for, sharing the visual metaphor of “self~other” is my offering to the academic community. I use the wave-like tilde symbol in my vocabulary of “self~other” to liquefy the solid border manifested in the slash from the “self/other” expression that promotes an antagonistic “us versus them” mentality that any decolonial project should aim to deconstruct. The tilde symbol visualizes a decolonial spatiality that is fluid, transformative, and dynamic. Within the permeable spatiality, an alternative relationship between differences can emerge. The

new relationship different from the antagonistic one can cultivate a healing consciousness that facilitates a creation of transformative wholeness within the communal. The

“self~other” expression in my theorization of decolonial healing will add to feminist non- dichotomous thought, subjectivity studies, decolonial epistemology, and body politics.

The articulation allows us to visualize a decolonial formation of a healing subject that emphasizes the porous boundary between the self and the other, sustains multiplicity within the subject formation, and builds affinity across differences.

Figure 1: Tai Chi Yin Yang Figure My use of the tilde symbol in the “self~other” expression is inspired by the dividing line between yin and yang in the Tai Chi Yin Yang figure in Eastern thought. The tilde symbol mimics the dividing line in the figure when the line is turned horizontally

(see Figure 1). In the Tai Chi Yin Yang figure, the seemingly opposite differences as yin and yang are not clearly-cut dichotomies but non-dichotomous dualities that are mutually constituted, transformative, and interdependent. In addition, the undulating dividing line between yin and yang denotes the ongoing process of metamorphosis between differences. The hierarchy between yin and yang is shifting rather than static; neither yin nor yang can dominate over each other all the time. Moreover, yin and yang can transform and merge into each other to create various forms of wholeness as the circle shape of Tai Chi Yin Yang figure connotes. Inspired by the dividing line between yin and

yang in the figure, I use the tilde symbol in a “self~other” relationship to articulate democratized, non-dominant differences that are interdependent with one other. The

“self~other” expression also suggests the potential for creating a wholeness that does not erase the differences that constitute the whole through continuous interactions between non-dominant differences. Moreover, using “self~other” to contest “self/other,” I want to highlight the shift in my exploration of decolonial healing from a colonial logic of conquest and domination to a decolonial vision of confluence, co-existence, and mutual flourishing.

Furthermore, the tilde symbol also visualizes a wave-like liquid space between differences. The following chapters will show that fluid imageries associated with decolonial healing are salient in the self-narratives written by Hogan, Anzaldúa, and Cha and my theorization of healing. For example, Hogan adopts an indigenous cosmology that conceptualizes life beginning from water rather than dust as seen in Judeo-Christian belief to understand an ecological wholeness in her memoir. Hogan also uses the transformation of a sea goddess as a central symbol to articulate her notion of decolonial healing. As for Anzaldúa, her spiritualized understanding of the body relies on the creation and maintenance of a fluid energy field where her wounded body becomes a nexus that connects with differences in order to construct a healing self. Moreover, in my reading of Cha’s Dictée through Lugones’s decolonial feminist framework, I distill a ripple imagery based on her image of a series of concentric circles to illuminate her coalitional decolonial self. All of the chapters use fluid visual imageries to highlight the permeable temporal, spatial, categorical, bodily, and epistemological boundaries of differences to create a resistant community of differences for reciprocal healing.

Therefore, the tilde symbol in the “self~other” articulation also visualizes those watery, liquefied, and porous imageries emerging from the works I examine. In the following pages, the theoretical “self~other” expression will become concretized and embodied in the process of forming decolonial healing selves in women of color autohistorias.

Chapter 1: Decolonial Healing: An Ecological Self in Linda Hogan’s The Woman Who Watches Over the World

Elizabeth Archuleta notices that cartography is a common metaphor indigenous women use to describe their experiences and “the process of survival in terms of following maps, paths, or markers as if they too were preparing the way for others who would follow them” (94). Many Native women writers participate in the project of decolonial cartography in their literary works in order to carve out an indigenous spatiality conducive for them to rework their wounded selves to become healing selves.

There is a close link between spatiality and identity. The transformation of a fragmented

Native identity relies on the creation of an alternative spatiality different from the colonial one. As Alette Willis suggests, restoring a lost self requires rediscovering a suppressed spatiality (89). Construction of the self is never transcendent from the place but depends on it. Donelle Dreese articulates clearly the interconnection between place and the self when she writes: “We are our environments. We take in, physically and psychologically, our surroundings, and they become part of who we are. Place and the self are not separate entities” (20). Similarly, Mishuana Goeman suggests, “How we have come to see land and water are closely linked to how we see ourselves and others and how we engage the world” (49). Reading within the frameworks that Dreese and Goeman provide, I argue that the formation of a decolonial Native self in Native American women’s literature often involves not only disruption of a “grammar of settler space”

characterized by enclosure, categorization, and possession (Goeman 251) but also creation of a decolonial spatiality that emphasizes fluidity, relationality, and mutual flourishing between differences. It is important to note that the self that Native people search for is not a liberal possessive self but a self that is “transpersonal and includes a society, a past, and a place” (Bevis 19). In other words, the Native self is a communal self who shares spatial, spiritual, and temporal boundaries with other beings in the indigenous space where the very self is formed.

But what does such a transpersonal Native self and the decolonial spatiality that the self grounds itself look like? How does decolonial spatiality promote collective healing? In this chapter, I turn to mixed-blood Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan’s memoir,

The Woman Who Watches Over the World, to exemplify the praxis of Native cartography in the construction of a decolonial Native self in relation to an indigenous spatiality that is suppressed yet always co-existing with the colonial one. Hogan’s decolonial cartography is informed by indigenous nature ethics that promotes ecological dynamic wholeness. Hogan’s map-drawing practice involves not merely breaking down the boundaries established by the colonial grammar of space characterized by ownership and domination but also re-building kindred relationships with all that live in the continent where she resides. In an anthropocentric society where we live now, all life forms, human and non-human, become more and more like commodities and objects to be exploited rather than subjects to be respected. Therefore, the interdependent and democratic ecological relationships that Hogan and other Native Americans value are no longer self- evident. It is within this context that I argue that in her self-narrative, Hogan’s act of rebuilding ecological kindred relations with other lives to facilitate her healing should be

viewed as her decolonial praxis in the remaking of a Native self. Engaging with the land from an indigenous perspective, Hogan cultivates an ecological self never in isolation from other life forms but always in the midst of them and in kinship with them.

The Road Map of a Native Life

Linda Hogan is a novelist, poet, essayist, teacher, and activist known for her commitment to environmental justice. The Woman Who Watches Over the World is

Hogan’s memoir. It documents the various life experiences of Hogan as a Native

American woman in childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and parenthood. Hogan shares honestly her various life experiences of alienation, frustration, disorientation, and suffering in the memoir. For example, she reveals her internal conflicts caused by her in- between experience as a biracial woman whose father is Chickasaw and whose mother is white. She also retells her silent childhood in a house without words and intimacy. When she was young, Hogan struggled over finding a language to express herself and building emotional connection with her parents. Hogan grew up in a silent house because of her father’s long absence when stationing in foreign countries as an army sergeant and her mother’s seclusion in her own world due to long-hour work and emotional distress.

Through finding her words in writing and learning through life failure and mistakes,

Hogan gradually found the light out of the labyrinth of her silent childhood and disoriented adolescence. But when starting her own family, Hogan faced significant challenges again in the process of raising her two adopted Native American daughters who were previously physically and emotionally abused. In addition to the obstacles she encountered in relationship with other people, Hogan also shares her struggle over her

own body. She reveals her experience of living with chronic fibromyalgia and coping with a head injury caused by a serious horse accident. While the overall self-narrative is interspersed with the stories of pain, suffering and violence, healing always lies at the core of the text. As Hogan states, “I sat down to write about pain and wrote, instead, about healing, history, and survival” (16).

It is also important to note that Hogan’s life experiences are woven into larger narratives: her family history, Native American collective memory, indigenous myth and her spiritual reflection on the world and the animals she encounters. Hogan provides a

(w)holistic representation of human experiences that are deeply connected to and dependent on the stories of animals, land, ancestral memories, and spirituality. The literary fabric of The Woman Who Watches Over the World consists of various genres.

Therefore, I suggest that Hogan’s text also falls into the genre of what Gloria Anzaldúa calls “autohistoria”. Autohistoria “goes beyond the traditional self-portrait or autobiography; in telling the writer/artist’s personal story, it also includes the artist’s cultural history” (Anzaldúa, “Border Arte” 183). In other words, by blending “cultural and personal biographies with memoir, history, storytelling, myth, and other forms of theorizing,” authors of autohistoria aim to create “interwoven individual and collective identities” (Keating, Introduction 9). Reading within this framework, the Native self that

Hogan constructs is one with porous rather than enclosed historical, spatial, and memorial boundary shared with other people in the communities where she belongs.

What’s more, I suggest that The Woman Who Watches Over the World can be read as a literary map that documents the author’s homecoming journey from a Native perspective. Hogan states clearly at the beginning of the text that she wishes to “offer up

a map and say, ‘This way’” when young people in reservations ask how she has survived her life (14). However, drawing a map that provides guidance on how to reclaim and affirm Native way of living is not easy. Similar to many Native Americans, coming home for Hogan is a difficult, disorienting, and painful process because “[t]here are no roads through, no paths known, no maps or directions” (Hogan 14). A decolonial map that

Hogan delineates in her narrative is an embodied one and still in progress. No ready- made map exists for Hogan to follow. Instead, through trials and errors, Hogan uses her life experiences to walk out a path toward an alternative spatiality where she can transform a lost Native self in the settler colonial cartography to a decolonial healing self.

The decolonial spatiality presented in Hogan’s autohistoria is fluid and liquefied, which is foreshadowed in Hogan’s insistence that the origin of life is from water rather than from dust. Early in her work, Hogan writes:

It must have been a desert person who said from dust we come to dust we return, because, for most of us, water is the true element of our origin. Broken birthwaters signal our emergence into the air world, and through our lifetimes it is water that sustains us, water that is the human substance, the matter of cells. (31)

Locating the origin of life in water, Hogan highlights that the space from where life emerges is fluid rather than definite; the boundary of the environment that sustains life is porous rather than solid. Hogan relies on a watery and fluid imagery to construct her decolonial spatiality, which is consistent with her politics of place manifested across her writings and her interviews. In “Breaking Boundaries: Writing Past Gender, Genre, and

Genocide in Linda Hogan,” Peggy Maddux Ackerberg argues that Hogan’s politics of place is guided by a “boundary-breaking imperative”, an imperative to “break, break down, break open, break out and break free” (7). One of the examples that show Hogan’s

efforts to break down boundaries is her use of mixed genres in her self-narrative as mentioned earlier. I argue that for Hogan, the imperative to break down genre boundaries is not only for the purpose of literary innovation but also out of a decolonial yearning to transgress a colonial spatiality that confines her.

Critiquing colonial cartography is a recurring theme in Hogan’s literary works.

The way that colonizers conceptualize space as individual property rather than sacred communal home contributes to the colonial wounds of Native Americans. For instance, in her novel Solar Storms, Hogan presents the tension between European maps and indigenous maps when indigenous people fight for water rights in a remote region of the boundary waters between Canada and Minnesota. In her analysis of Solar Storms in

“Writing Deeper Maps,” Kelli Lyon Johnson argues that “Hogan finds European maps lacking. European maps are incapable of representing the movement, rhythms, and ecology of the boundary waters region” (110). Johnson elaborates that Hogan’s distrust of European maps hinges on the role that the maps play in the genocide of Native

Americans. Johnson argues, “Because they are so closely linked to definitions of and claims to Native lands, European maps iterate, instigate, and justify violence against the people to whom those lands belong” (106). The violence against the land goes hand in hand with the physical, psychological, epistemic, and spiritual violence against Native

Americans. In her autohistoria, Hogan retells the colonial wounds of Native Americans caused by the dispossession of their ancestral land at both the levels of her family history and the collective Native history. The colonial wounds are still fresh, awaiting to be healed.

Colonial Wounds and a Glimpse of Healing

In The Woman Who Watches Over the World, Hogan’s struggle in a colonial spatiality that fragments her Native identity is symbolized in a broken clay statue that she purchased from a museum gift shop. The name of the clay woman statue is “The Bruja

Who Watches Over the Earth”; she flew over the earth while attached to it (Hogan 17).

When the clay woman was shipped to Hogan from the museum gift shop, she was not whole. Her legs and one of her hands fell off and later her nose broke off. Hogan was unable to glue the parts of the body back to the statue successfully. The broken condition of the clay woman could not be repaired through restoration. Although Hogan was initially disappointed at the continuous brokenness of the clay woman, she soon realized that “the woman who watches over us is as broken as the land, as hurt as the flesh people.

She is a true representation of the world she flies above. Something between us and earth has broken” (18). The external violence during shipping leads the clay woman to be alienated from her home that is the earth from which the clay is made. Telling the story of the broken clay woman right after the introduction to her autohistoria, Hogan foregrounds that one of the collective colonial wounds she hopes to heal is related to the forceful removal of Native people from their land and the dispossession of indigenous land in the settler colonial state of U.S.

For Native Americans, their physical, emotional, and spiritual wounds often include ravages of the land. Hogan recollects the incidents of violence against Native

Americans in association with the violence against the Native land. For instance, she tells a history of Chickasaws on the Trail of Tears in her autohistoria (54-56). The Chickasaw was one of the five tribes along with the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole that

suffered through the arduous removal journey from their homelands on the east to locations west of the Mississippi River during the decade following the passage of the

United States Indian Removal Act of 1830 (Thornton 289). Chickasaw tears on the trail were generated not only by their forced removal from their Native land by the U.S. settler state but also by the imposition of a colonial spatiality on the communal land. Hogan writes, “The federal government’s plans in those days were to put all American Indian tribes in Oklahoma and build a wall around it, to keep us contained in the country which came to be called Indian Territory. It was then a place they didn’t want” (55). Making man-made walls to make a land that was once continuous into clear compartments follows a colonial logic that puts people into hierarchical categories along the racial, gender, and class lines. In the white supremacist racial politics, Native Americans are not recognized as full citizens and not even full humans; hence, they are put into undesirable places to live, sites that are forgotten in the national geography.

Even within Indian territories, keeping the integrity of their land is also a daily struggle when colonizers continuously prey on any lucrative natural resources in these territories. Hogan’s father once told her that he found the trees near their house gone one day when he took a wagon into town at the time when white men stole trees to sell hardwood for gunstocks (Hogan 118). In addition, during the 1930s, Native Americans experienced massive land loss. Hogan’s grandfather was a case in point. Hogan explains that “legal problems, the Depression, foreclosures, and the closing of the banks [that] took all his assets” (52). Moreover, she states that her grandfather’s case is common among Chickasaws during that historical time period (52). In an interview with Patricia

Clark Smith, Hogan elaborates that many Chickasaws were foreclosed upon by the banks

during the period, which led them to be “a landless tribe” (146). Hogan continues, “There is no reservation, and I really know of no one who still has their original allotment”

(Smith 146). Hogan’s statements indicate how prevalent land loss among the Chickasaws has been.

The loss of indigenous land causes serious identity crises for many Native

American populations who follow spatial-based traditions rather than temporal ones.

Hogan’s grandfather exemplifies the close links between land and identity. He used to be a confident rancher and cowboy but later lost himself to alcohol when he became landless. The deprival of his land shattered his Native identity because many Native

Americans think of their past and future in relationship to the land. Their historical memory is spatial and contextual. J. Donald Hughes makes it clear that Native people

“[see] the past as giving them roots in a particular land, with its air, water, weather, and living things, all connected with the events that marked their life as a people…. As long as they [keep] their relationship to that land, they [have] a living continuity with their own past” (107-8). Reading within this indigenous context, it becomes clear that Hogan’s grandfather’s loss of his land uproots his Native identity from the very land where he used to ground himself and where he shared memories with other lives. After the land loss, Hogan’s grandfather also lost himself to alcohol in order to forget the pain of colonization. It is important to note that Hogan distinguishes a drunk from an alcoholic in her autohistoria. For Hogan, alcoholism is often associated with the realm of morality; those who are alcoholic are considered to be weak-willed. In contrast, drunkenness of many Native Americans is not related to morality but “a way of not remembering,” and

“an escape from the pain of an American history” (Hogan 54). By making the distinction

between a drunk and an alcoholic, Hogan challenges the stereotype of Native Americans as immoral alcoholics. Hogan asks us to read her grandfather and other Native Americans who engage in self-destructive acts after the dispossession of indigenous land and the value attached to the land within the interpretative framework of colonial psychic trauma.10

In addition to the symbol of the clay woman, Hogan uses another symbol, the indigenous sea goddess Sedna, to capture the colonial wounds experienced not only by

Native Americans in general but also by Native American women in particular. The myth of Sedna is a recurrent narrative component interspersed across Hogan’s self-narrative.

Sedna’s legend is a creation story circulated widely in the pan-Arctic Inuit oral tradition

(Kennedy 211). Hogan tells a version of Sedna’s life in which her father married her to an old homely man living on an island. When her father was about to leave, Sedna held tight to her father’s boat because she wanted to go home with him. Rather than letting

Sedna go with him, her father cut off her fingers when he could not loosen her grip.

Sedna’s cut fingers later grew into sea animals, such as whales, seals, walruses, and narwhals.

The violence against Sedna can be interpreted in at least two levels. In the first level, Sedna’s body is a casualty of patriarchal violence. Her body is treated as a property to be passed on from one man to the other when her father married her off to a man without her consent. Moreover, like many Native women and women of color, the

10 In the article, “The American Indian Holocaust: Healing Historical Unresolved Grief,” Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart and Lemyra M. DeBruyn also explain that Native American alcohol abuse is “an outcome of internalized aggression, internalized oppression, and unresolved grief and trauma. In this view, anger and oppression are acted out upon oneself and others like the self, i.e., members of one’s group” (69- 70). 54

integrity of Sedna’s body is not respected but violently dismembered as shown in her severed fingers. The close bodily and psychological gender connection is severed in the act of patriarchal violence, which is symbolized in the disconnected relationship between

Sedna and her father at the very moment when her digits were severed. In addition to patriarchal violence, the colonial violence in terms of forceful removal of one from one’s native land is also hinted at in the suffering of Sedna. Through the forced marriage and violent dismemberment of Sedna’s body, the father first removes Sedna from her homeland and later exiles her to a foreign place by destroying her last means to return home, her fingers.

In Native American literary tradition, myth is a crucial narrative component to express collective reality in literary works. Paula Gunn Allen emphasizes that contrary to the popular notion of myth, Native understandings of myth are based on the commonality of human life rather than on fiction and fantasy. Allen points out, “In the culture and literature of Indian America, the meaning of myth may be discovered, not as speculation about primitive long-dead ancestral societies but in terms of what is real, actual, and viable in living cultures in America” (105). The mythic dimension of experience is “an experience that all peoples, past, present, and to come, have in common” (Allen 104).

Shared with Allen’s insight on myth, Hogan also views myth as “the deepest, innermost cultural stories of our human journeys toward spiritual and psychological growth”

(Dwellings 51). Myth can generate a particular type of truth that is more expansive than the scientific perception of reality. Moreover, although myth suggests a reality common to people across time and space, its meaning is never static but always re-engaged and regenerated every time when the story is told. Myth requires an audience’s immediate

participation to produce its meaning in a particular time and context. Through the continuous engagement, “the myth proceeds to re-create and renew our ancient relationship to the universe that is beyond the poverty-stricken limits of the everyday”

(Allen 106). The characteristics of myth in Native American literary tradition can be found in Hogan’s use of the Sedna myth in her autohistoria.

The myth of Sedna is not fictional for the mere pleasure of imagination or amusement; instead, it epitomizes the common struggle of Native Americans in the past and the present. The wounds described in the myth of Sedna are still existing and experienced viscerally in the lives of many Native American women. For instance, with a close reading, we can see that Sedna’s wounds are also embodied in the lives of Hogan’s adoptive daughters, the older daughter Marie in particular. Hogan adopted two Lakota girls, Marie, who was 10 years-old, and Jeanette, who was 5 at the time of their adoption.

Marie and Jeanette were born to the same mother but different fathers. Both Marie and

Jeanette came to Hogan’s home as abused and neglected children unable to form emotional and caring bonds with those around them. Years later, however, Jeanette overcame her difficulties and became a loving mother herself as an adult. Unfortunately, her older sister Marie failed to find a way out of the psychological and spiritual labyrinth of pain and suffering even after spending around twenty years with her caring adoptive parents, Hogan and her ex-husband. Hogan says that Marie “was already broken and wounded beyond what could be repaired” (69). Marie experiences viscerally the similar violence against mythical Sedna. The bodily integrity of both Marie and Sedna is violated.

While Sedna’s fingers were cut off, Marie as a girl was also “violated and tortured” (76).

Even as an infant, Marie suffered physical abuse in the form of cigarette and hot wire

burns as well as rape. Furthermore, both Marie and Sedna are powerless in terms of deciding where they want to be. As Sedna, who was married off to an old homely man without her consent, Marie as a child also “had no say” in the matter of adoption and “no control over what was to become of her” (Hogan 69). Furthermore, Marie experiences similar traumatic dislocation in a foreign space like Sedna. Sedna was disowned and exiled in an island by her father when he severed her fingers holding onto the boat. As for

Marie, when she was little, she was abandoned on a dark country road by her biological mother and her mother’s boyfriend. Although Marie managed to find her way home that night, “she never found her way back to herself as a child” (Hogan 76). The suffering of

Marie is a lived manifestation of Sedna’s suffering.

Reading the myth of Sedna together with the life of Marie is to appreciate one of the decolonial moves that Hogan makes to deconstruct and liquefy the colonial grammar of space characterized by categorization and separation in her narrative structure. That is,

I contend that Hogan shuttles between myth and personal narratives to make the literary genre boundary porous in her narrative structure. On the one hand, the personal history of

Marie makes the myth of Sedna relevant and embodied in the contemporary era. On the other hand, Marie’s life becomes a contemporary myth to connote a continuously collective and wounded life shared by many Native American women for centuries who are still living the struggle for survival, endurance, and healing. Hogan refuses to read

Marie’s wounding as a singular case merely happening in the present. Instead, she frames it as a collective experience in a temporal continuity because “our stories do not begin with us as individuals” (78). In this context, Hogan writes, Marie was “a remnant of

American history, and the fires of a brutal history had come to bear on her. As a Lakota

girl . . . she was the result of Custer’s dream, containing the American violences, the people from another continent, that entered this land without compassion” (77). Hogan’s reading of Marie’s individual suffering as a collectively Native American one corresponds with the generational pain that Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart and Lemyra

DeBruyn observe in their years of providing mental health treatment and prevention services to North American indigenous people. Comparing the pain of Native American children to that of the children of Jewish Holocaust survivors, Brave Heart and DeBruyn suggest that unresolved loss for Native Americans is carried into the younger generations:

“subsequent generations of American Indians also have a pervasive sense of pain from what happened to their ancestors and incomplete mourning of those losses” (68). Hogan’s narrative structure that constantly moves between different literary genres, between various temporal moments, and between the background and the foreground of stories highlights the generational pain experienced by Native Americans in the past and the present. The shifts mark a break from a linear narrative structure that creates an illusion of a progressive self. The narrative structure of Hogan’s autohistoria is more cyclical11 than linear; the self that Hogan narrates under this particular structure is an interwoven web across space, time, and bodies.

Hogan’s politics of place guided by the “boundary-breaking imperative” articulated by Ackerberg is not only demonstrated in her liquefaction of the solid genre and temporal boundaries in the narration of her life. It is also manifested in her vision of

11 The cyclical structure in Hogan’s narrative structure also reflects Hogan’s ethics that asks people to take responsibility to ensure sustainability for future generations. In “The Terrestrial and Aquatic intelligence of Linda Hogan,” Donelle Dreese argue, “Hogan believes that if people take responsibility for one another as well as the earth, and perceive life as circular, with transformations instead of conclusion, their attitude toward life prioritizes preservation and sustaining what they may someday need” (9). 58

decolonial healing that does not center on restoration but regeneration of a wounded life.

I argue that the myth of Sedna as the underlying organizing thread in The Woman Who

Watches Over the World conveys Hogan’s vision on decolonial healing.

According to Allen, indigenous myth is “a story of a vision”; “It is a vehicle of transmission, of sharing, of renewal, and as such plays an integral part in the ongoing psychic life of a people” (116). Myth as vision then is futuristic in the sense that it is guided by a politics of hope. Similarly, for Hogan, myth and other stories remembered and told are “reservoirs of light and fire that brighten and illuminate the darkness of human night, the unseen” (113). The myth of Sedna is no exception in this matter. The story of Sedna is not only about dismemberment but also about becoming whole in a transformative way in the process of healing. While Sedna’s lost digits mark the remnant of a violent act, they also suggest a beginning point of becoming, renewal, and transformation; her cut fingers turn into multiple sea animals. The message of Sedna’s life that Hogan learns is that “[t]hrough her wounding, something else, other lives, was born” (39). The decolonial healing hinted at in Sedna’s myth involves two levels: One is about a liquid space to rebirth a wounded life. The other is about regenerating a wounded life to a new life by extending its bodily boundary. It is important to note that when

Sedna’s severed fingers are transformed into various sea animals at the end of the myth,

Sedna is also turned from a terrestrial wounded woman into an aquatic mother goddess birthing sea lives. It is in the water that Sedna undergoes metamorphosis, which reflects

Hogan’s insistence on water rather than dust as the origin of life mentioned earlier in this chapter. What’s more, while the sea is where Sedna is abandoned by her father, it is also the very site where she survives through the appearance of other life forms. As Dreese

argues, one of the transformative qualities of Native American cultures is “adapting to their surroundings in order to survive rather than forcing the environment to adjust to their requirements, a characteristic of Western cultural ideologies” (13). The rebirth of

Sedna illuminates Hogan’s notion of decolonial healing that takes place in a fluid space and that catalyzes transformation within the environment a wounded self used to be confined.

Furthermore, an important dimension of Hogan’s concept of decolonial healing revealed in the myth of Sedna is the extension of one’s bodily boundary to create a collective new life. I read the sea animals born out of Sedna’s lost fingers as an extension, renewal, and re-generation of Sedna’s body and life. Sedna’s dismembered body becomes whole again through her metamorphosis. Each life of the sea animals is whole in itself but together they also constitute and sustain the regenerated life of Sedna by extending her bodily boundaries. Rethinking healing through the myth of Sedna, I argue that Hogan does not naively seek for healing as restoration of bodily integrity confined to an individual body but as extension of bodily boundaries to nurture other lives when rebirthing a wounded self. The decolonial wholeness hinted at in Sedna’s transformation then refers to the continuous regeneration of life.

Hogan’s conscious decision to value continuity and regeneration of life is a decolonial option which marks a clear break from the colonial capitalist logic perpetuating the colonial wounds of Native people associated with the loss of their sacred land. Mignolo contends that decolonial options should start from “the principle that the regeneration of life shall prevail over primacy of the production and reproduction of goods at the cost of life (life in general and of humanitas and anthropos alike)”

(“Epistemic Disobedience,” 161; original emphasis). Prioritizing regeneration of life over production of commodities is also a practice of Indigenism. Dian Million defines

Indigenism in the following way: Indigenism is “a position that is active visioning of a present belief, valenced and mobilized as life exceeding life, not to be contained by or within capitalism’s voracious appetites. It is an Indigenous politic that imagines human in relation with life’s potential rather than as masters” (39). Hogan recalls this break from capitalist thinking as values instilled in her by Native elders: “This is what we love about our elders, that they honor us when we care, not when we win, but when we look after the earth and show compassion” (30). Remembering the old teaching of Native elders to prioritize caring for the earth rather than taking advantage of nature to reap personal gain is one of the crucial steps Hogan has to take in her healing process. In her autohistoria, she foregrounds and reclaims an indigenous nature ethics suppressed by a capitalist logic.

Decolonial Healing

What characterizes Hogan’s notion of decolonial healing is that she seeks out regeneration to transform a wounded self rather than reintegration of the self back into a rigid framework of living that harms a person for the first place. Decolonial healing emphasizes perseverance and survival within communities in the colonial “fractured locus,”12 to borrow María Lugones’s term. The decolonial healing that Hogan yearns for is not a palliative but a constant vigilance against colonial infiltration and damages which ultimately involves a fundamental break from the colonial logic. Willis clarifies the distinction between palliation and healing when she states that palliatives “are charged

12 The colonial fractured locus results from ongoing negotiation and resistance between colonial imposition of systems of oppression onto the colonized and the colonized’s fluency and memory of their native cultures. I will elaborate the concept in Lugones’s thought in more details in chapter 3 of this project. 61

with dampening-down symptoms and emotions regardless of what has caused them.

Healing—to make whole, holy, to make sacred—is concerned with underlying causes and their transformation” (86). That is, unlike palliatives, healing strives to uncover the problems that lead to pain in order to transform the once wounded self into something new by uncovering rather than cloaking the problems. Therefore, when Hogan traces, remembers, and documents the individual and collective colonial wounds suffered by

Native Americans, she is engaging in a necessary process of healing. By recounting the pain and sorting out the colonial logic underlying the pain, Hogan re-connects herself with her individual and communal past with a hope to catalyze transformation of the

Native self in the present and toward the future. It is in this sense that Hogan says, “The pain, the accident, transformed us all into something better as people, and finer than pain

. . . Not just the healing of the body but something more than that” (180). I suggest

Hogan’s strategies of transforming pain into something finer than pain in her autohistoria are similar to the practices of de-linking and re-linking that Mignolo proposes. The two strategies are crucial to facilitate decolonial healing.

De-linking for a colonial subject is often driven by a desire to reclaim her/his full humanity that is denied by colonizers. Mignolo suggests that the process of delinking is to regain “your pride, your dignity, assuming your entire humanity in front of an un- human being that makes you believe you were abnormal, lesser, that you lack something”

(Gaztambide-Fernández 207). However, if the humanity of the colonized cannot be acknowledged within colonizers’ frame of intelligibility, the colonized have to look for alternative paradigms to reconstruct their humanity, regain their pride, and challenge the limited framework of humanity defined by colonizers. It is in this sense that Mignolo

contends that de-linking is “to think and become by embodying categories of thoughts that are grounded in non-Western experiences” (Gaztambide-Fernández 206). To recognize and to practice thought based on non-Western experiences aims to disrupt

Western totality and to acknowledge the existence of “waste of experience”13 in

Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s words (“A Critique of Lazy Reason” 190).

For instance, Hogan critiques the individualistic and narcissistic approach to dreams from an indigenous perspective, which becomes a practice of de-linking from the dominant understanding of a world larger than oneself. In her memoir, Hogan claims that psychoanalysis treats dreams as mere reflections of the individual and her/his own perceptions. Hogan finds that this particular perception of dreams is limited; it endows the individual with too much significance. As Hogan explains: “If everything comes from one person’s perception, the individual has far too much power and importance” (135); the ideas of “love, relationship, and ecology” are not taken into consideration in the overemphasis of the individual (136). The narcissistic and individualistic approach to dreams fails to acknowledge that “the person is a cell in the embodied world of spirit and matter” (Hogan 136). For Hogan, dreams are sites of nexus that connect the individual with the spiritual and material world. Dreams, according to her, are visionary and inspirational rather than merely reflective of one’s inner self. In indigenous epistemology, dreams and visions are not entirely distinguishable; they could be one and the same. As

13 Santos uses “waste of experience” to refer to the reduction of the inexhaustibility of experiences in the world by the Western frame of intelligibility. Santos points out that “social experience in the world is much wider and more varied than what Western scientific or philosophical tradition knows and considers important” (“A Critique of Lazy Reason”158). According to Santos, failure to recognize and to recycle the waste of experience will lead to an impoverishment of our imagination for an alternative world and a different rationality. As Santos argues, “On this waste feed the ideas that proclaim that there is no alternative” (“A Critique of Lazy Reason” 158). 63

Donald Hughes clarifies, “dreams are visions seen in sleep, visions are waking dreams, and sometimes the person who sees one cannot tell which it is” (88). By de-linking herself from the interpretation of dreams that only reflects the individual experience through an indigenous view of dreams as visions, Hogan reclaims a dimension of the

Native self suppressed by the scientific framework of intelligibility.

It is important to note that the act of de-linking does not merely mean that one stands against oppressive practices and systems. It also helps to reveal an alternative world that co-exists contemporaneously with the world of oppression while also operating independently of it. Rosalba Icaza and Rolando Vázquez remind us that we cannot fully grasp the impact of social struggle if they are “primarily represented as reactions to the structures of oppression, and only secondarily as leading to alternative political practices” (699). Reading social struggle as merely an opposition to the matrix of oppression follows a logic of reduction in the sense that the structures of oppression still occupy center stage. By contrast, reading social struggle as the creative revelation of the existence of plural worlds that are parallel or intersectional with the world of domination adheres to a logic of multiplication that diffuses the centrality of the oppressive world. Only when we are able to recognize that multiple worlds are possible and already existing and that their significance is not derivative from the world of domination can we realize there are always alternative ways to engage the world.

In her critique of the individualistic understanding of dreams from an indigenous perspective, Hogan emphasizes that an alternative perception of the world exists simultaneously and contemporarily with the worldview of those in power. It is constructive for Hogan to show the conflict emerging from the juxtaposition of two

different views on dreams because bringing together different traditions of critique is “a way to move beyond universalism into forms of argumentation that are built on the possibility of a dialogue across a plurality of epistemic locations” (Icaza and Vázquez

687). We may forget and fail to recognize the suppressed worldviews lived and practiced by the colonized but they never disappear. Instead, they endure before, during, and after the colonial contact. It is in this sense that Hogan says, “It’s not that we have lost the old ways and intelligences, but that we are lost from them” (14). In her autohistoria, Hogan attempts to find her way closer to the old ways and intelligences about indigenous nature ethics that can help her heal the colonial wounds.

While de-linking helps expose the underlying logic that causes colonial wounds as well as reaffirm alternative worldviews, the act of re-linking to indigenous worldview facilitates transformation from a colonial self to a decolonial self through the creation of connections between once broken relationships with the land and with different life forms co-existing in the same land. The process of re-linking emphasizes that decolonial healing is never an individualistic task but always a relational one. Willis expresses this dimension of healing eloquently when she contends, “Embedded individuals cannot heal in isolation but must instead transform in and through relationships to and within a range of places. Wholeness involves others” (86-89). In Hogan’s autohistoria, her journey to healing involves relationships not limited to humans. Hogan firmly expresses her view of healing early on in her autohistoria when she says, “Finally, my doctors became earth, water, light, and air. They were animals, plants, and kindred spirits. It wasn’t healing I found or a life free from pain, but a kind of love and kinship with a similarly broken world” (16). Stressing that earth, water, light, and air become her doctors may cause a

danger of stereotyping Native Americans as closer to the nature, a trope that Hogan herself critiques. Hogan writes, “For white Americans, even today, we Indians came to represent spirit, heart, an earth-based way of living, but the true stories of our lives were, and are still, missing from history, the geography of our lands changed” (60). There seems to be an implicit tension: On the one hand, Hogan critiques the stereotype of

Native Americans as closer to the earth. On the other hand, she shows her life deeply interconnected with other beings on the earth. However, I do not think that Hogan contradicts herself. In a TedTalk presentation, Chimamanda Adiche provides an explanation for the kinds of worldviews offered by the likes of Hogan by reminding us that “the problem with stereotypes are not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” Hogan may profess a closeness to nature but she does not essentialize it. Similarly, she does not romanticize

Native Americans as always peaceful, strong, and rooted in nature. Instead, she provides a more rounded representation of Native American experiences that includes not only their respect for and the desire to be close to nature but also their collective suffering associated with a violent history of the ravage of the Native land.

Hogan’s critique of the one-sided representation of Native Americans is shared with Menominee rights activist and poet Chrystos. In the poem, “I Am Not Your

Princess,” Chrystos writes:

If you ever again tell me how strong I am I’ll lay down on the ground & moan so you’ll see at last my human weakness like your own. (67)

Similar to Chrystos’s critique of the dominant romanticized stereotype of Native

Americans, Hogan also wants us to recognize the pain and suffering she and other Native

Americans experience in a white supremacist, capitalist, and anthropocentric world. The collective wound that indigenous people experience involves the mistreatment of the

Native land as a commodity to be sold and exploited; the Native land is no longer viewed as a communal sacred space that facilitates mutual prosperity among different lives.

Hogan does show us her connection and intimacy with animals, stones, fire, ice, and the earth in her autohistoria. But at the same time, attending to the violence and suffering of the land and the people on the land in her memoir, Hogan romanticizes neither life nor love. She acknowledges that pain happens in life and that love does not

“always make for betterment” but requires continuous growth (Hogan 76). The healing

Hogan pursues is not idealistic freedom from pain; instead she actively seeks out political, social, cultural, ecological, and spiritual bonds emerging out of the recognition of collective vulnerability and strength of all life forms. In this sense, Hogan’s appreciation of the land contrasts sharply with the romanticized stereotype of Native

Americans’ relation with nature from an outsider perspective. On the one hand, Hogan reveals brokenness at multiple levels that lead to Native wounds as analyzed earlier in the chapter. On the other hand, Hogan seeks connection in her healing path, especially ecological connection. Hogan writes, “Our healing, we both knew, was connected to this other healing, as woman to land, as bird to water. We are together in this, all of us, and it’s our job to love each other, human, animal, and land, the way ocean loves shore, and shore loves and needs the ocean, even if they are different elements” (29). Hogan’s notion of decolonial healing consists of situating oneself in an ecosystem and enhancing

the regeneration of a collective life in a shared broken world by not merely securing and loving individual life but also by building connections between differences to form an ecological wholeness.

Ecological Wholeness from an Indigenous Perspective

To better grasp the ecological wholeness Hogan has in mind for decolonial healing, we need to first distinguish an emancipatory understanding of that particular concept from an oppressive one. Regarding problematic discourses on ecological wholeness, Marti Kheel’s critique of holist nature philosophy that builds on masculinism14 is a case in point. In Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist Perspective, Kheel argues that the ecological wholeness that many holist nature philosophers support, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Aldo Leopold, fails to respect and care for the lives of individual other-than-human animals.15 Kheel contends, “The utilitarian idea of

‘conserving’ nature for human well-being is accompanied by the willingness to

‘sacrifice’ individual animals for the well-being of the ecosystem” (16). Kheel continues,

“by focusing on ‘species,’ ‘the land,’ or ‘the ecosystem’ over individual beings, holist philosophers have promoted a socially acceptable context for the expression of aggression toward individual16 (other-than-human) beings” (16). Kheel uses the example of sport hunting to point out the problematic holist ecological discourse. Hunters often describe the activity of sport hunting as one done out of a love for nature. But in reality,

14 Kheel defines masculinism as “an ideology that endorses the explicit or implicit belief in the superiority of a constellation of traits attributed to men” (3, original emphasis) 15 Kheel uses the phrase “other-than-human animals” to remind us of the kinship that humans share with other animals (6). Kheel argues that we are often less aware that humans are also animals when using the term “animals” alone as if humans and animals are distinctively different (6). 16 In her book, Kheel uses the word “individual” in reference to other-than-human animals (6). Kheel uses “individual” to highlight the integrity of lives that include non-humans. 68

the activity often involves the conquest and killing of individual animals to restore and to secure the hunters’ manhood. The rhetoric of preserving the integrity of the ecosystem in sport hunting is not out of a care for all individual other-than-human animals that constitute the ecosystem. Instead, it originates from an instrumental purpose, that is, preserving the ecosystem to secure enough game animals for future killing. Kheel’s insightful critique reveals at least two dimensions of oppressive discourses on ecological wholeness. First, the holist nature philosophers who Kheel criticizes only focus on the abstract population without concern for the individual that constitutes the population.

Kheel argues that the concept of “species” is only a mental construct; “It is the living beings who matter, not the human abstractions” (230). Second, the oppressive understanding of ecological wholeness involves prioritizing utilitarianism over ethical responsibility. To put it differently, preserving the integrity of the ecosystem is often out of instrumental concern for the future use of nature beneficial mainly to humans rather than out of an ethical responsibility to secure the interconnection between humans and other-than-human animals to enhance mutual flourishing. By contrast, the kind of holism conducive to feminist nature ethics that Kheel calls for is one that cares for both the individual and the whole rather than sacrificing the individual for the whole. In other words, an empancipatory ecological wholeness should be a holism that, metaphorically speaking, sees the forest and the trees simultaneously.

The liberatory ecological wholeness that Kheel envisions is shared by Hogan as seen in her views on decolonial healing that is guided by an ecological feminist ethics.

Chris Cuomo argues that for ecological feminists, “women’s well-being and human flourishing are always necessarily ecological” (53). Because “nonhuman communities

and entities are necessarily, intrinsically bound up with human life and interests, the well- being of nature is implied, to at least a minimal degree, in human flourishing” (Cuomo

63). Hogan shares Cuomo’s ecological feminist thought on the inseparable interdependence between the flourishing of both human and other-than-human individuals in nature in her reflection on a stranded loon she and her friend rescued.

When Hogan and her friend were walking by the sea one day, they encountered a stranded loon whose feathers were covered by black and thick oil, struggling between life and death. Although Hogan does not specify what causes the loon’s suffering, the black oil covering the loon is likely caused by an oil spill, a human-provoked disaster. Hogan and her friend were not the only witnesses to the suffering of the stranded loon. There was also a young man who worked in a trailer set up at the beach and who was about to get off work when Hogan and her friend brought the loon. But the young man was indifferent toward the loon. He said that there was nothing he can do, locked the door of the trailer, and then left (Hogan 25). His indifference shows that he can neither see the non-instrumental value of the loon’s life deserved to be saved nor recognize his ethical responsibility in an ecological web to alleviate the suffering of the bird. In contrast,

Hogan and her friend offered help to the loon. They brought the loon home, called multiple rescue centers, and took care of the wounded loon. The loon lived after the care.

In her reflection, Hogan sees that ethical responsibility toward the lives of other-than- human individuals is crucial to sustain human subjectivities. The alleviation of the loon’s pain is urgent to her as if her own pain could also be assuaged by the very act of caring for the loon. Hogan says, “ [The loon’s] fate was interwoven with our own human fates in this world we humans have diminished because we have failed to understand how each

thing connects with all the rest” (25). Hogan’s words remind us that ensuring others’ flourishing means securing one’s subjectivity in the indigenous worldview where subjectivity is shared and mutually enhanced, which will be elaborated later in the chapter. Dreese points out that “[c]aring more for the other does not mean caring for the selfless. It means recognizing one’s position within the multitude of life forms in the universe and taking some responsibility for their well being. If one is not safe, none of us are” (21). Dreese’s other-directed ethics is shared by Deborah Bird Rose’s. According to

Rose, “We make ourselves vulnerable when we situate others first, whether those others are human or non-human, because we enter a world of mutuality in which there is no category of those who are exempt from suffering. To be deeply embedded in life is to stop freeriding on the pain of others” (185). In other words, to assuage the pain of others is a way to really live in the world according to the other-directed ethics. Hogan’s ethical response to the suffering of the loon gives a hint at her process of rebuilding a Native self by assuming her responsibility to care for the lives in the ecological web where she shares. Facilitating the flourishing of others who are similarly wounded in the world where Hogan lives is one of the crucial steps toward her decolonial healing.

I suggest that decolonial healing manifested in the creation and maintenance of ecological interconnectivity in Hogan’s autohistoria should be understood within an indigenous framework of nature ethics. Nature for Native Americans is never empty wilderness waiting to be enclosed, domesticated, and civilized. In fact, emptiness and wilderness is only a discourse created by those who are unable to see themselves within the interwoven ecological web of life where they sustain themselves and by those in power who want to justify occupation and domination over specific spaces. Melani Bleck

insightfully argues that viewing space as empty, “void,” or “lack” contributes to colonizers’ domination of Native Americans by occupying their land (26). Bleck contends, “Lack, because it negates, leads to acquisition. Space has become something to occupy and acquire” (27). Space as empty is never self-evident but always produced.

Louise Owens reminds us that ultimately we have to realize “there is no emptiness in this world unless we create it, and that when that happens not only does our environment become more fragile, but we are forever cut off from a part of our inheritance as living beings in a richly interconnected web of life” (236). For Native Americans, nature is not equal to empty wilderness. Rather, it is regarded as an interconnected community with diverse participants, including “animals, plants, human beings, and some things that

Americans of the Western European tradition would call physical objects on the one hand, and purely spirits on the others” (D. Hughes 16). I use the word participants intentionally to emphasize that humans, other-than-human animals, physical objects, and spirits are all viewed as persons in indigenous thought.

The indigenous world is an animist one. In such a worldview, other-than-human individuals are not some “insensitive species”; instead, they are regarded as people “in the same manner as the various tribes of human beings are ‘people’” (Deloria 88). In other words, personhood17 is not reserved only to humans in an animist worldview.

Instead, humans and other-than-human beings, such as animals, plants, and stones, are all persons. Graham Harvey defines persons as “volitional, relational, cultural and social

17 It is important to note that personhood can be used to serve both liberatory and conservative purposes depending on the context where it is evoked. In this chapter, I suggest that reclaiming personhood from an indigenous perspective in an anthropocentric world should be viewed as a decolonial move that many Native scholars make. But in another context, we also see that the discourse of personhood can be mobilized for conservative agenda, such as the discourse of fetal personhood in the pro-life movement (See Halva-Neubauer and Zeigler 2010). 72

beings”; persons can exert “agency and autonomy with varying degrees of autonomy and freedom” (xvii). Understanding both humans and non-humans as persons who are equally18 capable of showing autonomy and exerting agency through their display of various degrees of volition, perception, intelligence, and relationality helps us move beyond an anthropocentric worldview. The anthropocentric society where we live not only puts other-than-human persons into abstraction as merely species but also justifies the sacrifice of them for human benefit as the masculinist holist nature philosophy that

Kheel criticizes. Moreover, with the rise of the modern sciences in an anthropocentric world, Thomas Berry keenly observes that “we began to think of the universe as a collection of objects rather than as a communion of subjects” (qtd. in King, “Earthening

Spiritual Literacy” 248). Re-conceptualizing various other-than-human life forms as persons rather than objects highlights one of the crucial characteristics in indigenous nature ethics in which reciprocal social contracts rather than one-sided domination exist between humans and non-humans (Vecsey 20). Using the term, social contracts, to describe the relationship between humans and non-humans, Christopher Vecsey emphasizes that both humans and non-humans are actors who can sense, make decisions, and express their desires and emotions to various degrees. The notion of personhood in indigenous nature ethics breathes the life back into countless life forms in nature that are wrongly and unjustly viewed and treated as objects to be exploited.

18 Being equal is not the same as being identical. While all persons have the capacities of volition, intelligence, relating, communication, and perception, differences always exist in different persons. As Matthew Hall writes, “plants are persons, but they are not naively regarded as being identical to human beings. Plants, animals, and humans are acknowledged as possessing different attributes” (“Indigenous Animisms” 109). Viewing what is different as subordinate and equating what is equal with sameness is a colonial logic that inflicts how we conceptualize the world in a dichotomous and hierarchical way. 73

The idea of personhood in indigenous thought also hints at a democratic view of the world in which “every creature had its place, with privileges and duties to the others”

(D. Hughes 17). Each being is unique in the ecosystem but, at the same time, every being relies on other beings to exist and flourish. The indigenous view on the ecosystem maintains that every being is equal to each other regarding their individual significance and contribution to the ecosystem. What’s more, each being is fundamentally interconnected with other beings because without each other, one cannot live, which is manifested in Hogan’s seeing the overlapping of the fate of the stranded loon and that of hers discussed earlier. The democracy envisioned in indigenous nature ethics emphasizes simultaneously individual autonomy and fundamental relationality among all persons.

Cuomo emphasizes that autonomy and interdependence are not mutually exclusive if we are willing to abandon the presumption that autonomy should be based on atomistic individualism (99-100). The notion of personhood is useful to grasp the two features that constitute indigenous democracy. On the one hand, recognizing that all life forms are persons in the indigenous animist world helps us understand and appreciate the individuality and autonomy of each living being. On the other hand, the notion of personhood applied to all living beings unfolds the ontological relationality between all lives. One of the crucial characteristics that define persons is their capacity to interact with other persons “with varying degrees of reciprocity” (Harvey xvii). Fritz Detwiler articulates clearly that relating between persons and the environment is a crucial defining feature of personhood when he says, “The category applies to anything that has being, and who is therefore capable of relating” (239). Relating not only defines personhood but also lies at the core of animism. As Matthew Hall clarifies, animism does not simply

point out that everything is alive. What’s more significant, animism is “a sophisticated way of both being in the world and of knowing the world; it is a relational epistemology and a relational ontology” (Hall, “Indigenous Animisms” 105). In this indigenous relational world, all persons in the nature are relatives.

For Native Americans, nature is not a place located outside of one’s home as stipulated by the discourse of sport hunting that Kheel critiques. Rather, nature is home for indigenous people as Raymond Pierotti and Daniel Wildcat emphasize (“Traditional

Ecological Knowledge” 1336). In the nature conceptualized by indigenous people, there is neither a clearly-cut spatial line between the domestic and the wild; nor is there a sharp relational split between relatives and strangers. Brave Heart and DeBruyn point out, “For

American Indians, land, plants, and animals are considered sacred relatives, far beyond a concept of property” (62). Enrique Salmón’s notion of kincentric ecology also relates the indigenous idea that nature is home and that all lives are relative to one other. In his article, Salmón illustrates kincentric ecology through the Ramámuri19 concept of iwígara in the manifestation of land management. Iwígara expresses “the belief that all life shares the same breath”; every being is interconnected with the complexity of life through the shared breath (1328). Iwígara lies at the core of Salmón’s notion of kincentric ecology, which builds from the premise that humans and other life forms in the natural world are all “kindred relations” (1331). The kindred relations encompass the scope of the entire ecological system, Salmón explains:

Kincentric ecology pertains to the manner in which indigenous people

19 The homeland of the Rarámuri, also known as Tarahumara, is located in a region called “Gawi Wachi (the Place of Nurturing)” in the eastern Sierra Madres of Chihuahua, Mexico (Salmón 1327). 75

view themselves as part of an extended ecological family that shares ancestry and origins. It is an awareness that life in any environment is viable only when humans view the life surrounding them as kin. The kin, or relatives, include all the natural elements of an ecosystem. (1332)

By re-thinking nature through the framework of kincentric ecology, we can comprehend that living in nature means coming home to all kindred relations that exist in the world.

However, the human relationship with the land has been disconnected as symbolized by the broken clay woman statue in Hogan’s book discussed earlier in the chapter. The relationship between human persons and other-than-human persons living in the same continent as kin is no longer self-evident. Hence, recovering and sustaining the kindred relationships between all persons in the same ecological web becomes a decolonial political strategy that Hogan and other Native writers promote. Living in an anthropocentric and naturist20 world in which Hogan suffers physically, mentally, and spiritually, her desire to re-build kindred relations with both human and non-human persons is a desire to return home. In fact, Hogan’s homecoming journey moves from an

“egosystemic” spatiality to an “ecosystemic” spatiality, to borrow Owens’s terms (227).

In other words, Hogan’s homing is characterized by a departure from a spatiality that centers on enclosed space where a possessive individual occupies to one that focuses on the interrelation and interdependence among differences with whom one shares the space.

Homecoming to the Continent

Hsinya Huang notices that searching for links with other persons, histories, and cultures is an important task for Hogan to construct her Native identity. Huang argues that shared with other Native American authors, Hogan creates an “integrated Native

20 Naturism as a structure of oppression refers to the domination of nature. 76

self” through “blood memory,”21 a self that views memory as “genes of survival” by bringing once disparate bloodlines and cultural heritages together (173). Blood memory serves as a subversive strategy to affirm and re-create one’s Native identity in contrast with the oppressive blood quantum directives imposed by settler colonizers to determine whether one is Native enough to be qualified as a Native American and thus qualifies for benefits under treaties signed between the U.S. nation-state and indigenous nations. As

Huang contends, “Whereas ‘blood quantum’ fractionalizes indigenous identities, ‘blood memory’ functions as a synthesizing power that recovers the missing blood links for them” (173-4). Put differently, blood memory is a relational work that creates wholeness and alliance in the face of the dividing and segregating force associated with the blood quantum discourse and practices. The move from blood quantum to blood memory is a decolonial gesture.

In her article, Huang does not distinguish the respective signified of blood in the two terms, blood memory and blood quantum. But clarifying the different signified of blood attached to the two terms will help us better grasp Hogan’s decolonial politics. I suggest that in the notion of blood memory, blood refers to various kindred relations among all persons in the world, including both human persons and other-than-human persons, as articulated by Salmón’s indigenous notion of kincentric ecology mentioned in the previous section of this chapter. In the concept of blood quantum, blood refers to scientifically quantifiable genetic composition. The diverging views between Hogan and her white mother on Hogan’s adoption of her two Native American daughters from other tribes highlight the distinction between the two meanings of blood:

21 Huang’s notion of blood memory follows that of N. Scott Momaday. 77

With my own mother, she and I come from vastly different times and cultures. While we were related by blood, my heart came from some other place, from a tie to this continent. . . . She was disappointed in the adoption of my daughters. While I considered it a gain, a hoped-for tripling of love, she thought of it as the loss of a bloodline. I saw it as the strengthening of tribes, the future of our Indian children, back in their right place, open-eyed and knowing who they are. (Hogan 126)

Although Hogan’s mother still loves Hogan’s adopted daughters, her original disappointment with Hogan’s decision to extend her family through adoption may indicate a concern with the loss of the white blood in Hogan’s family. In contrast with her mother, Hogan’s refusal to prioritize biological bloodlines and her embrace of kindred relations with differences in the adoption of her two daughters marks a decolonial break from the traditional value placed on genetic bloodlines as the utmost foundation of reproducing oneself and continuing one’s family. While blood quantum can be diluted with the mixture of tribal and racial differences under the colonial logic, blood understood as kindred relations in decolonial thought can only be strengthened with the very mixture of differences. In other words, when Hogan moves from understanding blood as genetic bloodline to kindred relations, she also moves from a colonial logic of purity and sameness to a decolonial one of plurality and difference. Moreover, as Pauline

Turner Strong and Barrik Van Winkle point out, in Native American tradition, “Kindred membership did not depend solely or necessarily on assumptions of shared substance: what was most important was the existence of named and unnamed role relationships and expectations among a set of individuals” (557). Reading within this context, Hogan’s insistence on broadening her family through extending kindred relations that do not rely on shared blood should be seen as an integral part of her reclaiming an indigenous consciousness in the reconstruction of her wounded Native identity.

The kindred relations created by blood memory that Hogan seeks to acknowledge and sustain are not limited to human persons. When Hogan states that “my heart came from some other place, from a tie to this continent,” she also emphasizes that the root where she grounds herself lies in the land, in the bond with the Americas (126). Moving one step further from Huang’s argument, I argue that the blood memory that Hogan practices and values is not anthropocentric but kincentrically ecological in Salmón’s word. That is, Hogan not only remembers the resistant histories of Native Americans but also relates to the histories of struggle of animals in the same continent where Hogan shares with other lives. To re-build the kindred relations with other-than-human animals,

Hogan reads the lives of other-than-human persons who collectively struggle in the oppressive world alongside with her life and the lives of the Native American community. Hogan’s accounts of horses in The Woman Who Watches Over the World provide illuminating examples of how she creates a Native self with an ecological dimension, a self whose subjectivity overlaps and interconnects with the subjectivities of other-than-human persons in her homecoming journey to the continent.

In the chapter titled “Mystery,” Hogan weaves her reflection on her individual and collective life into the interaction she has mainly with three horses, Mystery, Kelli, and Big Red Horse. Hogan’s interaction with Mystery takes up the most space in the chapter. Mystery is a wild mustang not bred for certain traits. She is a Native horse, who resembles the Chickasaw ponies that Hogan recalls from her childhood memories.

Mystery used to belong to an owner who did not pay the board on her and later was cared by Hogan. Mutual affection and affinity grow between Mystery and Hogan; the two share commonalities. For example, Mystery and Hogan have an injury in common, that is,

pelvic fractures, although the causes of their injuries are different. Mystery’s fractured pelvis began during “the terrifying roundup of wild horses;” Hogan’s resulted from a fall from Big Red Horse (Hogan 158). Hogan has compassion for Mystery due to the similar bodily injury. For Hogan, Mystery is not her pet subordinate to her but a sister kindred to her. Hogan describes Mystery as “a beautiful survivor, as if she is [my] sister to me in some kind of time from before” (157). Hogan’s relationship to Mystery is not only one of sisterhood but also that of comradeship due to their collective survival out of shared violent histories. Hogan says it explicitly, “it was not just her sturdiness or wildness, not the loss of foal, that brought us together. We had these other things in common, a shared history, a world we once knew, the ache of being rounded up, being branded, owned, and battered” (157-8). I suggest that the “we” in the quote refers not solely to Hogan and

Mystery but also to Native Americans who survive the violent colonial histories as a whole.

Like Mystery and Hogan, many Native Americans experience the reduction of their subjecthood to violable objects. In the autohistoria, Hogan reveals a segment of

Mystery’s history with branding. Hogan writes, “Mystery, the horse branded U.S., with what looks like a bolt of lightning behind the letters, numbers frozen white” (154).

Although the identifying numbers scorched on her skin are fading, Mystery still bears the embodied violent history and memory of being captured, owned, mistreated, and objectified. In fact, the name “Mystery” contrasts sharply with the identifying numbers inscribed on her body. Naming the horse Mystery, I suggest that Hogan exposes the irony of the impossibility of reducing the complexity of a Native person to an arbitrary number meaningful only to herd management. In addition to criticizing colonial and capitalist

efforts of dehumanizing and reducing an other-than-human person to a property, Hogan also includes the incident of Mystery being branded with numbers to remind us the numbers imposed on Native American children at Indian boarding schools that she mentions earlier in the autohistoria. Earlier in the text, Hogan cites quotes from Inupiat

Florence Kenney’s words in an interview with Jane Katz in which Kenney recalled being separated from her sisters and brothers in an Indian boarding school. At school, Kenney not only forgot her Native language but also experienced dehumanization by being called by a number rather than by her real name given by her parents. Kenney was called “Miss

14” and nothing more (Hogan 87). Similar to Mystery, Kenney’s Native identity is reduced to an arbitrary number deprived of meaning, history, and humanity. Reduced to a number, Kenney is turned from a Native subject to a colonial object of settler colonizers’ population control at the boarding school.

When reading the histories of the bodies of Mystery and Kenney alongside one another, a bodily proximity and an intersubjectivity between humans and other-than- human persons emerges. Intersubjectivity here can be better articulated as a topographical aggregate in Jennifer McWeeny’s term to show that the affinity between Mystery and

Kenney does not reside at some abstract level but at an embodied one. McWeeny proposes the concept of topographical aggregates in her article “Topographies of Flesh” where topographical aggregates refer to those groups that “consist in beings who participate in the same line of intercorporeal exchange” (271). It is important to note that beings do not have to possess the same bodily features to be grouped together as a topographical aggregate. McWeeny emphasizes that topographical aggregates are about

“bodily proximities rather than bodily properties; they emerge out of what actually

happens between bodies instead of what features those bodies may or may not possess in themselves” (281). Therefore, topographical aggregates can consist of human persons and other-than-human persons at the same time as long as their bodies experience similar intercorporeal relationships.22 In the context of Hogan’s autohistoria then, Mystery and

Native American children like Kenney at Indian boarding schools experience a shared intercorporeal asymmetry in the sense that their bodies are owned, branded (physically and figuratively), dehumanized, and uprooted from their native home only for the benefit of their owners. Together, the bodies of Mystery and Kenney form a topographical aggregate. The seemingly unrelated bodies of a horse and Native Americans overlap and interconnect with each other, which delineates a common ground of struggle desiring for collective healing. Topographical aggregates help illuminate the embodied proximity as a form of intersubjectivity between otherized bodies.

However, identifying topographical aggregates does not directly lead to solidarity or coalition between different bodies. McWeeny underscores that “The material proximity of our fleshes in lines of intercorporeal relations affirms merely an opportunity for solidarity and coalition, not their factual existence” (282). I argue that to maximize the chance of turning the proximity of fleshes into a political bond conducive to collective struggle for emancipation and healing requires that we ensure reciprocal enhancement of well-being for different persons. Rose reminds us that the real path to connection “does not seek connection, but rather seeks to enable the flourishing of others”

(185). In other words, connection in a broken world is not sitting there passively to be

22 Exchange, substitution, and asymmetry are the three main intercorporeal relationships that McWeeny identifies (279). 82

rediscovered; instead, it requires an other-directed ethics and practices to be created, preserved, and strengthened. Rose’s other-directed ethics informed by Emmanuel

Levinas hinges on her indigenous notion of subjectivity where boundaries do not stop at the skin but are “sited both inside, on the surface of, and beyond the body” (180). Rose points out that “Totemic and country relationships distribute subjectivity across species and countries such that one’s individual interests are folded within, and realized most fully in the nurturance of, the interests of those with whom one shares one’s being” (181).

In this understanding of subjectivity, one finds both vulnerability and strength in the interconnection, overlapping, and bordering with others’ subjectivities. As Rose highlights, “In this system, living beings truly stand or fall together” (181). The fate between the self and the other becomes collective. Hogan’s reflection on the stranded loon discussed in the previous section is a case in point.

Hogan demonstrates even clearer that mutual flourishing is required to facilitate collective healing among different persons understood in indigenous notion in her description of the interaction with Kelli. Kelli is an abused twenty-year-old horse Hogan adopted from the Colorado Horse Rescue; Kelli came in contact with her when the writer was still on two crutches after being thrown off by Big Red Horse. When Hogan first met

Kelli, she was significantly underweight with numerous saddle sores, injured hooves, and other wounds. She was described as a nonridable companion horse by the rescue center.

Taking care of Kelli with food and everyday walks to fresh pastures is not only an act of healing for the horse but also a process of healing for Hogan herself during the time of rehabilitation from the other horse incident. Kelli gradually gained weight, began running again, and became a guardian in a herd after Hogan’s attentive care. With Kelli’s

recovery, Hogan was also healing slowly but gradually from the brain trauma caused by the Big Red Horse accident. Kelli and Hogan became companions on their way to collective healing. Therefore, Hogan says, “We healed each other, in a way” (175). The mutual flourishing of Kelli and Hogan in terms of their bodies and spirits creates a deep bond between these two different bodies. In the “Mystery” chapter, the mutual support and nurture between Hogan, Kelli, and Mystery leads to the creation of Hogan’s Native self that is always beyond the individual boundary and involving an ecological scope.

Contextualizing her Native self within the interconnected and interdependent ecological relations marks Hogan’s return to the indigenous continent where she belongs, a continent that Hogan searches for throughout her life in her homecoming journey. Hogan expresses that her homecoming is a long-term search that entails efforts when she writes,

“I was from a world of horsemen, men who were in rodeos and drove cattle and had roping skills and rope tricks, like my dad. It took me half a century to enter it, this world that was in my DNA, this unguessed, unforeseen mystery, and I would never go back”

(177). In this particular context, Hogan’s homecoming is interconnected with the journey of her enhancing the flourishing of the lives and bodies of the horses, Kelli and Mystery.

Through her contribution to the well-being of the horses, Hogan takes pride again in the horseman tribe to which she belongs. Nurturing the wounded horses also helps Hogan reaffirm and take root in her Native identity as a member of the horseman tribe that used to be rendered insignificant in a white settler colonial state.

An Ecological Self

In my life, the wounds of history, illness, the split second of an accident, have turned me to the spirit in a search for healing, wherever it can be found. And in that turn is the fact of the body, not only in the world, but as a process of the world. -Linda Hogan

Ursula King asks us to pay equal attention to the spiritual energy resources that can “give us hope and healing, courage and strength, and a faith to live by” in addition to the instrumental material resources of our planet (254). Hogan’s The Woman Who

Watches Over the World provides a map to excavate such spiritual energy resources that

King emphasizes. Hogan locates the spiritual energy resources in the lives of human and other-than-human persons who collectively struggle in a broken world caused by structures of oppression. To regenerate wounded lives, including her own, Hogan carves out a fluid decolonial spatiality to construct an ecological self through indigenous nature ethics. The ethics help Hogan reclaim her Native identity by affirming differences and enhancing mutual flourishing between her and other persons, including other-than-human persons.

Hogan’s creation of an ecological self involves cosmological, ontological, and epistemological re-worlding of a wounded self in a spatiality where the boundary between the self and the other is fluid and porous to invite creative connections and interdependence. Hogan’s search for decolonial healing to become whole is guided by an indigenous worldview where dynamic ecological wholeness exists and where the nature is home. In the animist worldview, every life form is a person with both individual autonomy and fundamental interconnectivity with other persons. Hogan frames her understanding of healing under this indigenous cosmology characterized by

interconnection, mutual flourishing, and regeneration of differences. Re-centering the indigenous worldview and ethics, Hogan deconstructs the colonial grammar of space where isolation, separation, categorization, and exploitation reign.

The (w)holistic cosmology in indigenous thought informs a particular ontology in

Hogan’s ecological self; it is a permeable and porous self that is more than skin deep.

Hogan expresses clearly in her autohistoria that “skin isn’t where a person ends” (204) and that “what we call self extends beyond skin” (172). The subjectivity of the self is always an intersubjectivity in the sense that one’s subjectivity overlaps with, borders with, and mutually enables the subjectivities of others as Rose informs us. I find David

Abram’s understandings of the body very enlightening to capture the ecological body:

The boundaries of a living body are open and indeterminate; more like membranes than barriers, they define a surface of metamorphosis and exchange. The breathing, sensing body draws its sustenance and its very substance from the soils, plants and elements that surround it; it continually contributes itself, in turn, to the air, to the composting earth, to the nourishment of insects and oak trees and squirrels, ceaselessly spreading out of itself as well as breathing the world into itself, so that it is very difficult to discern, at any moment, precisely where this living body begins and where it ends.” (46-47)

The ecological body is always engaging continuous, dynamic, and transformative movements of giving and receiving, reciprocal enhancement, and regeneration between different live forms. Sedna’s severed fingers turning into multiple sea lives can be seen as a prime symbol of an ecological body emerging out of a wounded life.

In addition to an alternative cosmology and ontology, what turns Hogan’s search for healing into a political act in The Woman Who Watches Over the World lies in its epistemological dimension of re-worlding of a wounded self in terms of reading different lives of persons into kindred relations. Hogan’s decolonial response to the colonial reality

symbolized by the broken clay woman statue is to reclaim her kindred relations with other-than-human persons in the same continent where she lives. For instance, Hogan weaves the incidents of the loon, Mystery, and Kelli into a reflection about her own life and the lives of other Native Americans who share in a common struggle over collective healing.

Hogan transforms an atomic self whose existence is limited by the physical confines of the body into an ecological self whose boundary extends to other-than-human persons. This extension happens through the re-worlding of a wounded life at cosmological, ontological, and epistemological levels. In this way, similar to Sedna’s severed fingers that are not restored to their original shape but transformed into different forms of life, Hogan’s healing does not aim to reclaim some essentialist bodily, psychological, and spiritual integrity. Instead, as the end of Sedna’s myth demonstrates, decolonial healing for Hogan means transforming a wounded life into a regenerated life.

In the process of healing, one shares the bodily boundary with other beings through facilitating the flourishing of other lives different from the life of the self in order to create an interrelated web of ecological (w)holeness.

Hogan’s homecoming journey to her literal and metaphorical Native continent delineated in The Woman Who Watches Over the World invites readers to walk out of the colonial grammar of place and enter into “a geography of healing”, to use Hogan’s own term (149). The geography of healing is precisely what Hogan articulates at the beginning of her autohistoria: “Finally, my doctors became earth, water, light, and air. They were animals, plants, and kindred spirits. It wasn’t healing I found or a life free from pain, but a kind of love and kinship with a similarly broken world” (16). Hogan finds the love and

kinship she desires through re-worlding of suffering lives at an ecological level so that she could identify intersubjectivity between differences.

Hogan’s vision of decolonial healing as a re-worlding process that creates a decolonial healing self is shared by other feminists of color writers. The following chapters will continue the exploration of how the construction of a decolonial healing self relies on a decolonial spatiality that is fluid and porous. Chapter 2 will theorize a spiritualized porous body paradigm in Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa’s work to elaborate a decolonial spatiality at a bodily level.

Chapter 2: The Porous and Permeable Body in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Work

While the myth of Sedna reoccurs throughout Linda Hogan’s memoir as discussed in the previous chapter, the myth of Coyolxauhqui haunts many Chicana feminist writings. According to Aztec mythology, the moon goddess Coyolxauhqui conspired with her brothers, 400 stars, to commit matricide when she found out that the mother goddess Coatlicue was impregnated by a feather when sweeping in a temple.

When she was about to do the deed, the Aztec god of war Huitzilopochtli emerged from

Coatlicue’s womb fully grown. He killed Coyolxauhqui, dismembering her body into pieces, and lifting her head to the sky; her head became the moon.

As the myth of Sedna that encapsulates the violence that afflicts indigenous people, the myth of Coyolxauhqui exposes at least three levels of violence and antagonism collectively experienced by Chicanas. First, patriarchal violence against women’s bodies is revealed when Huitzilopochtli violently burst out of Coatlicue’s womb fully grown and when he dismembered Coyolxauhqui’s body into pieces. Second, the act that Huitzilopochtli severed Coyolxauhqui’s head from her body and lifted the head into the sky indicates an epistemic split between the body and the mind, which leads to a dichotomous way of knowing. Third, antagonism between men and women and between women themselves is denoted in the battle involving Coyolxauhqui and

Huitzilopochtli as well as in the moon goddesses’ plan for matricide.

Violence pervades both myths, but unlike Sedna’s story that gives a hint at the ecological transformation and healing of a wounded life, how to heal Coyolxauhqui’s dismembered body remains obscure in the myth itself. Therefore, collectively brainstorming about visions and strategies conducive to heal Chicana dismembered womanhood, violated body, and antagonistic thinking symbolized in Coyolxauhqui’s wounding is central to many Chicana feminist literary writings and political praxes.

Chicana feminist philosopher and writer Gloria Anzaldúa is one of the leading figures in such a collective healing project.

In chapter 1, I elaborated on how Hogan reclaims a suppressed decolonial spatiality that encourages interdependence with different life forms in an ecological web so that she could transform her wounded Native self into a healing self. In this chapter, I continue the exploration of a fluid spatiality in relation to healing. I argue that Anzaldúa also relies on the construction of a decolonial spatiality that liquefies the boundary between differences to promote collective healing. While the previous chapter looks broadly into the ecological scope to articulate Hogan’s spatiality conducive to regenerate her Native self, this chapter will zoom in to the bodily level so that I can delineate an embodied decolonial spatiality. In the following pages, I will theorize the porous and permeable body paradigm in Anzaldúa’s work during different stages in her career to illuminate the fluid liminal space where Anzaldúa lives. It is in this space where she develops her ideas about the individual and collective decolonial healing self. I argue that

Anzaldúa adopts an indigenous, Nahua in particular, framework of spirituality to liquefy the bodily boundaries when laying out a permeable spatiality.

Body as the Soil of Transformation

I want to write from the body; that’s why we’re in the body. -Gloria Anzaldúa

Anzaldúa strives to put the dismembered Coyolxauhqui together at multiple levels. This project comprised her path to healing over a career that spanned 30 years.

Her writings concern themselves with the praxis and consciousness of healing dismembered womanhood, the fragmented body, and the split ways of knowing conveyed in Coyolxauhqui’s myth. Anzaldúa proposes the concept of the Coyolxauhqui imperative as the underlying drive for mixed-race women and women of color to “[strive] for wholeness instead of being fragmented in little pieces” (Lara 49). Healing to become whole is central to Anzaldúa’s thought. As she clearly states, “All of my work, including fiction and poetry, are healing trabajos” (“Speaking across the Divide” 292). Healing for her is to “[take] back that alien other” and to accept all the pieces that constitute her being because “[getting] rid of this Gloria or that Gloria is like chopping off an arm or leg”

(“Spirituality” 88). It is important to note that for Anzaldúa, healing is fundamentally a bodily work because no matter whether it is physical, psychical, or spiritual suffering and pain, it is experienced viscerally through the body. Even though she is acknowledged for her use of spirituality as the building stone for her theoretical, analytical, and creative work, she never disavows the body. As Anzaldúa emphasizes,

We’re embodied in the flesh so there must be a purpose to this stage we’re living in, to this corporeal body which we lose when we die and which we don’t have before we’re born. The things that we really struggle with and need to work out, we need to work out on the physical plane. We can’t escape.” (“Making Choices” 164)

Anzaldúa’s aesthetics, epistemology, ontology and politics all originate from her lived bodily experience. But she understands the body in a different fashion from the biomedical body. For Anzaldúa, the body is always spiritualized; the soul is not imprisoned in the body waiting to be released. Rather, in Anzaldúa’s view, “every cell in one’s body has a memory and a brain and a generic code that is infused with spirit.

Psychic energy animates every cell in the body. The cells are spiritualized” (“Spiritual

Activism: Making Altares”). The body as a spiritualized space also serves as an embodied nexus bridging multiple realities and modes of consciousness through dream, trance, and intuition, which will be elaborated later in the chapter. Moreover, the body is the only place where creativity and politics can be materialized through the synergy of the body, the mind, and the soul as Anzaldúa writes, “the soul speaks, the body acts. The hand is an extension of our will” (“Haciendo caras” 134). Anzaldúa sees the body as a potential site where social change can take place. She stresses the transformative potential in the change of one’s relationship with her body and with others’ bodies. In

Anzaldúa’s own words, “For only through the body, through the pulling of flesh, can the human soul be transformed” (Borderlands 97). In another text, Anzaldúa emphasizes again that the body can be a catalysis to change self-other interactions, which could further lead to social transformation: “For if she changed her relationship to her body and that in turn changed her relationship to another’s body then she would change her relationship to the world. And when that happened she would change the world”

(“Dream of the Double-Faced Woman” 71; original emphasis). The “she” that Anzaldúa refers to could be Anzaldúa herself, Chicanas as a group, and anyone whose body is colonized by oppressive ideologies.

Paul U. Unschuld reminds us that “the human mind in conceptualizing the human organism has rarely been capable of creating models independent from the conceptualization of the political organism” (349). In other words, how we conceptualize the physical body is linked to the epistemology we adopt to understand the social and the political body. Therefore, in order to discern what alternative ontology, epistemology, and politics Anzaldúa advances in her work to conceptualize decolonial healing, I suggest that it is crucial to examine how she understands the physical body. In this chapter, I look particularly into Anzaldúa’s writing on the different dimensions of her body: the ecological body, bleeding body, and writing body. Anzaldúa’s paradigm of the body is distinctive in the sense that her body delineates neither a fixed nor self-enclosed boundary to separate the self from the other. Instead, I argue that the body in Anzaldúa’s work is a porous and permeable interface that connects, communicates, shares, and intermingles with other vitalities, which leads to a collective subject always in the process of transformation. Importantly, Anzaldúa’s body paradigm is not human-centered but ecological and cosmological in scope, which is informed by Mesoamerican indigenous thought, Nahua23 thought in particular. Anzaldúa’s body politics promotes the invaluable interconnectivity and interdependence between the human and the non-human, between the material and the non-material, and between the mundane world and the sacred world.

I contend that Anzaldúa’s spiritualized body paradigm offers us an embodied example to conceptualize a liquefied decolonial spatiality where an “us versus them” mentality will

23 Nahuatl is a member of the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family. Because of their shared language and culture, scholars refer to Nahuatl-Speakers as “Nahua” and to their culture as “Nahua culture” (Maffie 12).

be rendered obsolete and where a non-dichotomous and mutually transformative

“self~other” relationship can prosper.

The Symbiotic Body

In Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature,

Suzanne Bost convincingly argues that Anzaldúa’s entry into theory through pain and vulnerability displaces “the rhetoric of fortresses, defenses, and weapons” (107). Instead of creating a bastion and enclosure, Anzaldúa develops “a theory of permeable identity” that always includes the other within the self but not in a colonizing way (Bost 107). Bost further contends that Anzaldúa makes “permeability politically progressive” (103).

Following Bost, I also regard permeability to be central to Anzaldúa’s feminist politics that strives for securing the intersubjectivity between differences in order to catalyze mutual transformation between the self and the other.

I contend that Anzaldúa’s theory of permeable identity is grounded in her distinctive view on the body that is neither self-enclosed nor separated from other beings.

Her body paradigm is characterized by its porous boundary that allows it to permeate other bodies and vice versa as well as by its role as a connector to link the body with other bodies to build a collective field of the self. As Anzaldúa clearly articulated in an interview with AnaLouise Keating, “The self does not stop with just you, with your body.

The self penetrates other things and they penetrate you” (“Making Choices” 162). In contrast to the liberal possessive individual whose body has a clear boundary to separate the self from the other, Anzaldúa’s model of the body is a space where any solid

demarcation between the self and the other is unattainable because the body cannot be fenced.

Similar to Hogan’s “boundary-breaking imperative” discussed in the previous chapter, I suggest that Anzaldúa’s efforts to break down any solid boundary between differences in her theory on the body are fundamental to her decolonial politics.

Anzaldúa’s critique of the violence caused by making artificial fences to police and colonize differences in a confined space can be discerned in her poem that opens her well-known monograph, Borderlands/La Frontera. After stating that her people suffer from the “1,950 mile-long open wound” that is the U.S.-Mexico border (24), Anzaldúa writes:

But the skin of the earth is seamless. The sea cannot be fenced, el mar does not stop at borders. To show the white man what she thought of his arrogance, Yemayá blew that wire fence down. (25)

She uses the earth and the sea, entities that cannot be entirely enclosed, to contrast them with the man-made fence between Mexico and the United States. The continuity of the earth and the sea exposes the artificiality and illegitimacy of the U.S.-Mexico border. As

Ellyn Kaschak argues, the seemingly solid boundaries used to separate the self from the other—which are not unlike the U.S.-Mexico border itself—are “material illusions, imaginary lines that are imbued with the human meaning that make them real enough to die for. Yet they are built on shifting sand” (10). Kaschak then concludes that boundaries are “alive as is each person, each group, and each culture” (11). In Anzaldúa’s writings and drawings, she also shows that the bodily boundary is also breathing and permeable

rather than airtight and solid through spiritualizing the body from an indigenous perspective.

The most radical permeability in Anzaldúa’s body paradigm can be found in her description of the relationship between her physical body and other bodies in the nature.

In Anzaldúa’s thought, different vitalities, including the human, the non-human, the material and the non-material, do not have discrete substantially enclosed boundaries to separate one from the other. Instead, her physical body is fundamentally connected with all other existence that vibrates with energy. For example, in one of Anzaldúa’s unpublished journal entries, she writes:

I stare at a hybrid of tree trunk and stone in symbiotic embrace. I can see myself a third of such an embrace. This is not as strange as you would think for aren’t we also composed of the same elements as sky, tree, Earth. I could melt into the dead tree trunks, into their dark hollows. No one would distinguish me from them. Half of me has always felt non-human. (“Untitled Scrapbook”)

It is interesting to note that Anzaldúa believes that the sky, the earth, trees, stones, and her body are constituted by the same elements. This view may not be held true according to scientific thinking; the human body, trees, and stones are categorized under different organism types according to biology. I argue that the fact that Anzaldúa does not distinguish the differences of biological composition between her body, trees, and stones results from her distinctive spiritualized conceptualization of the body and all existence, which is informed by the Nahua cosmology that profoundly shapes Anzaldúa’s thinking.

According to Anzaldúa, spirit is “an inorganic kind of energy, vibration, condition, force or consciousness” permeable in every existence in the cosmos

(“Spiritual Activism,” original emphasis). Her definition of spirit can be contexualized in

the concept of teotl in Nahua cosmology. In “Pre-Columbian Philosophies,” James

Maffie points out that in Nahua cosmology, teotl is a “single, dynamic, vivifying, eternally self-generating and self-regenerating sacred power or force” (13, original emphasis). Teotl is within everything and “everything is identical with teotl” (Maffie 13).

However, it is crucial to distinguish teotl from the God in Christian thought. Teotl is

“non-personal, non-agentive, and non-intentional. It is not a deity possessing power in the manner of a ruler or a king” (Maffie 13). Teotl as an inorganic energy not only generates and connects everything in the universe together but also is beyond all existence at the same time. I suggest that Anzaldúa’s notion of spirit should be understood in this Nahua concept of teotl.

Reading within the Nahua cosmological framework, we can better understand that when Anzaldúa states that her body, trees, stones, the sky, and the earth are composed by the same element in her journal entry mentioned earlier, the same element refers not so much to the biological organism as to the energy Anzaldúa calls spirit or teotl that connects all existence in the universe. The permeability of the bodily boundary in

Anzaldúa’s thought hinges on her spiritualized worldview that every being shares the pulsating rhythm with the whole universe and therefore all beings are interconnected. As

Anzaldúa states, the universe “pulsates, everything’s alive: nature, trees, the sky, and the wind. Once you connect with that, you feel like you’re part of interconnecting organisms—vegetable, animal, mineral—and everything has some kind of consciousness” (“Making Choices” 160). Grounding in the spiritualized cosmology,

Anzaldúa’s body paradigm allows for the reciprocal exchange among vitalities in the

permeable body as well as for the connection between the human body and other bodies in the universe.

Since every existence is infused with the same energy that Anzaldúa calls spirit, the human body can also share the energy to heal other beings and to create a new bodily contour. For instance, in another unpublished journal entry, Anzaldúa writes, “I kiss a cedar that is dying, visualizing gold energy flowing out of my body through my hands into the trunk, down to the diseased roots and up to the branches” (“Untitled Scrapbook”).

Since energy is the generating force that creates all that exists in the universe in

Anzaldúa’s cosmology, a new contour of the body can be formed when Anzaldúa shares her life-generating energy with the dying tree; it becomes a symbiotic body. This new body is constituted by both human and non-human elements because the energy extends the boundary of Anzaldúa’s body to the roots, trunk, and branches of the dying tree.

Anzaldúa’s body and the tree become permeable with one another when the energy flows between the two bodies. The tree carries part of Anzaldúa by receiving the energy from her and Anzaldúa’s bodily boundary extends to the tree through sharing her energy. This new symbiotic body that combines yet exceeds any definite shape of Anzaldúa’s body and the tree can be further illuminated in Anzaldúa’s drawings that offer us visual clues of her notion of the permeable body.

The symbiotic body is no stranger to Anzaldúa’s drawings. As Guisela Latorre notices, Anzaldúa’s iconographic vocabulary is full of “[a]nthropomorphic figures displaying both human and animal traits” (130). For example, Figure 2 drawn in 1987

(“Sketchbook”) is one of the anthropomorphic figures in Anzaldúa’s drawings that illustrate the sharing of the bodily boundary with different entities. The drawing portrays

a symbiotic figure constituted by a profile of a bird whose right wing carries both feminine and masculine human facial features. And the masculine human face shares the right side of the feminine face. The symbiotic body in this drawing is both avian and human and both feminine and masculine; the boundary between species does not seem to exist. Instead, the avian and the human and the feminine and the masculine interpenetrate each other to create an interrelated field of the symbiotic body that defies any solid demarcation of differences. As Latorre argues, the anthropomorphic figures in

Anzaldúa’s drawings convey both her notion of interconnectedness and her insistence on the co-existence of alternative realities (130).

Furthermore, Anzaldúa’s view on the permeable bodily boundary among different beings in her drawings of anthropomorphic figures can be seen as embodiments of shapeshifting, a capacity valued by indigenous shamans as in the tradition of nagualismo.

Nagualismo is “a Mexican spiritual knowledge system where the practitioner searches for spirit signs”; Mexican indigenous shamans use the capacity of shapeshifting to become

“an animal, place, or thing by inhabiting that thing or by shifting into the perspective of their animal companion” (Anzaldúa, “now let us shift” note 4, 577). Shapeshifting highlights the possibility of forming a new subjectivity characterized by porous consciousness and shifting bodily contours. As Kelli Zaytoun argues, Anzaldúa invokes la naguala, the shapeshifter, to make a move toward “a posthumanist capacity of subjectivity” (2). Zaytoun elaborates, “By taking up the image and concept of la naguala in her discussion of self-transformation, Anzaldúa calls for a way of thinking about the individual human body that is more expansive yet also more decentralized with relationship to its surroundings than liberal humanist conceptions” (10). Departing from

the humanist notion of the individual human body, Anzaldúa’s anthropomorphic figures reveal that her conceptualization of the permeable bodily boundary is interrelated with her reconfiguration of the world. The new world Anzaldúa envisions is not human- centered but cosmologically interdependent in the sense that all existence in the universe has consciousness and that the human has the potential to access other consciousness through shifting or expanding our bodily boundaries. The symbiotic body in Anzaldúa’s drawings is a case in point. It helps us visualize her written description of the reciprocal and interrelated relationship between the human body and the bodies of other vitalities, such as trees and stones, in her journal entries analyzed earlier.

Even when Anzaldúa draws the relationship only between human bodies, she also insists on a connected field of existence within which one human body is not separated from the other. For instance, in one drawing titled “Waiting for BART”24 (Figure 3,

“Sketches”), Anzaldúa uses different combinations of circle-like, square-shape, and wave-like spirals to highlight the distinctive rhythm of vibration of each living being. At the same time, Anzaldúa also connects all the human figures in the drawing through a three-layered spiral in the center. Passengers often feel alienated in public transportation because they are strangers to each other. However, Anzaldúa visualizes BART passengers through a spiritual lens so she infuses them with different energies, which is consistent with her cosmology. In Figure 3, all passengers vibrate like energy but every passenger vibrates in a distinctive rhythm; nevertheless, they are still connected with each other because of each of them shares the larger pulsating rhythm in the universe.

24 BART stands for Bay Area Rapid Transit. It is a public transit system serving the San Francisco Bay Area. 100

Understanding relationships among humans and between humans and other beings through a spiritual lens is the foundation of Anzaldúa’s (w)holism. This (w)holism adopts a holistic perspective to conceptualize wholeness and to decolonize the social forces that fragment her and that alienate her from other people. As Anzaldúa states clearly,

Like love, spirituality is a relational activity leading to deep bonds between people, plants, animals, and the forces of nature. Spirituality not only transforms out perceptions of ‘ordinary’ life and our relationships with others, but also invites encounters with other realities, other worlds. (“Foreword” 229)

I suggest that it is Anzaldúa’s spiritualized cosmology that shapes her distinctive view on the body as permeable to other entities, which is not acknowledged by the scientific mode of thinking. Her body paradigm not only exposes the porous boundary between the human body and other bodies in the universe but also emphasizes the body’s connecting role in healing the division between different bodies caused by structures of oppression, such as sexism, racism, colonialism, and anthropocentrism.

The Bleeding Body

Another entry point to grasp the permeability of the body in Anzaldúa’s work is through examining her writing on her bleeding body, an entity that she describes as an open wound. In addition to her spiritualized cosmology, Anzaldúa’s view on the body partly germinates from her lifelong struggle with early menstruation beginning at the age of three months due to a hormonal imbalance, an experience she found to be uncontainable and painful. She felt that “[she] was not of this earth” but an “alien from another planet” (Anzaldúa, “La Prieta” 40). Carrie McMaster also points out that “the

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shame Anzaldúa experienced because of her untimely menstruation had a powerful and enduring impact upon her life and her identity” (103). Anzaldúa composed several pieces of writing on her early menstruating body, such as “La Prieta” and “La vulva es una herida abierta/ The vulva is an open wound.” In both writings, Anzaldúa not only reveals her alienation due to her early onset menstruation but also connects her body to other outcast or wounded bodies. Paradoxically, her bleeding body serves simultaneously as a symbol of disconnection and a nexus for connection. The permeable body exemplified by

Anzaldúa is a body that carries the memory and residue of the pain and suffering of other bodies who suffer collectively in a matrix of power. Exploring Anzaldúa’s bleeding body is to examine the permeability of the social body in her work. I suggest that the shared sensitivity of pain and suffering that Anzaldúa experiences viscerally makes her body resonate with other suffering bodies. She thus shapes a collective body in which individual bodily boundaries delineated by the society are blurred and dissolved.

For example, in “La Prieta,” Anzaldúa links her young menstruating body with her mother’s transgressive body that had sex out of wedlock. Anzaldúa writes, “My mother would pin onto my panties a folded piece of rag. ‘Keep your legs shut, Prieta.’

This, the deep dark secret between us, her punishment for having fucked before the wedding ceremony, my punishment for being born” (“La Prieta” 39). Her mother’s words, “Keep your legs shut, Prieta,” warn Anzaldúa not to stain her clothes during her menstruation while also carrying an admonishing undertone that Anzaldúa should not transgress gender and sexual norms. Ironically, Anzaldúa’s mother, who violated the gender and sexual norms herself, becomes a patriarchal gatekeeper that polices

Anzaldúa’s sexuality. As Anzaldúa once revealed in an interview, “My mother

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representing the culture’s laws, yes. She represents a whole culture. . . . She gives lip service to the culture’s laws, but it wasn’t really her stuff” (“Within the Crossroads” 94).

However, her mother’s warning fails to confine Anzaldúa. In fact, Anzaldúa transgresses the sexual and gender norms even further than her mother by embracing a queer sexual identity and non-normative femininity, which is “the ultimate rebellion she can make against her native culture” because she violates moral prohibitions against both female sexuality and homosexuality at the same time (Borderlands 41). But Anzaldúa’s bodily transgression of the sexual and gender norms in turn connects back to her mother’s body that does not respect the social restrictions imposed on women. Both Anzaldúa and her mother know that the patriarchal demand on women for chastity and obedience is a shackle that alienates women from their bodies. The enactment of their desires makes both Anzaldúa and her mother the rebellious Chicana daughters of their community, which in turn highlights their commonalities across the generational divide under patriarchal gender and sexual oppressions.

In addition to linking her body to her mother’s once transgressive body,

Anzaldúa’s bleeding body can also be read as one of the casualties of the collective

Chicana body wounded by colonialism and sexism in the US-Mexico border. The

Chicana body carries the residue of patriarchal violence and colonial legacy. The creation of the U.S.-Mexican border was the violent result of the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848) and later the U.S. colonization of the Southwest, former Mexican territory. The 1950- mile barbwire not only splits the Mexican people as a nation but also renders all inhabitants of the US-Mexico border illegitimate, except for “those in power, the whites and those who align themselves with whites” (Anzaldúa, Borderlands 25-26). The

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illegitimate status of Chicanas/os results from the specific colonialism Chicanas/os experience in the U.S, namely, an internal colonialism. In the book La Chicana, Alfredo

Mirandé and Evangelina Enríquez point out that the central mechanism of internal colonialism is the destruction of native ways of life. This destruction is caused by the colonial authorities who refuse to recognize the existence and legitimacy of native institutions and epistemologies. Similarly, the U.S. internal colonization of Chicanas/os also functions through the deliberate suppression and obliteration of the Mexican culture, which renders the identity of Chicanas/os non-existent or illegitimate to Anglo

Americans because Chicanas/os are asked to choose between identifying as Mexicans and as Americans but not both of them at the same time. In other words, Chicanas/os can either be forever foreigners as Mexicans or be “noncolonized non-Chicana[s/os]” who have to deny the reality of internal colonization (Mirandé and Enríquez 12).

While the Chicana/o community is collectively internally colonized by the U.S.,

Chicanas encounter another level of colonization in comparison with their male counterparts. That is, Chicanas also experience the internal patriarchal colonization within their own community. Anzaldúa identifies the three mothers of Chicanas in mythologies used by the Chicano patriarchal power to suppress women: “Guadalupe25

[is] to make us docile and enduring, la Chingada to make us ashamed of our Indian side, and la Llorona26 to make us long-suffering people” (Borderlands 53). In other words,

Chicanas are asked to choose to be either a sexually pure virgin like Guadalupe or as a

25 Guadalupe represents the ideal form of pious and asexual femininity and maternity in religious institutions and in the Chicano movement. 26 La Llorona is a Mesoamerican mythical figure known as the weeping woman. 104

whore and a traitor as La Chingada.27 The role model of motherhood for Chicanas is also dichotomous. Chicanas are expected to choose between a caring and sacrificial mother as

Guadalupe and a failed mother as La Llorona condemned to roam the earth after exerting her agency to kill her children in a fit of jealousy due to her husband’s betrayal.

The impossibility for Chicanas to fully embrace every dimension of being a woman as both a mother and as a sexual being is well-captured by Cherrie Moraga’s re- interpretation of the mythical figure, Coyolxauhqui. According to Moraga, Coyolxauhqui serves as a mythical symbol of “dismembered womanhood” that Chicanas experience in a patriarchal racist culture (74). In both physical and metaphorical border space, Chicanas are caught in the dilemma of choosing between mutually exclusive dichotomies, which renders Chicanas wounded and seemingly conflicted. However, Anzaldúa emphasizes that the incompleteness that Chicanas experience is imposed by outside patriarchal and white supremacist power so it is not the natural outcome of being mestizas. As Anzaldúa proclaims, “Who, me, confused? Ambivalent? Not so. Only your labels split me” (“La

Prieta” 46). But it takes decades for Anzaldúa to realize that the emancipation of

Chicanas must involve decolonizing internalized forms of oppression.

Anzaldúa used to feel guilty and split because her own personal interests failed to correspond with women’s work expected by the larger Chicana/o community. When she was young, she preferred to read and write and refused to iron her young brother’s shirts or to do household chores (Borderlands 38). What she desired was not approved by her

27 For more information on Malinche and her epithet la Chingada, see the introduction of this dissertation (27-28). 105

community, which led her to interpret her bleeding body in a negative light. In an interview with Christine Weiland, Anzaldúa said,

I realized that being selfish was being myself, and they called me selfish only because I didn’t do what they wanted me to do. But it took me thirty years to realize this. During this time I had terrible guilt and I blamed the body. I thought I was bleeding because I’d done something bad, there was something in me that caused it.” (“Within the Crossroads” 94)

Similar to Anzaldúa’s mother, who attributed her daughter’s early menstruation as a punishment for her having sex out of wedlock as the writer describes in “La Prieta”,

Anzaldúa also read her bleeding body as a punishment for her own transgression of gender roles. Anzaldúa’s menstruating body then becomes a nexus that links generational wounds and guilt inflicted by the patriarchal fence that delineates the boundary of women’s gender and sexual norms. Therefore, her menstruating body is not only connected to her mother’s body but also to the collective Chicana body.

In another poem that discusses her early menstruating body, “La vulva es una herida abierta/The vulva is an open wound,” Anzaldúa also relates her own bleeding body with other wounded bodies that are not restricted to humans. For instance, right after

Anzaldúa describes the fact that her menstruation began at the age of three months,

Anzaldúa writes:

She watches a chicken, neck wrung, twitch all over the yard. It bleeds then lays still. Dead. At night she stays awake to keep death away. Chickens peck each other when confined in small spaces. She is afraid. No not of the blood but of what happens when someone or something bleeds. (“La vulva” 199)

Bleeding here hints at a sense of disconnection. On the one hand, Anzaldúa’s bleeding body not only makes her feel alienated from herself but also disconnects her from her family members and peers. Because of her untimely menstruation, young Anzaldúa

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“refuse[d] to take communal showers” and hung her underwear on shrubs in order to hide it from her brothers, uncles, and cousins (“La vulva” 199). The evidence of her

“abnormal” body makes Anzaldúa feel ashamed of herself. On the other hand, the dying chicken Anzaldúa witnesses also experiences a disconnection between life and death in the process of bleeding. However, while bleeding causes alienation and disconnection in this poem, it also connects Anzaldúa’s body with the body of the chicken in the poem.

Anzaldúa recognizes her vulnerability through her bleeding body in relation to the vulnerability of other beings that are not confined to humans.

Anzaldúa has had a heightened sensibility toward non-humans’ suffering since her childhood partly owing to her experience of constant painful menstrual periods. In an interview with Linda Smuckler, Anzaldúa shared one of her experiences with feeling the pain of non-human existence: “Once when I was in Prospect Park in Brooklyn for a picnic everyone was smoking cigarettes and putting them out in the grass. My whole body reacted: I could feel the pain of the grass. These people were turning their live cigarettes on it” (“Turning Points” 26). For Anzaldúa, the sociality between bodies is not reserved to the relationship between human bodies; there is also a social bond between the human body and the body of other beings. On the one hand, the insistence on the sociality across life forms is consistent with Anzaldúa’s spiritualized holistic cosmology as discussed in the previous section of the chapter. On the other hand, Anzaldúa extends her sensibility of pain and suffering toward the natural world because she acknowledges the shared vulnerability across different lives. The common vulnerability between

Anzaldúa’s body and the body of the grass results from their collective struggle within the structures of oppression that attempt to inhabit or even annihilate the flourishing of

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those bodies considered to be inferior. While the interpretations of Anzaldúa’s early menstruating body as abnormal and as punishment for both her mother’s and her own gender and sexual transgressions are dominated by an ableist, sexist, and heteronormative perspective, the wounded body of the grass caused by the burning of cigarettes is a casualty of anthropocentrism that considers life other than that of the human is inferior.

Although Anzaldúa’s early menstruation sets herself apart from her peers and family members, her experience of constant pain from her periods becomes an entry point to recognize the pain of otherized beings that are both human and non-human.

In both “La Prieta” and “La vulva es una herida abierta” discussed above, we can see that Anzaldúa’s early menstruating body as an open wound makes her feel alienated from other people and connected with other outcast or wounded bodies at the same time.

Although Anzaldúa uses the wound as “the symbol of being/ cut off from the self” (“War

Wounds”), she also believes the wound can serve as an entryway to heal through connecting with other beings who also suffer in order to become whole. In “now let us shift,” an essay that marks the watershed moment in her theoretical development,

Anzaldúa clearly states, “Although your culture rejects the idea that you can know the other, you believe that besides love, pain might open this closed passage by reaching through the wound to connect. Wound causes you to shift consciousness” (571). To

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comprehend the transformative potential of the wound in Anzaldúa’s work, we can look into the most well-known “open wound” in Anzaldúa’s writing, that is, B/borderlands.28

In her influential monograph, Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa describes the

U.S.-Mexico border “es una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture” (25). Similar to Anzaldúa’s early menstruating body as an open wound that is regarded to be alien, the bodies of the borderlands inhabitants are also “prohibited and forbidden” (Anzaldúa,

Borderlands 25). However, a new consciousness emerging from the liminal space of the borderlands as open wounds re-evaluates the prohibition and turns it into a nurturing source of new possibilities. Anzaldúa calls this new consciousness a mestiza consciousness.

According to Anzaldúa, the formation of the mestiza consciousness is a survival skill born out of an urging desire to become whole and to heal the open wound suffered by B/borderlands inhabitants. In the B/borderlands, colonial, patriarchal, racial, sexual, and epistemic violence splits people into the normal and the abnormal; it puts people into a hierarchy of humans, sub-humans, and non-humans, and disintegrates modes of consciousness that our body experiences. The open wound of the B/borderlands is caused by disintegration. However, the open wound also leads to a transformative potential for creating an alternative wholeness. It is important to note that wholeness theorized in

28 AnaLouise Keating provides a concise definition of Anzaldúa’s concept of B/borderlands in Appendix 1 in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader. Anzaldúa uses the term, “borderlands,” with a lower-case b, to refer to the geographical locations of the both sides of the Texas-Mexican border. When Anzaldúa uses the term with a capital B, she expands the concept to encompass sexual, psychic, and spiritual Borderlands beyond the Texas-Mexican border. Following Keating, I use “B/borderlands” to connote both geographical and metaphorical levels of liminality. 109

Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness does not mean sameness or blissful harmony. Instead, the mestiza consciousness tolerates ambiguity, requires flexibility, weaves contradictory aspects together, and turns the outcast position into a nexus of larger connection

(Anzaldúa, Borderlands 59). Tensions are necessary and productive in the formation of the mestiza consciousness. Moreover, inclusion instead of exclusion undergirds the new consciousness. It embraces both sides of the split self, but it does not follow a simple additive way without anything transformed. Anzaldúa argues,

This assembly is not one where severed or separated pieces merely come together. Nor is it a balancing of opposing powers. In attempting to work out a synthesis, the self has added a third element which is greater than the sum of its severed parts. That third element is a new consciousness—a mestiza consciousness—and though it is a source of intense pain, its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm.” (Borderlands 101-2)

The mestiza consciousness is a coagulated wholeness that can be better elucidated through María Lugones’s concept of curdling following the logic of impurity.

Lugones distinguishes curdle-separation from split-separation. Split-separation, following the logic of purity, contains no resistance but only co-optation and control; it presumes a possibility of fragmentation into pure parts. In contrast, according to

Lugones, curdle-separation following the logic of impurity is both a creative act and a social commentary potential for inventing non-oppressive alternatives. Curdling “realizes their against-the-grain creativity, articulates their within-structure-inarticulate powers”

(Lugones, “Purity” 133). Curdling is not only a survival technique as an active subject but also “an art of resistance, metamorphosis, transformation” (Lugones, “Purity” 144).

Curdling insists on the stickiness of every segment in a whole, resisting being separated cleanly into homogenous components. I suggest that it is this very characteristic of

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stickiness of curdling that informs Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness as it defies the demand for choosing between dichotomies imposed by the force of domination. The mestiza consciousness defiantly clings to the impure coagulated wholeness.

While previous scholars focus mainly on the consciousness change when analyzing Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness, I contend that the formation of such consciousness is also about conceptualizing a different body paradigm characterized by porosity, multiplicity, and inclusivity of differences. In Borderlands/La Frontera,

Anzaldúa reclaims and appreciates ambiguous bodies that cannot be categorized in a dichotomous way, such as the bodies of “half and halfs” and the body of Coatlicue. I argue that those bodies are the embodiments of the mestiza consciousness that forms the impure coagulated wholeness.

In the second chapter of Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa recalls a girl living near her house whom people called “mita’y mita,” namely, half and half (41). She got the name because she was said that “for six months she was a woman who had a vagina that bled once a month, and that for the other six months she was a man, had a penis and she peed standing up” (Anzaldúa, Borderlands 41). She was “neither one nor the other but a strange doubling, a deviation of nature that horrified, a work of nature inverted” (ibid).

The trans bodies of half and halfs are considered to be grotesque and abnormal by many people because they cannot be categorized as either male/man or female/woman.

However, Anzaldúa insists that half and halfs themselves are “not suffering from a confusion of sexual identity, or even from a confusion of gender” (ibid.) Instead, what they suffer is an external imposition of “an absolute despot duality that says [they] are able to be only one or the other” (ibid). Anzaldúa’s affirming the impure bodies of half

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and halfs demonstrate the required capacity for tolerating ambiguity and contradiction in the formation of the mestiza consciousness that she calls for. The bodies of half and halfs embody the new consciousness that strives to bridge and transform dichotomies into a dynamic wholeness that consists of multiplicity.

In addition to half and halfs, Anzaldúa tells a history about how the wholeness of the mother goddess Coatlicue is fragmented into antagonistic dichotomies under patriarchal domination in the third chapter of Borderlands/La Frontera. According to

Mesoamerican myth, Coatlicue was a creator goddess. She was the mother of the celestial deities, the sun god Huitzilopochtli and the moon goddess Coyolxauhqui. The indigenous

Coatlicue represents a set of cyclical dualities rather than antagonistic dichotomies in one body, including life and death, masculinity and femininity, and ugliness and beauty. The

Coatlicue statue housed in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City makes it more concrete the co-existence of dualities in one body. In the statue, Coatlicue’s open hands symbolize giving life to children while her necklace of human hearts connotes taking life through sacrifice. Her hands are shaped like serpents that suggest femininity while her legs with eagle claws denote masculinity. For Anzaldúa and other Chicana feminists, the original Coatlicue, before the patriarchal Aztecs and Spanish colonizers split her, represents not only the wholeness of Chicana womanhood but also the dynamic creative power with co-existing opposing and cyclical forces. Similar to Anzaldúa’s anthropomorphic figures discussed in the earlier section of the chapter, the statue of

Coatlicue also draws attention to the porosity of the bodily boundary where multiplicity of differences can co-exist in one body. I propose that the wholeness of both the bodies of

Coatlicue and the half and halfs can be conceptualized in the circle shape of the Tai Chi

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Yin Yang figure discussed in the introduction of this dissertation. Similar to the relation between yin and yang and the wholeness created by the endless interactions between yin and yang, the male and female characteristics of the half and halfs and the various sets of co-existing opposites in Coatlicue are also cyclical dualities whose hierarchies are dynamic and temporary rather than static and fixed; together, the cyclical dualities create wholeness that consists of not merely their parts but also a new form of existence beyond their components.

However, the wholeness and creative multiplicity in the bodies of half and halfs and Coatlicue are no longer self-evident because many of us are so ingrained in the dichotomous and antagonistic thinking promoted by different structures of oppression.

Hence, in order to decolonize the antagonistic thinking in order to move toward an inclusive mestiza consciousness, we need to undergo an arduous process in the formation of the new consciousness. According to Anzaldúa, cultivating a third perspective beyond dichotomy and beyond simple synthesis of the duality requires that we cross the

Coatlicue state, that is, the psychic and perceptual block we need to cross over to be transformed. The Coatlicue state is a rupture of everyday life, “the consuming internal whirlwind, the symbol of the underground aspects of the psyche” (Anzaldúa,

Borderlands 68). In the Coatlicue state, one has to adopt la facultad to see the inner fear in order to confront it, to make change, and to form the mestiza consciousness. Anzaldúa defines la facultad as the capacity to see deep structure below the surface; it is “anything that breaks into one’s everyday mode of perception . . . anything that takes one from one’s habitual grounding, causes the depths to open up, causes a shift in perception”

(Borderlands 61).

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Anzaldúa herself also adopts la facultad that moves beyond one’s accustomed perception to re-interpret her physical open wound, namely, her bleeding body, to nurture a new consciousness. Anzaldúa’s open wound could be read as a threshold in Keating’s notion. Keating’s threshold theories follow a metaphysics of interconnectivity rather than oppositional thinking. Keating argues that unlike borders, thresholds start from “the presupposition that we are intimately, inextricably linked with all human and nonhuman” rather than from a point of breakage (Transformation Now 11). Thresholds are relational, multiple, liminal and transformative rather than oppositional, binary, definite and disciplinary. The ultimate purpose of threshold theories is to “seek commonalities and move toward healing”, which is similar to Anzaldúa’s use of the wound that can serve as a connector conducive to healing and transformation (Keating, Transformation Now 12).

I contend that Anzaldúa’s early menstruating body as an open wound is a liminal threshold that not only disrupts any fixed boundary of definitions but also allows for new consciousness to emerge through the visceral experience of the wound. Permeability is a crucial element in Anzaldúa’s re-conceptualization of the liminal space of the wound and her bleeding body.

Anzaldúa’s expression of an open wound that has not yet scabbed but bleeds again hints at a sense of permeability between differences or between beings that are supposed to be clearly separated. The wound is in fact a messy space where a well- defined boundary between beings cannot be maintained because the breakage of vessels that causes bleeding indicates that one part of the body trespasses into another part of the body. Anzaldúa’s writing on her menstruating body also suggests the blurring of boundaries. For instance, her early menstruating body was both infantile and mature as

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well as both dysfunctional and nurturing. While her physical body was that of a three- month old infant, this body also demonstrated characteristics of a more mature woman capable of reproduction. Furthermore, while her early menstruation was a symptom caused by a hormone imbalance, Anzaldúa’s struggle with this body became a source of creativity. Early menstruation made Anzaldúa’s body permeable in the sense that she felt neither like a girl nor a woman; yet, she was both of them. Her body was physically ill, but at the same time, it was also creatively nurturing. Anzaldúa’s bleeding body embodies the permeability between girlhood and womanhood and between what is damaging and what is nurturing. Her bleeding body renders any stable categorization and demarcation obsolete.

In addition to disrupting any clear demarcation, Anzaldúa’s bleeding body also leads her to access other realities. As Tace Hedrick notices, “blood links Anzaldúa both with her own body and with otherworldly experiences” (80). Anzaldúa often uses the expression of bleeding in her talks, conversations, and writings to convey the porosity between different realities and vitalities. For example, Anzaldúa said in an interview with

Smuckler, “You’re not born as a blank slate; something from your previous lives bleeds through” (“Turning Points” 21; my emphasis). In the same interview, when Anzaldúa explained the impossibility of extricating the mind from the body and rationality from intuition, she told Smuckler that “One of the tasks I’ve chosen is to blur these boundaries.

I try to do this with some of the Prieta stories where one reality bleeds into another, where fiction bleeds into concrete reality with dreams and visions. . . .” (“Turning Points”

21; my emphasis). I argue that Anzaldúa’s use of the verb, to bleed, connotes a sense of permeability crucial in her thought that blurs bodily and epistemological boundaries. For

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Anzaldúa, the boundaries that seemingly separate different entities and spaces are never solid but porous; one side of the boundary can permeate into the other.

In fact, Anzaldúa herself practices the epistemological permeability to shift out of habitual thinking to re-evaluate her own bleeding body. As Amala Levine points out, in

Anzaldúa’s development of her thinking, she “no longer attributes her early menstruation exclusively to physiological causes—as a hormonal imbalance—but rather sees it also as the psychic phenomenon of another spirit, unused to physical incarnation, having entered her body” (172). I suggest that we could think that the spirit that enters Anzaldúa’s body is alive but not yet fully embodied in the sense that it has its own vibrating rhythm but has not yet concretized and harmonized with the rhythm of Anzaldúa’s body. Moving beyond the physiological explanation of her early menstruating body to a spiritual one,

Anzaldúa’s re-conceptualizes her body as an open wound in a new light. Her early menstruating body is no longer a self-enclosed physical body that is simply ill or dysfunctional. Instead, her bleeding body is re-conceived as a result of uneasy co- habitation between her physical body and a spirit unused to physical incarnation. In essence, the bleeding is a symptom of this uneasy co-habitation between her body and the spirit. The re-interpretation of her bleeding body denotes a birth of a new consciousness that is trapped neither by scientific explanation of her body nor by her own internalized moral judgment. The new consciousness liberates Anzaldúa’s bleeding body from an individual wounded body to a communal body where outside spiritual existence can co- exist in the interface of her body. In her threshold thinking that relies on the logic of porosity, Anzaldúa makes her physical early menstruating body bleed into a spiritualized co-inhabiting body. Through the spiritualized interpretation of the bleeding body,

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Anzaldúa contextualizes her individual painful bleeding body within a larger context of suffering. That is, the spirit that has entered Anzaldúa’s body also suffers from newly physical incarnation. In this sense, her bleeding body is both individually and collectively shared by Anzaldúa and the spirit. Anzaldúa’s re-telling of her early bleeding body as a symptom of a jarring relationship between vitalities disrupts the liberal self-enclosed notion of the body. The re-interpretation hints at a sociality that constitutes the individual body. Moving beyond the physiological interpretation of her bleeding body, Anzaldúa is able to imagine her body as one permeable with the spirit that randomly enters her body causing the bleeding.

In the following section, I am going to turn to a discussion of Anzaldúa’s writing body to further elucidate her permeable body paradigm that involves the co-habitation and creative exchange between her consciousness and spirits in the interface of her body in the process of creativity.

The Writing Body

Anzaldúa’s spiritualized re-interpretation of her early menstruating body is meant to heal the wound caused by a sense of alienation she feels with her body and between her body and other vitalities. As for her work on her writing body, it attempts to heal the split between different paths to access reality. Her writing body neither separates modes of consciousness nor privileges rationality over other ways of knowing, such as dreaming, going into trance modes, and enacting intuition. Rather, Anzaldúa constructs her writing body as “a crossroads of the self” (Alarcón 119). To better comprehend the crossroads of the self exemplified in Anzaldúa’s writing body, I propose that we read her

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writing body through the Mesoamerican indigenous framework of the healer’s body, which will help elucidate Anzaldúa’s aesthetics and epistemology.

Reading Anzaldúa’s writing body as an indigenous healer’s body is not far- fetched. Anzaldúa herself compares her writer’s role with the role of a shaman, as she told Keating during an interview: “I felt a calling to be an artist in the sense of a shaman—healing through words, using words as a medium for expressing the flights of the soul, communing with the spirit, having access to these other realities or worlds”

(“Turning Points” 19). Furthermore, in “Metaphors in the Tradition of the Shaman,”

Anzaldúa mentions that in indigenous communities, the shaman and the poet serve similar roles. Both play pivotal roles in the communities to “preserve and create cultural or group identity by mediating between the cultural heritage of the past or group identity by mediating between the cultural heritage of the past and the present everyday situations people find themselves in” (121). Assisting people who feel alienated from the dominant society to re-integrate themselves into their indigenous community is one of the duties of indigenous healers. As Elizabeth de la Portilla points out in They All Want Magic, curanderas/os29 are cultural brokers, “helping their clients to construct a whole out of fragmented worlds in which they can function” (23). Curanderas/os deploy their healing strategies to create bridges between cultures to help their patients re-connect to the web of the culture where they live. Comparable to indigenous healers, Anzaldúa’s role as a writer also promotes healing for the community where she belongs through different writing strategies. Importantly, across Anzaldúa’s entire career, she labors to create new

29 Curanderas/os are healers who practice curanderismo. Curanderismo is a syncretic healing system common in Latin America with origins in “Arab (via Spain), African (via diasporic slave), Greek, Spanish, and Amerindian cultures” (Hartley 141). 118

metaphors to replace the old and stagnant ones that deeply confine our thinking.

Anzaldúa firmly believes that the creation of alternative images will help other people heal because “we may give others access to a language and images with which they can articulate/express pain, confusion, joy, and other experiences thus far experienced only on an inarticulated emotional level” (“Metaphors” 122). Put differently, Anzaldúa’s creation of new metaphors aims to offer a visual and psychical language to legitimatize those realities experienced viscerally by Chicanas, women of color, and those who are oppressed but not yet acknowledged in the dominant discourse.

As a shaman, Anzaldúa diagnoses most of her ills as the results caused by the separation of the flesh from the spirit, a “separation of the economics of the physical life with the economics of the spirit” in the Christian-Judeo worldview (“Dream of the

Double-Faced Woman” 70). The body/spirit split results from the suppression of

“otherworldly” events. As Anzaldúa says, “We’ve been taught 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”

(Borderlands 58). In Anzaldúa’s view, spirit is not exclusive to the celestial domain governed by God but exists in every mundane being throughout the universe as I have discussed in the section titled “The Symbiotic Body” in this chapter. In other words, those considered to be otherworldly are in fact this-worldly for Anzaldúa.

Since spirituality connects everything in the universe, the failure to recognize the existence of spirit in every cell of our body and in other beings causes wounds of fragmentation and alienation that requires shamanistic intervention to reconnect the patients back with themselves, with other vitalities, and with the whole universe.

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According to Anzaldúa, one of the shaman writer’s important responsibilities is to help those who suffer from the spiritual estrangement from our body and from the bodies of others in the world. Re-associating with spirit not only leads us to move out of the compartmentalization of the individual but also catalyzes self-transformation through interactions with the spirit of other beings.

Anzaldúa’s work on her writing body that communicates with the spirit illuminates the way in which she heals the epistemological split caused by the spiritual fragmentation of the self. This work also aspires to heal the alienation of the self from the other, as seen in Anzaldúa’s distinctive aesthetics and epistemology. I contend that her writing body can be best understood through the framework of the indigenous healer’s body. Unlike the liberal self-enclosed body that fails to recognize the existence of spirit in the body, both Anzaldúa’s writing body and the indigenous healer’s body are infused with spirit but are not taken over by it. Their bodies serve as pervious interfaces where multiple entities with spirit can travel through and interact in the body to effect transformation not only inside but also outside of the self.

To understand the Mesoamerican indigenous healer’s body, we need to first liberate our imagination from the shackle of the Western biomedical body that is the foundation of the liberal possessive individual. Different from the biomedical body viewed as “a package of blood, viscera, and bones enclosed in a sack of skin like the one which modern individual ‘has,’” the body conceptualized in Mesoamerican traditional medicine is “porous, permeable, and open to the great cosmic currents” (Marcos 5-6).

The body’s porosity suggests that skin serves as an interface where different entities traffic through rather than a fence that encloses a property and separates the inside from

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the outside as in the liberal notion of the body. The liberal individual or the modern rational self is a sealed vacuum; the body is regarded as “the temple of one’s individuality, of one’s clear and distinct separation from others and from nature, because it is an enclosed entity” (Winnubst 29). In contrast with the liberal individual and her/his view on the body, the Mesoamerican body has a cosmological dimension. As Sylvia

Marcos points out, “[w]hat must be read in the body are signs of relationship with the universe” (6). The body becomes a hinge between the self and the other and between the individual and the universe. The body is a text demanding to be read cosmologically.

Moreover, the guiding cosmology shaping the view on the Mesoamerican body is animism that believes everything has soul; there is no static hierarchical distinction and clear separation between humans and non-humans. Instead, the porous body functions as a connector bridging various entities. Marcos uses the image of a “vortex” to conceptualize the Mesoamerican body. For Marcos, the body as a vortex is “generated by the dynamic confluence of multiple entities, both material and immaterial and often contradictory, that combine and recombine in endless interplay” (64). In other words, the

Mesoamerican body is a communal body where an individual, spirit, and non-human, and non-material elements communicate and/or collide; the self emerging out of this specific notion of the body is neither fixed nor enclosed but is constantly transformed and renewed by the exchange between the material and the non-material as well as between the divine and the mundane. The foundation of the transformation of a person lies not as much in one’s intentionality as in one’s ontological openness to other entities that traffic through, exchange, and coalesce in the permeable body. The body’s porosity allows for creative synergy of body, mind, spirit, and surroundings to emerge.

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The distinctive notion of agency that relies on bodily porosity affecting transformation can be further illuminated in the specific body paradigm of Mesoamerican indigenous healer’s body. According to her anthropological observation of curanderas/os in San Antonio, Texas, De la Portilla notices that a healer’s body is often regarded as “an empty vessel that is filled with a divine healing energy” (53). However, it is important to note that by claiming divine intervention, healers “‘give up’ agency to a superior force and in doing so reconstruct their identity,” which in turn makes them become “agents of change” (De la Portilla 79). A paradoxical relationship exists between healers’ giving up the traditional notion of agency limited to individual intentionality and their becoming of agents of change in the very act of relinquishing the full control of their bodies and consciousness. In her analysis of Mesoamerican healers in Taken from the Lips, Marcos helps us grasp the intricate notion of the healer’s agency. The healer is recognized as an agent but without full intentionality initiated by a sole individual. The healer’s body is infused by spirit but is not a passive recipient of the spirit. Marcos argues that, in the

Mesoamerican indigenous medical framework,

The healer as a vehicle receives the spirit, but not as inert matter. She vibrates, she is alive. Her human boundaries are flexible, pliable, redundant and permeable, allowing a certain flow between the heavenly domain and her own earthly being. Vehicle healers participate actively in conveying the divine to the human. (51)

Vehicle healers are healers who use their bodies to communicate with the spiritual world to receive healing messages to treat their patients. The agency of vehicle healers that

Marcos points out here is not shored up by a subject’s deliberate intention but is generated through releasing the desire of the full control of the human body to interact with other vitalities. I find Jane Bennett’s concept of distributive agency discussed in

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Vibrant Matter helpful to elaborate the paradoxical dynamic of the indigenous agency that Marcos articulates. According to Bennett, agency is always distributive in the sense that agency occurs in “a swarm of vitalities at play” rather than merely in an individual subject (32). That is, in the theory of distributive agency, human intentions are “always in competition and confederation with many other strivings. . . .” (Bennett 32). Therefore, the causality catalyzed by distributive agency becomes “more emergent than efficient, more fractal than linear” (Bennett 33). Although unlike Marcos, Bennett insists on adopting a framework of materiality rather than spirituality to understand vitality and agency in her book, her notion of distributive agency is still instrumental in capturing the agency of the indigenous healers. Reading within the framework of Bennett’s distributive agency, the indigenous healers also manifest their agency by situating their bodies within, to borrow Bennett’s term, a “swarm of vitalities.” The swarm of vitalities in the context of the vehicle healers includes both the bodily and spiritual dimensions. Both the body of the healer and the spiritual energy that conveys through the healer’s body vibrate and thus both are alive. Moreover, the spiritual awareness or spiritual message that indigenous healers use to treat their patients is emerging rather than consciously developed when the healers are willing to be vulnerable to share their bodies with the spiritual energies. This distinctive notion of the indigenous healer’s body as a vehicle permeable to other vitalities without losing itself is exemplified in one of Anzaldúa’s poems, “The

Presence.” In the poem, Anzaldúa’s shamanistic writing body is also an active permeable vehicle to accommodate and communicate with the spirit to facilitate her creative process.

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In “The Presence,” Anzaldúa embodies the consciousness of the spirit in her writing to make the collective art creation process more vivid. In the poem, Anzaldúa describes a “he-spirit” whom she calls her “writing daemon” (119) and “a spirit helper or a guardian spirit” (120) that tells her what to write. With the help of the writing daemon,

“the words just/ flowed out of [her] fingertips/ into [her] pen, spilling on the paper”

(Anzaldúa, “The Presence” 119). Even though the spirit escapes her vision, Anzaldúa always feels it and tracks it “by its smell” (“The Presence” 120). It is important to note that the he-spirit is not an eventful appearance or authority but a daily companion; he sometimes follows Anzaldúa

to the homes of friends to the university, but after a couple of blocks he would get further and further behind as if afraid he’d forget the way back to [her] apartment. He’d always be there when [she] returned. (“The Presence” 119)

The spirit that frequents Anzaldúa’s life and work is not otherworldly but this-worldly.

In the collaborative process of art creation shown in “The Presence,” the self of

Anzaldúa is not taken over by the “he-spirit” when the consciousness of Anzaldúa and that of her writing daemon converges in her writing body. Anzaldúa invites us to re- conceptualize the convergence of the writer’s consciousness and the consciousness of the spirit through the concept of “habitation” in meditation. In Anzaldúa’s own words, habitation is not like “a spirit taking over”; instead, “[w]hen the spirit inhabits you, then you get direct information. But it doesn’t mean that your spirit leaves. It’s like a teacher teaching you, except you’re not in a classroom” (“Within the Crossroads” 125). Through habitation, Anzaldúa’s writing body becomes the space of a classroom where she can

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communicate with the spirit and learn from it. In other words, the spirit of Anzaldúa and the teaching spirit cohabit in her writing body rather than the teaching spirit taking over

Anzaldúa’s spirit in her body. Put metaphorically, I read that the spirit is more like a roommate cohabiting with Anzaldua’s spirit in her physical body than an intruder who defeats or annihilates her spirit.

“The Presence” epitomizes Anzaldúa’s distinctive aesthetic agency in the sense that she lets go the desire of mastery and total control and listens to her writing daemon that tells her what to write. Her aesthetic agency hinges on yielding to the writing daemon. Lugones’s notion of “active subjectivity” is productive to illuminate Anzaldúa’s aesthetic agency. Lugones distinguishes Anzaldúa’s active subjectivity from the Western notion of agency. According to Lugones, the Western notion of agency “presupposes ready-made hierarchical worlds of sense in which individuals form intentions, make choices, and carry out actions in the ready-made terms of those worlds. That is, agency is constituted by potent intentionality in a particular vein” (“From within Germinative

Stasis” 86; original emphasis). Lugones critically argues that in the liberal notion of agency one must believe in a unified self to maintain the fantasy of individual agency that one makes choices intentionally. Lugones also points out that this fantasy of the Western concept of individual agency is in fact a mask for power and for domination over others.

Lugones proposes that we replace the authoritative notion of agency with active subjectivity to better grasp Anzaldúa’s distinctive agency. Lugones’s concept of active subjectivity refers to an active germinate state where subjects exist before taking any outward action; the germinate state incubates future transformation in its active stasis.

Although the subject of active subjectivity does not act, “she is active, a serpent coiled”

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(Lugones, “From within Germinative Stasis” 90). Lugones distinguishes action and the state of being active. Being active does not always involves external action. Instead, it can refer to a state where one is mentally and spiritually alert and vigilant without any outward bodily action.

In “The Presence,” we see that Anzaldúa enacts Lugones’s notion of active subjectivity by listening to her writing daemon in the process of writing before she composes her creative work. Interestingly, Anzaldúa’s aesthetic agency is obtained through the process of de-emphasizing authoritative agency. By yielding to her spirit helper, Anzaldúa liberates herself from the straitjacket of the illusionary unified self to become multiplicious. Her writing body becomes a crossroads like the indigenous healer’s body where the healer’s spirit can actively exchange with the spirit helper without losing itself or without being passive. Anzaldúa’s shamanic writing body as a vehicle healer to convey the divine to the human hinges on the conception of the body as permeable rather than self-enclosed. That is, the transmission between the spiritual and the human and between the immaterial spirit and the material words relies on Anzaldúa’s writing body as a pervious interface.

Anzaldúa’s writing body as a porous and communal body instead of a sovereign and self-enclosed body resonates with her alternative view on art creation. Unlike

Western aesthetics that attempt to “manage the energies of its own internal system” and that treats art as an object that can be owned, Anzaldúa’s aesthetics roots in tribal art that regards artworks not as inert objects but as something with an identity (Borderlands 89).

In Anzaldúa’s words, art is “a ‘who’ or a ‘what’ and contains the presences of persons, that is, incarnations of gods or ancestors or natural and cosmic powers” (Borderlands 89).

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Anzaldúa believes that art is never entirely created intentionally by artists. Rather, the cosmic and spiritual forces that drive art creation also demand themselves to be materialized through the bodies of the artists. Loosening mastery through yielding to spiritual forces in art creation, Anzaldúa emphasizes that creativity requires spiritual excavation: “Inherent in the creative act is a spiritual, psychic component—one of spiritual excavation, of (ad)venturing into the inner void. . . . To do this kind of work requires the total person—body, soul, mind, and spirit” (“Haciendo caras” 135).

Anzaldúa’s aesthetics is an other-directed process of art creation; what’s more, it is also spirit-laden. Attributing her creative agency within a collective field of consciousness that is not reserved to human agents, Anzaldúa dispels the narcissistic myths of “golden nugget theory of genius and the free enterprise conception of individual achievement” that inflict Western art history (Nochlin 352). In Anzaldúa’s spiritualized other-directed aesthetics, agents of art creation with total control do not exist because the creative agents could refer to both the artist and the spirit that demands to be embodied in artwork. In an interview with Smuckler, Anzaldúa explained, “Now it’s the other way around, or rather my mouth and the words from the typewriter are channels for what the soul has to manifest” (“Spirituality” 91). The idea that writing carries part of Anzaldúa and Anzaldúa carries part of the spirit that shapes her work is manifested in the relationship between

Anzaldúa and her writing daemon in “The Presence” discussed above.

In Anzaldúa’s aesthetics, her writing body serves as an interface between the inspiration of the spirit and Anzaldúa’s own consciousness and between her writing ideas gained through the communication with the spirit and the actual written words on paper.

It is crucial to note that for Anzaldúa, writing is always a sensuous and bodily act instead

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of mere mind work. In “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers,”

Anzaldúa urges women of color writers to “[f]eel your way without blinders. To touch more people . . . not through rhetoric but through blood and pus and sweat” (173). “Blood and pus and sweat” denote the embodied dimension of writing in contrast with the belief that writing is only produced by mind but not through the body. For Anzaldúa, our body

“does not discern between external stimuli and stimuli from the imagination. It reacts equally viscerally to events from the imagination as it does to ‘real’ events” (Borderlands

60).

Conceptualizing the body as a crucial source and vehicle for knowledge production, Anzaldúa recuperates different modes of knowing in the body that are downplayed and belittled by the epistemological system governed by scientific rationality. Anzaldúa calls those suppressed modes of knowing la facultad, “an instant

‘sensing,’ a quick perception arrived at without conscious reasoning” (Borderlands 60).

Levine elaborates on la facultad, stating that it is also “a synaesthetic faculty, involving intuition, imagination, senses, and emotions as well as the inner eye. . . .” (179).

Anzaldúa evokes la facultad during the process of writing through dreaming, meditation, being in trance, and allowing the spirit to speak to and through her body. Similar to indigenous healers whose transformative repertoire involves a variety of practices such as spiritual channeling, rituals, plant use, and massage, Anzaldúa as a shaman writer also adopts various modes of consciousness to facilitate her art creation without privileging one over the other. As Keating emphasizes, Anzaldúa does not “abandon the ‘rational eye’ in order to rely exclusively on the ‘magical eye,’ the emotion/intuitive mode of perception”; instead, Anzaldúa synthesizes both rational and magical eyes (“Myth” 84).

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While Anzaldúa evokes a variety of nonrational modes of consciousness in her writing, she does not aim to replace the rational consciousness with the nonrational one but only acknowledges the existence and equal usefulness of those alternative forms of consciousness looked down upon by a society where scientific rationality dominates.

Elevating one perspective to be the only perspective is always oppressive because it follows a colonial logic that presupposes that those that stray from norms are inferior and thus should be eliminated. Instead, as Anzaldúa writes in an unpublished article draft titled “El desarrollo and future of Chicana theory”, “We need not a method but methods, not a style but many styles, not a perspective but many” (original emphasis). Anzaldúa’s multiplying aesthetic and epistemological repository is a decolonial effort to disrupt the colonial logic under which there can only exist one truth and reality accessed through scientific rationality.

Emphasizing the fact that writing is a bodily act rather than a mere mind work and that writing requires various forms of consciousness, Anzaldúa endeavors to heal the split between the body and the mind and between the rational and the nonrational in art creation and knowledge production. I argue that Anzaldúa’s acknowledgment of the co- existence of different modes of consciousness experienced through the body is to embrace wider dimensions of our existence. For Anzaldúa, aesthetics, existence, politics, and epistemology are inseparable. As Anzaldúa clearly articulates, “I write not just to escape reality but to create a new reality” (“When I Write I Hover” 238). Anzaldúa’s use of her innovative images, metaphors, and nonlinear narrative styles to delineate those realities only known through our emotional, psychic, and spiritual senses rather than our rational reasoning is to not only validate those realities but also expand readers’

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epistemological horizon in a scientific rationality-dominant world. We can contextualize the intricate relationship among Anzaldúa’s aesthetics, epistemology, ontology, and politics within the Nahua thought which deeply influences Anzaldúa’s work.

For Nahuas, existing is fundamentally artistic; the artistic is also epistemological and transformative. No clearly-defined boundary exists between existence, aesthetics, and epistemology in Nahua thought. In “Pre-Columbian Philosophies,” Maffie states:

The Nahua had no notion of a distinctly aesthetic—as opposed to moral or epistemological—point of view from which to judge the goodness of human artistry. They defined aesthetic goodness in terms of human flourishing. Aesthetically good (cualli) ‘flower and song’ improve both its creator and audience metaphysically, morally, and epistemologically, and is an essential ingredient of a flourishing life. Aesthetics is thus shot through with moral and epistemological purpose. (21)

The transformative element that constitutes Nahua aesthetics hinges on the distinctive power of language in Nahua philosophy. That is, language is not an instrument for representation but as a medium that catalyzes change in the world (Maffie 20). The spoken word is “causally efficacious, and when used wisely, affects change in the course of human and non-human events with an eye toward human and cosmic balance” (Maffie

20; original emphasis). The Nahua emphasis on transformative power in art creation is also salient in Anzaldúa’s aesthetics that integrates aesthetic, spiritual, ontological, epistemological, and political dimensions with transformative and therapeutic qualities.

Anzaldúa’s aesthetics are well-captured by Keating’s notion of “poet-shaman aesthetics” as “a transformation-based writing practice” that is “a synergistic combination of artistry, healing, and transformation grounded in relational, indigenous-inflected worldviews” (“Speculative Realism” 51). One of the distinctive characteristics of poet- shaman aesthetics lies in its emphasis on the embodied effect of writing. In poet-shaman

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aesthetics, the effects of writing expand beyond the linguistic and metaphorical territory for representation into a material realm in which writing is not only about words but also about the world. In other words, writing has “material(izing) force” as the way in which language is understood in Nahua thought (Keating, “Speculative Realism “52). Writing can affect change and transformation in the material world through linguistic words. The interplay between linguistic words and the material world is integral in Anzaldúa’s aesthetics. For Anzaldúa, creative acts are “forms of political activism employing definite aesthetic strategies for resisting dominant cultural norms and are not merely aesthetic exercise. We build culture as we inscribe in these various forms” (“Haciendo caras” 135).

Anzaldúa endows writing with politically transformative and materializing power; her writing body becomes the embodied medium to make the power happen.

The Permeable Body as an Embodied Decolonial Spatiality

In this chapter, through examining her writings on the ecological symbiotic body, bleeding body, and writing body, I map out Anzaldúa’s decolonial spatiality located at a bodily level. Anzaldúa always strives for blurring the boundary between sets of dichotomies and insists on the permeability of the in-between space where the body is located in order to create her ontological, epistemological, aesthetic, and political

(w)holism. Some crucial dichotomies that Anzaldúa disrupts in her work include body/mind, body/spirit, aesthetics/politics, the human/the non-human, the material/the non-material, and self/other. I contend that Anzaldúa relies on a permeable body paradigm as an alternative spatiality to conceptualize decolonial healing in her writing and in her feminist politics. The pervious body paradigm decolonizes the body from a set

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of antagonistic binaries into a spiritualized nexus that re-connects with all those entities, vitalities, and relationships she used to be alienated from.

Anzaldúa sketches out at least three dimensions of permeability in her body paradigm: ontological, social, and epistemological permeability. The ontological notion of permeability in Anzaldúa’s body paradigm hinges on her indigenous spiritualized cosmology. In the cosmology, the shared spirit as energy that can be understood within the framework of teotl in Nahua thought generates and permeates in every existence in the universe. Believing that all beings are created by the shared spirit pulsating in the universe with different rhythms, Anzaldúa highlights the permeable bodily contour between the human and the nonhuman manifested in her ecological writings and drawings of anthropomorphic figures. Anzaldúa does not see the body as a discrete self- enclosed entity that clearly separates the self from the other but as a porous nexus to link the self and the other through recognizing the shared life-generating energy called spirit.

In the writing of her early menstruating body, Anzaldúa illuminates the social permeability in the body in the sense that the boundary of individual colonized women delineated by the society blurs through experiencing shared suffering and pain caused by structures of oppression. Anzaldúa interprets her bleeding body not merely as an individual suffering body caused by a hormone imbalance. Importantly, Anzaldúa reads her bleeding body as an embodied metaphor for the collective suffering body that can be connected to her mother’s transgressive body and to the collective wounded Chicana body. Refusing to view her bleeding body as a singular body in the state of suffering,

Anzaldúa emphasizes the anonymity of social casualty of women of color in general and

Chicanas in particular in a sexist, racist, homophobic, and colonialist society. The

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anonymity of social causality results from the exchangeability of bodies under the matrix of oppression. Anzaldúa’s interpretation of her individual bleeding body as an open wound that connects with other wounded bodies suggests that her bleeding body is only one casualty among all who transgress the spatiality created by structures of oppression.

Society does not distinguish the faces of those who transgress the norms but shoves them anonymously to the B/borderlands, the geographical open wound. The animosity of the bleeding body characterizes the social permeability in Anzaldúa’s work.

Later in her life, rather than understanding her early menstruating body as merely the symptom of a hormone imbalance, Anzaldúa re-interprets that a spirit unused to physical incarnation has entered her. Through re-conceptualizing her bleeding body in a spiritual lens, she affirms a mode of consciousness that is suppressed by a society dominated by the scientific rationality. Anzaldúa adheres to epistemological permeability by shifting between different interpretative frameworks to understand her wounded body.

The epistemological permeability experienced in the body is best elaborated in

Anzaldúa’s writing on her collective writing process with the spirit. Similar to the indigenous healer’s body that acts as an interface porous to the spiritual world,

Anzaldúa’s writing body also allows for the spirit to communicate with her consciousness. By sharing her aesthetic agency with the spirit that demands to be embodied in words, Anzaldúa aims to heal the split of body/mind/spirit in writing. While writing is often viewed as a mind work, for Anzaldúa, it is fundamentally bodily and spiritual work. Only by recognizing and utilizing the co-existence of multiple modes of consciousness experienced non-discretely through the body can the full dimensions of existence be represented in creative and political works.

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Anzaldúa’s permeable body paradigm theorized in this chapter offers us an invaluable embodied foundation to grasp the fluid decolonial spatiality symbolized in the tilde symbol that I present through the visual expression of “self~other,” a concept proposed in the introduction of this project. Anzaldúa’s alternative body paradigm liberates our conception of the body by helping us see the liquefied field of energy between the self and the other; we no longer regard it as a sealed vacuum promoted by the discourses of the liberal possessive individual. I see Anzaldúa’s paradigm of the permeable body concretizes the tilde (~) space of the “self~other” relationship. Only when we re-think the body as a permeable space that can potentially merge the self and the other can we grasp the inseparable yet invaluable interconnectivity among all beings to move beyond the “us versus them” mentality and to create a decolonial healing self that is grounded in the interconnectivity and multiplicity of differences. In the following chapter, I will use Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s experimental autobiography as a literary example to further illuminate how we can multiply the “self~other” relationship to create a field for a coalitional self. I will propose a ripple imagery to help us visualize a decolonial spatiality where a healing self situates itself within an expansive coalitional field of differences in a memory landscape.

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Figure 2: An anthropomorphic figure drawn by Gloria Anzaldúa in 1987

Figure 3: "Waiting for BART" drawn by Gloria Anzaldúa in 1978

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Chapter 3: The Ripple Imagery as a Decolonial Self: Exploring María Lugones’s Multiplicity in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée

The previous two chapters demonstrate the act of boundary breaking to illuminate a decolonial spatiality where a colonized wounded self can transform itself into a decolonial healing self. Linda Hogan and Gloria Anzaldúa disrupt the colonial spatiality characterized by border demarcation and hierarchical categorization of differences by liquefying the boundaries between different vitalities to invite creative, democratic, and transformative interactions between them, which in turn catalyzes their regenerated subjectivities. Both Hogan and Anzaldúa situate their formation of decolonial healing selves within the communal but with different foci. While Hogan emphasizes ensuring the flourishing of other lives in an ecological web to secure the prosperity of her decolonial self, Anzaldúa promotes the embodied porosity informed by an indigenous framework of spirituality to regenerate her individual wounded self through building connections with other bodies violated by structures of oppression. I argue that what underlies the two constituting dimensions of decolonial spatiality of healing, that is mutual flourishing and porosity, is a decolonial logic of multiplicity. Without multiplicity, practices of liquefying the space between differences could be difficult to distinguish from the colonial practices of homogenizing differences.

In this chapter, I delve into the decolonial logic of multiplicity fundamental to the mapping of a fluid and liquefied spatiality that allows for creative interconnectivity

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between differences without flattening them out. I find Latina feminist philosopher María

Lugones’s decolonial feminism enlightening to illuminate the formation of a healing self vis-à-vis a spatiality guided by a politics of multiplicity. To concretize and to visualize the spatiality undergirded by a decolonial logic of multiplicity, I look into Korean-

American writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s experimental autobiography Dictée, a text that seeks to create a decolonial healing self at a coalitional level.

The Relation between Multiplicity and the Decolonial Self

Lugones’s decolonial feminism is characterized by a methodology of multiplicity that emphasizes the irreducibility of the histories, epistemologies, memories, and cosmologies of the colonized in their contact with colonial power. Lugones argues that coloniality names not only the “classification of people in terms of the coloniality of power and gender, but also the process of active reduction of people, the dehumanization that fits them for the classification, the process of subjectification, the attempt to turn the colonized into less than human beings” (“Toward a Decolonial Feminism” 745). To address the dehumanization that occurs within the subjectivity of the colonized under coloniality, Lugones calls for a collective project of “decolonizing ourselves.”30

However, because the construction of the modern subject is problematic for Lugones, the project of decolonizing ourselves does not imply that the self will still be the rational, unified individual that is often promoted in colonial modernity. Whereas the mechanisms of categorization, reduction, and dehumanization buttress coloniality, recognizing,

30 Lugones articulated characteristics of decolonial feminism in a public lecture titled “Resisting Gender: Toward a Decolonial Feminism” at the Ohio State University on March 14, 2014. 137

maintaining, and creating multiplicity in us and in others are crucial steps toward the project of decolonizing ourselves.

In Lugones’s decolonial feminist thought, the irreducible multiplicity in the subjectivity of the colonized shows that the coloniality of gender is never a successful enterprise. As Lugones contends, “Without the tense multiplicity we only see either the coloniality of gender as accomplishment, or a freezing of memory, an ossified understanding of self in relation from a precolonial sense of the social” (“Methodological

Notes” 84). Coloniality of gender has two main aspects: one is what Lugones calls the light side of the modern/colonial gender system and the other is the dark side of the system. In “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” Lugones argues that the light side of the modern/colonial gender system focuses on constructing gender and gender relations that order only the lives of white bourgeois men and women and establishes the hegemonic colonial meanings of gender norms. Lugones points out that biological dimorphism, heterosexualism, and patriarchy are the main pillars of the light side of the gender system. As for the dark side of the system, it constructs gender and arranges gender relations of the colonized people through physical, sexual, and economic violence. While the modern/colonial gender system is a reality, it is never an accomplished product because resisting forces always exist simultaneously with oppressing forces, as in Lugones’s visual expression of “resisting ß à oppressing”

(“Tactical Strategies” 223). Resistance disrupts the fantasy of coloniality as accomplishment by undermining the oppressive forces. Alternatives always exist in the

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border31 of the oppressive spatiality because we are ontologically multiple. As Lugones explains: “You are concrete. Your spatiality, constructed as an intersection following the designs of power, isn’t. This discrepancy already tells you that you are more than one”

(Introduction 10). The spatiality drawn by those in power is only one possibility for our concrete bodies to inhabit. In addition to excavating multiple spatialities in which we can reside, Lugones’s vision of decolonizing ourselves requires us to learn about each other

“to encompass in our imagination the multiplicity of the powerfully oppressive constructions of the social and of the infrapolitically resistant collectives”

(“Methodological Notes” 71). The decolonial possibility therefore lies in the praxis of transformation at both individual and collective levels. The colonized self becomes a decolonial self by recognizing and insisting on one’s own multiplicity and that of others when trespassing the spatiality of oppression. Decolonial selves thereby invent a liberatory and coalitional spatiality from the bottom up.

To illuminate the contours of the decolonial self that emerges from Lugones’s theory of multiplicity, this chapter turns to Cha’s experimental autobiography Dictée for inspiration. Dictée can be read as a decolonial feminist text in which a decolonial self who is both multiplicitous and coalitional is created. Whereas Lugones mostly conceives of the multiple selves of the oppressed-resistant subject as occurring in one body as

Mariana Ortega suggests in her analysis of Lugones’s “world”-traveling self, this chapter seeks to expand Lugones’s theory of multiplicity by showing that the multiplicity of a

31 I use the term “border” with reference to Walter Mignolo’s concept. Mignolo argues that decolonial thinking dwells in the border, a space of “exteriority” that is “not the outside, but the outside built from the inside in the process of building itself as inside” (26). Border is the space where those who do not conform to Western modernity reside; it is also the space where we have the potential to cast off our previous epistemic baggage by “learning to unlearn in order to relearn and to rebuild” (Mignolo 26). 139

decolonial self also exists across different bodies, separated by culture and time. As a means to elaborating Lugones’s vision of “decolonizing ourselves” through Cha’s Dictée, this chapter will introduce a ripple imagery as a metaphor to conceptualize a self that is simultaneously connected to and separated from other people. The ripple imagery will help us conceptualize the construction of a decolonial self that can maintain multiplicity both within a body and across bodies in the process of remembering resistance to oppressive powers at different temporal and spatial moments.

Dictée

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982) was a diasporic Korean-American writer and performer. When she was thirteen years old, the Cha family moved from South

Korea to San Francisco after a yearlong stay in Hawaii. At the young age of thirty-one and upon entering Manhattan’s Puck Building to meet her husband, Richard Barbes, Cha was raped and violently killed by Joey Sanza, a security guard working there (Wallach).

Her now well-known book in the fields of Asian American studies and feminist literary studies, Dictée, was published posthumously on the same year of her death.

At its initial release, Dictée did not attract much attention from scholars within the

Asian American academic community. Dictée received recognition more than a decade after its first publication in 1982 when an anthology dedicated solely to Dictée came out in 1994, namely Writing Self, Writing Nation: A collection of Essays on Dictée by

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha edited by Norma Alarcón and Elaine H. Kim. The delayed recognition stems mainly from the fact that Dictée is an anomaly within Asian-American literary criticism and cultural studies due to its distinctive narrating style and structure as well as its lack of a central narrative voice. This text cannot be easily categorized into any

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specific literary and artistic genre because it uses a variety of representational forms, including prose, poetry, letters, and photos. Moreover, Dictée consists of Chinese calligraphic characters, clinical diagrams, and multiple seemingly discrete narratives, such as stories about Japanese colonization of Korea, Asian American diasporic experiences, and several known and unknown women’s stories across time and space.

Cha thwarts readers’ desire for a transparent, unified story because her book offers no clear storyline to weave the visual and written elements of the text into a linear and developmental narrative. It is therefore difficult to pinpoint what Dictée is with certainty.

It could be a collection of some marginalized histories of women fighters against the matrix of colonial power, an Asian-American woman’s diasporic story, a narrative about mother-daughter relations, and/or a story of a colonized woman’s struggle of coming to voice, and so on.

Besides its non-linear structure and ambiguous storyline, Dictée causes even more confusion to readers due to its diverse narrative voices. Even though the University of

California Press labeled Dictée as an autobiography, the autobiographical elements in it are debatable.32 Cha’s Dictée poses a challenge to the liberal notion of the self that is fully enclosed and autonomous. Cha undermines the dominant presumption of unity in subject formation and interrogates the boundaries between individual speaking subjects by mixing the pronouns of “I”, “we,” “she,” and “you” to narrate this so-called autobiography. Multiplying the voice of the narrating self and making speakers of the voices ambiguous, Cha renders the formation of a unified identity in this autobiography

32 Not all scholars agree that Dictée is an autobiography. For example, Nicole McDaniel calls for reading Dictée as a memoir rather than as an autobiography. 141

unattainable. As Shelly Sunn Wong argues, Dictée refuses “the dominant culture’s demand to represent (and by implication, to establish a formal identity with), and thereby legitimate, an ideology of cultural assimilation” (45). Cha’s rejection of a progressive developmental narration and the unity of a narrative voice can be contextualized within the search for an ethnic identity in Asian American studies.

Asian American critics often argue that the structural fragmentation used by Cha obstructs readers’ desire to pin down a unified ethnic identity. For instance, Fukuko

Kobayashi suggests that Cha creates a space that is “constantly on guard against any unifying, consolidating tendency from within, while simultaneously functioning as a cultural front from which to fight back against any exoticizing, essentializing move from without” (73). For Kobayashi, the seeming fragmentation of identities in Dictée exemplifies the double battle Asian Americans face. On the one hand, Cha wrote Dictée during the time when the majority of Asian American critics were trying hard to define and claim a clear Asian American identity. For the battle within the Asian American community, Dictée can be viewed as a hindrance to this clear identity search (Lamm 51).

On the other hand, as Hyo Kim points out, Dictée is a “critique of this very desire to name, anchor and fix the identity of a subject according to an arbitrarily constructed criterion” (470). For the battle outside the Asian American community, Cha poses a challenge to the audiences who desire to read her text as a full representation of the author or as a representation of the entire Asian American community. Cha deliberately adopts structural and aesthetic fragmentation techniques to disrupt readers’ desire of closure of narration in Dictée.

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In this chapter, I read Dictée as a decolonial feminist text and I argue that Cha thwarts any desire for a unified identity of the subject. Instead, her text actively explores the multiplicity of both oppressors and the oppressed, thus revealing Cha’s decolonial feminist politics. I propose to read Dictée within a decolonial feminist framework because her text not only exposes the active reduction of the colonized under the matrix of coloniality but also gives accounts of multiple women’s practices of resistance to cultural, physical, and historical violence across time and space. Instead of a unified self, which is what we often see in autobiographies, I contend that the self delineated in Dictée is a decolonial self who insists upon the stickiness of multiplicity without collapsing differences into a hybrid. This self therefore enacts Lugones’s emphasis on “maintaining multiplicity at the point of reduction—not in maintaining a hybrid ‘product,’ which hides the colonial difference—in the tense workings of more than one logic, not to be synthesized but transcended” (“Toward a Decolonial Feminism” 755). According to

Lugones, if we collapse the differences produced by colonial power into a hybrid or, worse, into some sort of unity, we will fail to discern the fractured point between oppressing and resisting forces. The failure to identify the fractured point will lead us to believe that the differences embodied by the colonized are consistent with dominant power rather than with a contestation against it.

Both Cha and Lugones highlight, in different ways, the irreducibility of differences in the construction of a decolonial self, but they also do not foreclose the possibility of a coalitional self formed by multiple decolonial selves whose differences are likewise not collapsible or synthesizable. I suggest that two levels of a decolonial self can be discerned in Dictée. On the one hand, Cha emphasizes a decolonial self at an

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individual level whose multiplicity resides in one body within the liminal space that exists between oppressing and resisting forces. On the other hand, Cha offers a contour of a coalitional decolonial self, the autobiographical I of Dictée, whose multiplicity is located across bodies. The coalitional decolonial self, following the logic of fusion, situates itself across several women’s lives that collectively resist a shared colonial logic characterized by a dichotomous, categorical, and dominating logic. Fusion, Lugones tells us, is “a resistance to multiple oppressions”; by recognizing our resistance to multiple oppressions, we can also “appreciate the ways in which others have conceived, given cultural form to, theorized, expressed, embodied, their resistance to multiple oppressions”

(“Radical Multiculturalism” 77). Fusion is not an abstract concept; rather, it is a series of lived possibilities that can unfold an alternative future if we are able to share with each other resistant tactics against multiple oppressions. The logic of fusion is what makes the individual and collective dimensions of a decolonial self interconnected.

The Colonial Context in Dictée

Cha’s resistance to delineate a unified subject in the autobiography of Dictée can be contextualized within Lugones’s critique of the construction of the modern subject that follows the logic of purity and fragmentation. Lugones contends that the modern subject as a unified self is only a fictitious construct because, in reality, each person is multiple in nature (“Structure” 57); even the modern subject is multiple. Lugones argues that a unified self is conceivable only through a split-separation imagination which “generates the fictional construction of a vantage point from which unified wholes, totalities, can be captured. . . . The series of fictions hides the training of the multiple into unity as well as

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the survival of the multiple” (“Purity” 128). A unified self is only possible from a particular vantage standpoint reserved for those in power. What appears unified is produced through active reduction of multiplicity; unification is not self-explanatory.

Lugones identifies several machineries that the modern subject adopts to construct an illusory unified self from a particular perspective. For example, the modern subject produces his unity by relegating the markings of difference, such as gender and race, to those who are always labeled as “with culture.” As Lugones argues, “His production as pure, as the impartial reasoner, requires that others produce him. He is a fiction of his own imagination, but his imagination is mediated by the labor of others” (“Purity” 131).

The modern subject establishes himself as a neutral subject without markings of his body or inscription because “[h]is difference can not be thought of as ‘inscriptions’ but only as coincidental, nonsymbolic marks” (Lugones, “Purity” 131). Since the modern subject needs to ignore his body to avoid the marking of differences onto him, he compartmentalizes various sense making abilities into rationality and others, such as sensuality and affectivity associated with the body, as if the practice of rationality does not also take place in the body (Lugones, “Purity” 129). He privileges rationality over sensuality, affectivity, and embodiment in order to distinguish himself from those who cannot escape the inscription of differences on their bodies and also to make himself pure without the contradiction arising from the co-existence and tug-of-war between rationality and sensuality in his body.

Lugones’s revelation of the active construction of the modern subject intertwined with the concepts of split-separation, unity, and purity also hints at the production of hierarchical difference. As Lugones argues,

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To the extent that he is fictional, the tainting is fictional: seeing us as tainted depends on a need for purity that requires that we become “parts,” “addenda” of the bodies of modern subjects—Christian white bourgeois men—and make their purity possible. We become sides of fictitious dichotomies. To the extent that we are ambiguous—non-dichotomous— we threaten the fiction and can be rendered unfit only by decrying ambiguity as nonexistent—that is, by halving us, splitting us. Thus, we exist only as incomplete, unfit beings, and they exist as complete only to the extent that what we are, and what is absolutely necessary for them, is declared worthless. (“Purity” 131)

I quote the passage at length because it articulates eloquently the interconnection between split-separation, oppression, and the production of hierarchical difference. The difference produced by split-separation is hierarchical in the sense that only one difference is important, namely the dominant difference. In the passage above, the dominant difference is the difference embodied by the modern subject who claims to be unified in an illusory whole, but it hides its difference as neutrality. In contrast, subordinate differences are viewed as fragmented parts that make the dominant difference complete. From the perspective of the modern subject, those differences viewed as deviation from the norm have neither value nor wholeness; they are only supplementary and subordinate to it.

Those ambiguous differences suffer violent dichotomization and categorization in order to serve the dominant difference that clings to purity and that assumes the possibility of fragmentation. Those differences that fail to make the dominant difference complete or that threaten the wholeness of it are viewed as anomalies in need of forgetting, suppression, or erasure.

In Dictée, Cha uses the production of whiteness as a symbol of the active reduction of multiplicity under colonial power. In the following poetic passage from the

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book, we can see that the assumption of whiteness follows the logic of purity, demands transparency and control, and asserts itself as the dominant, yet neutral, difference:

Ever since the whiteness. It retains itself, white, unsurpassing, absent of hue, absolute, utmost pure, unattainably pure. If within its white shadow-shroud, all stain should vanish, all past all memory of having been cast, left, through the absolution and power of these words. Covering. Draping. Clothing. Sheathe. Shroud. Superimpose. Overlay. Screen. Conceal. Ambush. Disguise. Cache. Mask. Veil. Obscure. Cloud. Shade. Eclipse. Covert. (Cha 132)

Cha’s words reveal that whiteness is never self-evident. Whiteness is never pure but a mixture of multiple hues. It retains itself as absolutely pure only through various mechanisms that actively hide the multiplicity that constitutes whiteness itself. In order to expose that multiplicity within whiteness, Cha uses a series of verbs that allude to hiding something from being discovered, such as the verbs to shroud, conceal, obscure, and eclipse. Through the verbs, Cha exposes the various acts at work that downplay the construction of the unquestionable whiteness. Only when “all stain” and “all past all memory” are suppressed or cast out can whiteness appear to be pure. But as Cha notices, pure whiteness is “unattainable;” it is only imaginable from a vantage point that conceals its own production.

Since active reduction of multiplicity characterizes colonial conditions, Cha exposes the irreducible multiplicity of the colonial subject through her deployment of languages to manifest her decolonial politics. Gloria Anzaldúa proclaims in

Borderlands/La Frontera that “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am

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my language” (81). Similarly, language is fundamental to all of Cha’s work as Constance

Lewallen notes (9). If we read Dictée as part of Cha herself, who is a colonial Korean-

American subject, the complicated colonial histories that the colonial subject negotiates with are reflected in Cha’s use of multiple languages and brokenness of sentence structures. While English is the main language used by Cha, we also sparsely encounter

Chinese, Korean, and French in images and in the textual narrative. The colonial subject in Dictée is always a multiplicious linguistic one whose subjectivity cannot be formed by limiting it to only one language because she faces various linguistic subjectifications at once in the present and in memory. In the context of Dictée, each evoked language hints at a part of the colonial history of which the Korean-American colonial subject bears burden. Cha’s use of French evokes early French missionary colonialism in Korea (Lowe

40). Chinese characters not only indicate a hierarchy in traditional Korean literati circles33 but also recall the history that Korea used to be a tributary nation to imperial

China. As for English, it is associated with U.S. imperialism in Korea after WWII and the assimilating force operating on immigrants to the U.S.

Throughout the narrative, the colonial Korean-American linguistic subject in

Dictée encounters pauses, stuttering, brokenness of sentence structures, and failure to find equivalency in French dictation exercises when articulating her subjectivity. Laura Hyun

Yi Kang argues that the brokenness of languages in Dictée “reflects the foundational alienation of the speaking subject in language rather than signaling lack and otherness”

(223). The rough linguistic terrain depicted in Dictée highlights the insufficiency of each

33 M. J. Rhee points out that “the medium of written communication in Korea was the Chinese language. Although the Chinese language is not genetically related to Korean, Chinese scripts were thought of as prestigious” (92). 148

colonial language to fully account for the experience of the colonial subject because the language she speaks is never a pure language without equivocality. I argue that, on the one hand, Cha adopts the brokenness of languages to dramatize the disciplinary effect of colonial languages on the colonized. On the other hand, Cha’s anomalous rendition of language reflects the creation of her own visual-verbal language not only to stain the colonial languages believed to be pure but also to offer a decolonial language for a linguistic self whose multiplicity is irreducible to come to speech. In other words, Cha’s distinctive verbal-visual language in Dictée is meaningful regarding her experiment with language. But what’s more important, Cha’s deployment of both verbal and visual languages aims to paint a contour of an alternative body that is a decolonial coalitional body whose multiplicity cannot be diluted and whose properties can be shared across different bodies.

For Cha, the process of coming to speech is also a process of embodiment.

Similar to Anzaldúa’s view on language discussed in chapter 2, Cha never separates the discursive and embodied dimensions of speaking. Cha writes, “To scribe to make hear the words, to make sound the words, the words, the words made flesh” (18, original emphasis). Wong notes that “DICTÉE locates the condition of coming-into-language in the physicality of the body” (53). To better comprehend the fleshing process of the way in which Cha negotiates with colonial languages that discipline the colonial subject, I propose that we look into the seemingly random images on the body scattered throughout

Dictée in our analysis in order to grasp Cha’s decolonial feminist politics. Various representations of the body are included in Dictée. For example, there are biomedical and

Chinese medical diagrams of the body, headshots of women warriors, a map about the

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division of the geographical body of Korea, photos of demonstrators against Japanese colonization, and photos of execution. The visual elements are integral to Cha’s development of her decolonial language and politics. The images ground the decolonial feminist context of the colonial subject in Dictée who is subjected to and resisting coloniality simultaneously. The insertion of the visual elements without reference across the autobiography disrupts further the already bumpy textual narrative, which attempts to crack open multiply fractured loci between the oppressing and resisting forces where the decolonial self can emerge and be preserved.

Productive fractured loci are often located in the gaps between the visual and the verbal and in the tensions between images in Dictée. For instance, Cha emphasizes that the process of speaking is a strenuous act that the narrator cannot fully accomplish. She articulates this idea by juxtaposing biomedical diagrams of the larynx (see Figure 4) and the following text:

Contractions. Noise. Semblance of noise. Broken speech. One to one. At a time. Cracked tongue. Broken tongue. Pidgeon. Semblance of speech. Swallows. Inhales. Stutter. Starts. Stops before starts. About to. Then stops. Exhale swallowed to a sudden arrest. (Cha 75)

While the medical diagrams of the larynx point to the physical structure that supports the act of speaking, the juxtaposed textual narrative makes apparent that the process of fluent speaking involves tremendous efforts of the synergy between muscle, breath, rhythm, and specific language standards. In the passage above, the words “contractions,” “exhale,” and “inhale” point to the muscle exertion and breath control in the act of speaking while

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“stutter,” “start,” “stop,” and “arrest” indicate a particular rhythm that facilitates or hinders an intended speech. In addition to the requirement of the synergy of muscle, breath, and rhythm performed through the larynx, whether a speaking act is deemed successful also entails social and political judgment not entirely controllable by the speaker. Kang reminds us that “language is a formidable medium of social, political, and psychic subjection” and that “language is ordered and normalized to privilege certain speaking and writing bodies over others” (220). In the aforementioned quote from Dictée, the colonial subject can hardly come into language successfully according to the normalized standards; her language is only viewed as “broken speech,” “cracked tongue,” and “semblance of speech.” The bodily synergy of muscle, breath, and rhythm as well as the sociopolitical dimension of speaking are rendered invisible in the biomedical diagrams of the larynx. Elizabeth Frost argues that the diagrams of the larynx in Dictée reveal “an emphasis on structure over process”; “[t]here is no complete body imaged here; rather, the various diagrams represent a series of parts without reference to the whole” (188). Cha’s written narrative exposes what is erased in the larynx diagrams and mobilizes the fixated and compartmentalized medical diagrams of speaking organs and air passage into a process of speaking. The lively body of the speaking subject attempts to make herself visible and audible again in the gap between the visual and the verbal.

Fractured points exist not only between the diagrams of the larynx and the verbal text quoted above but also between the larynx diagrams and the Chinese medical acupuncture body (see Figure 5). Cha includes the two medical diagrams in the same section titled “Urania—Astronomy.” Reading the image of the acupuncture body, Frost argues that the “subtle reversal of the norm of black type on white surface alludes to an

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ideology that connects all things, in which a fundamental materiality is shared alike by human body and heavenly matter” (186). While the larynx diagrams center on the structure of the body without reference to the whole body, the diagram of the Chinese medical acupuncture body emphasizes the interconnectivity between multiple loci across the whole body where qi (氣) passes through. I do not think that Cha necessarily privileges the Chinese medical acupuncture body over the biomedical one. Instead, I suggest that Cha includes the two distinctive paradigms of the medical body in the same section for the purpose of underscoring the tension between multiple ways of conceptualizing the body and their respective epistemologies associated with the medical discourses. The Chinese medical acupuncture body is included to contest the authority accorded to the biomedical body in countries that claim and pride themselves to be

“civilized” societies, such as the U.S. For the decolonial purpose, Cha makes the suppressed medical paradigm apparent; the acupuncture body reveals the traditional

Korean medical paradigm and epistemology that is still remembered and may be practiced by the colonial Korean-American subject.

Along with many scholars like Frost, I agree that the diagram of the Chinese acupuncture body brings to light a more holistic view on the body than the larynx diagrams. But I want to add another layer to the image that is relevant to the colonial context under which Dictée was written, a layer that has gone virtually ignored in the current scholarship on this text. I argue that the diagram of the acupuncture body that lays out the vessel systems where qi circulates across the entire body hints at the economic exchange and circulation desired by Japanese imperialism in the colonial Korean

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geographical body. I am connecting the acupuncture body to Japanese colonization of

Korea because there are recurring references to Japanese colonization in Dictée.

In Huang di nei jing su wen: Nature, Knowledge, Imagery in an Ancient Chinese

Medical Text, Paul Unschuld known for his scholarship on Chinese medicine offers a compelling account of the emergence of the vessel theory which guides the practice of acupuncture in the fundamental Chinese medical canon, Huang di nei jing su wen (黃帝

內經素問). For Unschuld, the medical ideology always goes hand in hand with the political one. Unschuld contextualizes the development of the new34 medical thought of vessel theory with a focus on the objective natural laws of systematic correspondence in an emerging unified empire that requires a new set of governances. Unschuld argues that vessel theory is actually a theory of economic exchange in the body that mirrors the expansion of resource networks among previously separated segments in the newly unified empires of Qin (221-206 BC) and Han (206 BC-220 AD). While Unschuld acknowledges the theoretical eclecticism in Su wen (344), he argues that the vessel theory conceptualized in Su wen is mainly guided by the political philosophies of legalism and

Confucianism that emphasize order and hierarchy rather than by Daoism which emphasizes a harmony that supports earlier medical discourse. Unschuld argues that acupuncture as a practice of the vessel theory “was not meant to bring a sick organism back to harmony with nature, as the Daoist might have preferred it; it aimed at restoring a complicated system of exchanges among different centers of production and consumption.

34 The newness of vessel theory stands in sharp contrast to earlier Chinese medical thought that takes seriously the existence of demons as pathogenic agents. While demons as pathogenic agents are not rejected or directly questioned in Su wen, vessel theory centers more on the natural laws of systematic correspondence (Unschuld 327). 153

In other words, acupuncture serves to maintain a system that runs counter to the social structures conducive to peace and harmony demanded by the Daoist worldview” (340). In the state governance of the empire of Qin, to ensure a smooth system of exchange requires military forces to establish order, which is in contrast to the rulership informed by the Daoist concept of wu wei35 (無為) characterized by non-action or non-interference.

In terms of the Confucian philosophy that supports the vessel theory, Unschuld contends that the key Confucian value term of yi (義) interpreted as “to do the right thing in any given situation” is related to “the practice of needle therapy, acupuncture, the method of choice to avert the prime anathema of Confucianism: luan 亂, chos, disorder” (345).

According to Unschuld, the vessel theory and its praxis of acupuncture not only correspond to a legalist and Confucian viewpoint but also mirror the desire for order and smooth systematic networks of economic exchange of the emerging unified empires of

Qin and Han.

In the context of Dictée, we can read the medical diagram of the acupuncture body together with the history of Japanese colonization of Korea that serves as a fundamental colonial ground in the autobiography. The diagram of the acupuncture body recalls the Japanese imperial body during the period of its colonization of Korea (1910-

1945). Bruce Cumings points out that the distinctiveness of Japan as a colonial power lies in the fact that the countries Japan colonized, such as Korea and Taiwan, were very close to its borders (485). The geographical contiguity between Japan and Korea was conducive to Japanese imperialist expansion in terms of resource access and circulation.

35 See Rui Zhu’s “Wu-Wei: Lao-zi, Zhuang-zi, and the Aesthetic Judgment” for a more nuanced discussion on the manifold meanings of the concept of wu wei.

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Japan’s significant investment in communication and transportation sectors sought to control the empire economy within the colony of Korea and between the colony and the metropole. Cumings notes that the concern for “industry and the contiguity of Korea led

Japan to lay an extensive network of railways in the colony, so that by 1945 Korea had the most developed rail system in Asia outside of Japan” (487). Reading against the backdrop of the history of Japanese colonization of Korea regarding economic exchange through communication and transportation sectors, we can better grasp another layer of the diagram of the acupuncture body included in Dictée. There are at least two dimensions of the acupuncture body diagram associated with the colonial context in

Dictée. On the one hand, in the face of the reduction and alienation of the colonized that

Cha depicts in her brokenness of speech, the diagram points to a more holistic view on the speaking body that is not seen in the diagrams of the larynx analyzed earlier. On the other hand, when reading the diagram of the acupuncture body within the political framework of the vessel theory that Unschuld provides, it hints at a body of the colonial and imperial empire that sustains itself through unimpeded networks that circulates sustenance and resources between the metropole and its colonies. The latter reading of the acupuncture body diagram helps unravel the layer of the colonial history of Japanese occupation of Korea alluded to in Dictée.

Japanese colonialism in Korea is evoked throughout the text. Cha uses several images and textual narratives to document the memory and history of Japanese colonialism both explicitly and inexplicitly in order to lay out the crucial colonial context her feminist decolonial politics tackles. Cha centers on the resistant history and memory of Japanese colonization in Korea. Resistance is always a crucial part of the colonial

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history but is often suppressed in official historical narratives. As every colonial project,

Japanese colonization of Korea is never an accomplished enterprise without resistance in both large and small scales. The legitimacy of Japanese colonization encounters continuous questioning. Cumings identifies several reasons of Koreans’ strong resistance to Japanese colonizers during the colonial period as well as the anti-Japanese legacy after the liberation of Korea. Cumings argues that “Japan’s attempt at legitimating the colonial enterprise in Korea always struck Koreans as absurd” because

Korea’s political, economic, and social level was not so far from Japan’s as to justify a civilizing colonial mission. Japan colonized a state, not a people, substituting for a state that had long considered itself superior (in the Confucian way of looking at things) to the “island barbarians” from Japan. (485-6, original emphasis)

In Dictée, Cha reveals Japan’s breaking the diplomatic agreement between Japan and

Korea, which makes the legitimacy of Japan to colonize Korea questionable. Cha includes a document titled “Petition from the Koreans of Hawaii to President Roosevelt” written on July 12, 1905.36 The document tells that the objective of the Japan-Korea

Protectorate Treaty between Japan and Korea was to “preserve the independence of

Korea and Japan and to protect Eastern Asia from Russia’s aggression” (Cha 34).

However, rather than preserving the independence of Korea during the time when Korea allowed Japan to use its territory as a military base to resist Russia, Japan expanded its imperialism and broke the promise by “forcibly obtaining all the special privileges and concessions” from the Korean government (Cha 35). The annexation of Korea with Japan

36 The Japan-Korea Protectorate Treaty was signed in 1905, which deprived Korea of diplomatic sovereignty and made the country into a protectorate of Japan. 156

between 1910 and 1945 can be viewed as Japanese imperial power trespassing the spatiality of Korea as a sovereign body (Choi 84-86).

Since the colonial project cannot be fully justified morally and politically,

Japanese colonizers have to rely on the dark side of physical oppressive forces in addition to the light side of industrialization to establish their authority in colonial Korea. Anyone who embodies the differences that cannot make the dominant difference of the colonizers complete or that threaten their legitimacy will be eliminated in order to maintain the colonial power. Cha features in Dictée a photo taken from a distance which depicts oppressors who are about to execute three blindfolded people in white, tied up in a cross- shape posture (see Figure 6). In this image Cha exposes the interrelation between coloniality, dehumanization, and violence in the subjectification of the colonized.

Although Cha does not specify the context of the photo, it is likely a picture taken during the Japanese colonization of Korea because the photo is included at the end of a section on the story of female Korean nationalist Yu Guan Soon (1903-1920 by lunar calendar).

The photo shows the power of coloniality at work: colonizers subjugate the colonized to manifest their power. The impaired mobility of those facing execution is indicated by their bound bodies in the photograph. The anonymous figures of the colonized are not allowed to look back at their oppressors during the execution so they are blindfolded.

This photo refers to the anonymity of causalities under the matrix of colonial power as I have elaborated when analyzing the dimension of social permeability in Anzaldúa’s body paradigm in chapter 2. I use the term anonymity to highlight that those in power do not distinguish the individuality of those who transgress the norms but only view them as homogenous faceless agitators who threaten to challenge the status quo. The anonymity

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results from the active dehumanization and reduction of the colonized through the deprivation of their individuality and identity. Once the colonized are stripped of individuality, their bodies become exchangeable.37 The notion of exchangeability is articulated more explicitly in the section where Cha offers the account on Yu Guan

Soon’s life. Yu Guan Soon, who was a daughter of patriot parents, organized the Korean people to protest Japanese colonization in 1919. Cha describes Yu Guan Soon as a “Child revolutionary child patriot woman soldier deliverer of nation” (37). When Yu Guan Soon was arrested as a leader of the revolution at the young age of seventeen, she was stabbed in the chest and tortured to death by Japanese oppressors. Cha evaluates her life in the following way: “Actions prescribed separate her path from the others. The identity of such a path is exchangeable with any other heroine in history, their names, dates, actions which require not definition in their devotion to generosity and self-sacrifice” (30). In the contact zone between colonizers and the colonized, the bodies of the colonized are ready to be killed and stripped of their individuality whenever they trespass the colonial spatiality from the bird’s eye view perspective of their oppressors. The bodies to be killed mark the embodied limit of the oppressive spatiality only wherein the life and movement of the colonized is permitted. Anyone who challenges the colonial rules will be punished or eliminated because their rebelliousness exposes the boundary of the spatiality of oppression delineated by the colonial power. Facing the uprising of Korean nationalists,

Japanese colonizers’ erasure of the colonized who rebelliously transgress the border of the colonial power, as those depicted in Dictée’s photograph discussed earlier, ironically

37 I use the concept of exchangeability to reflect a particular intercoporeal relationship that Jennifer McWeeny identifies when she states that “bodies are ‘exchangeable’ with one another when they are alternately used to serve the same function” (280) 158

acknowledges the existence of resistance. Furthermore, while violent oppressive acts are meant to shore up the authority of the colonizers, the violence simultaneously reveals their deep fear that their legitimacy of dominance will be undermined if they remember their previous trespassing against the Korean sovereign territory.

Interestingly, while execution is about reduction, the multiplicity of both the colonizers and the colonized is reinforced in the very act of killing. The multiplicity of the colonizers is revealed in their insecurity that they are not what they think they are from the eyes of the colonized. In other words, from the perspective of Japanese colonizers, they view themselves as rightful rule enforcers. But in the eyes of colonized

Koreans, Japanese colonizers are lawbreakers and exploiters. The intense threat Japanese colonizers face from Korean nationalists results from the colonizers’ refusal to see themselves in dual ways, as both law enforcers and law transgressors. Japanese oppressors represented in Dictée stick to the logic of purity to maintain illusory unified selves in the act of killing. Japanese colonizers are, to borrow Lugones’s phrase, “self- deceiving multiple [selves]” (Introduction 14). Lugones insightfully argues that oppressors self-deceive themselves about their own multiplicity through “disconnection of memory”, which leads to the failure of “cross-referencing, without first person memories of him—or herself in more than one reality” (Introduction 14-15). Killing the transgressors of colonial power aims to help the colonizers forget their own violation; colonizers rely on self-deception to secure the legitimacy of their dominance.

Although forgetfulness helps colonizers suppress their multiplicity, remembrance is a crucial endeavor of the colonized to survive and to envision liberatory options. As

Cha writes,

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Why resurrect it all now. From the Past. History, the old wound. The past emotions all over again. To confess to relive the same folly. To name it now so as not to repeat history in oblivion. To extract each fragment by each fragment from the word from the image another word another image the reply that will not repeat history in oblivion. (33)

To revisit the past and to reclaim memory as “would-be-said remnant” (Cha 38) is to relive the liminal space between the two arrows in Lugones’s articulation of “oppressing

ß àresisting” forces; it is to remember the multiplicity of the colonized. As Lugones says, “The limen is the place where one becomes most fully aware of one’s multiplicity”

(“Structure” 59). Lugones calls the liminal space in the colonial context a “fractured locus” (“Toward Decolonial Feminism” 748). The colonial fractured locus results from the ongoing negotiation and resistance between colonial imposition of systems of oppression onto the colonized and the fluency and memory that the colonized have of their native cultures. The fractured locus allows the colonized to conceive themselves as individuals “not exhausted by domination” (Lugones, “Complex Communication” 77).

While the colonizers strive to create unified selves to sustain their authority, the colonized aim at maintaining their multiplicity for survival and emancipation. In the colonial fractured locus, the colonized adopts what Lugones calls “a streetwalker’s” perspective that defies the bird’s eye view sight of the colonizers. The colonized resist the power of coloniality at every turn of contact in both small and large scales, which renders coloniality an impossible accomplishment. Remembering, maintaining, and deploying multiplicity at the colonial fractured locus is imperative for the colonized to transform their reduced, colonial into decolonial selves who insist on their irreducible multiplicity.

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Decolonial Selves in Dictée

Cha’s decolonial feminist strategies mainly include challenging the anonymity and exchangeability of people enacted by colonizers and created by the logic of oppression. In several sections, Cha humanizes resisters in Dictée by including photos of women warriors38 before she narrates their lives. For example, the section “Calliope-Epic

Poetry” begins with a photo of Cha’s mother in her youth. The picture precedes Cha’s narration of her mother’s life at the age of eighteen in China. The section ends with another photo of her mother at an older age, which appears just after Cha tells her mother’s struggle in the process of immigration to the U.S. Cha’s mother’s identity and history is denied and questioned at U.S. immigration checkpoints: “Every ten feet they demand to know who and what you are, who is represented” (Cha 57). In order to decolonize the colonial39 gaze that freezes the colonized as ahistorical objects, Cha includes two close-up photos of her mother at different ages in the same section to show the change of the corporeal body in the passage of time in order to make her mother visible as a historical subject. Frost also notices that the photos of Cha’s mother “provide a point of reference and signify both the concrete effects of time’s passage and a historical frame” (184).

38 A woman warrior is “a female figure—historic, literary, or mythical—who performs male tasks or social roles with the aim of avenging a family, village, nation, or a group of people oppressed by war, poverty, or colonial rule” (Lee 2010, 64). The term, “women warriors,” also recalls Asian American writer Maxine Hong Kingston’s famous novel about immigration, The Woman Warrior. With the use of “women warriors,” I also hope to situate Dictée within the genealogy of Asian American women’s writings on immigration that feature women resisters. 39 I use the term, “colonial,” here because the U.S.-Korea relationship was also a colonial one after the removal of Japanese rule from Korea after the Second War World even though the U.S. assumed a liberator role at that time. As Chungmoo Choi argues, “(post)colonial South Koreans have continued to mimic Western hegemonic culture and have reproduced a colonial pathology of self-denigration and self- marginalization, which have long blinded the South Koreans from critically assessing their ‘liberator- benefactor’ as a colonizing hegemon” (83). 161

In addition to putting faces back on resisters to challenge the anonymity that the oppressive power actively produces, Cha defiantly subverts the notion of how exchangeability operates in the logic of oppression with an alternative concept of interchangeability guided by the logic of resistance. Cha’s particular idea of interchangeability emphasizes the continuity of resistance across time and space. After a close reading of Dictée, Michelle Black Wester noticed that the interchangeability of women is emphasized through Cha’s mother, Hyung Soon Huo, whose story follows Yu

Guan Soon’s story. While the story of Yu Guan Soon focuses on her sacrifice at the age of seventeen, Cha’s mother’s story begins when she was eighteen years old. Wester argues that “the numbering is significant because it implies that Hyung Soon Huo’s story can be read as a continuation of Yu Guan Soon’s” (184). Wester’s insightful observation suggests that whenever the colonial force cannot be successfully combated, the resisting force always continues to emerge and to be embodied and manifested in different women’s lives. The shared colonial forces that Yu Guan Soon, Cha’s mother, and Cha resist at different temporal moments and spatial locations are those of the Japanese colonization of Korea in reality and in memory.

Yu Guan Soon’s resistance is outward, direct, and large-scale in her organization of a massive demonstration against Japanese colonizers. Although Yu Guan Soon’s cry for Korean liberation from Japanese colonization is stifled when she was violently killed,

Cha’s mother continues Yu Guan Soon’s resisting force in a more private and small-scale fashion by speaking Korean, a forbidden tongue under Japanese occupation, in the foreign land of China. Cha’s mother is a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation

Korean exiles. Cha writes, “The tongue that is forbidden is your own mother tongue. You

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speak in the dark. In the secret. The one that is yours. Your own. You speak very softly, you speak in a whisper. In the dark, in secret. Mother tongue is your refuge” (45). While

Cha’s mother speaks a resistant language in private, Cha makes her mother’s Korean whisper in China and Yu Guan Soon’s outcry in Korea heard once again in English in the

U.S. through her writing of Dictée. The multi-layered reverberation of resistant voices among Yu Guan Soon, Cha’s mother, and Cha at different temporal moments and spatial locations indicates a particular construction of the self that Nicole McDaniel identifies as

“an episodic, serialized version of self” (73). McDaniel argues that the main characteristic of a serial and interrelational strategy of self-construction lies in “the desire to expose the significance of others on our own self-imaging” (84). According to

McDaniel, simply collecting and repeating the stories and histories of others is not enough to form a serial self. Instead, a serial construction of the self must encompass the notion that “seeing the self through the bodies of others allows their stories to continue beyond their physical existence. This continuation beyond death is a driving force behind seriality and serial representation, as objects that are lost may also be found” (84). Cha’s construction of a serial self reveals a particular form of interchangeability with difference guided by the logic of resistance that does not fall into the pitfall of anonymity.

Interchangeability with difference involves an overlapping of lives and experiences without substitution, or exchange but with ongoing interaction.40 I argue that Cha’s resistant notion of interchangeability is a kind of intersubjectivity, as described in

40 Lugones emphasizes the interactive dimension in forming self-knowledge and catalyzing self-change when she writes: “self-knowledge is interactive” and “self-change is interactive” (“On the Logic of Pluralist Feminism” 74). 163

Lugones’s work, resulting from our knowledge of each other’s resistant histories and strategies in order to make each other full subjects in different “worlds.”41

For Lugones, intersubjectivity is the basis for us to be recognized as resisters and to recognize others as resisters. For them, “there is a need and an excitement to being understood in intersubjective encounters. . . .” because intersubjectivity makes resisters invisible in the matrix of oppression and legible to each other (Lugones, “Tactical

Strategies” 219). Intersubjectivity is not only what resisters desire but also what they must achieve in order to make sense of their existence because resisters are not individuals corroborated by institutional backing; they are “active subjects” who require each other’s backing at every turn in order to make sense of one’s words, gestures, and movements that lack of institutional support (Lugones, “Tactical Strategies” 219).

To facilitate intersubjective encounters among resisters that would make their subjectivities sensible, complex communication is required. Complex communication enables us to communicate across differences through a playful42 attitude in a liminal space even though we may arrive at the liminal space through different journeys. What makes complex communication successful is recognizing each other as resisters of intermeshed oppression,43 to borrow Lugones’s words. Our willingness to decipher each other’s resistant strategies in order to imagine, nurture, and create liberatory possibilities

41 The definition of “world” can be found in the introduction of this dissertation (19). 42 According to Lugones, a playful attitude refers to an “openness to uncertainty, which includes a vocation not bound by meanings and norms that constitute one’s ground”; it “enables one to find in others one’s own possibilities and thiers” (Introduction 26). 43 Lugones distinguishes intermeshed oppression from interlocked oppression when she nuances her theory of oppression and resistance. For Lugones, interlocked oppression follows the logic of fragmentation while intermeshed oppression is conceptualized under the logic of curdling or fusion. As Lugones points out, “[i]nterlocking is conceptually possible only if oppressions are understood as separable, as discrete, pure. Intermeshed oppressions cannot be cogently understood as fragmenting subjects either as individuals or as collectivities” (“Tactical Strategies” 223). Lugones uses intermeshed oppression to emphasize the stickiness of multiple oppressions that reduces and molds the colonial subject. 164

collectively are all tactics involved in complex communication. Complex communication demands our openness to uncertainty without “assimilating the text of others to our own”

(Lugones, “Complex Communication” 84). It is “enacted through a change in one’s own vocabulary, one’s sense of self, one’s way of living, in the extension of one’s collective memory, through developing forms of communication that signal disruption of the reduction attempted by the oppressor” (Lugones, “Complex Communication” 84).

Lugones’s well-known concept of “world”-traveling can be viewed as a spatial strategy to facilitate complex communication.

“World”-traveling is an essential constituent of Lugones’s methodology of multiplicity that can facilitate an epistemic shift as well as the transformation of selves, which paves the way for a decolonial self to emerge. “World”-traveling asks us to take up our ethical and political responsibility to travel to each other’s “worlds” and to adopt a loving perception in order to complicate our perspectives on ourselves and on others without colonizing other’s “worlds” and thus reproducing the colonial gaze. There are several characteristics that define “world”-traveling. To begin with, “world”-traveling is driven by a coalitional impulse rather than a desire for leisure or curiosity. “World”- traveling is a resistant act that refuses to walk and live in the illusory confinement by those in power anymore. I use “illusory” here to emphasize that the presumption of enclosed worlds we experience under the matrix of coloniality results from colonial impositions. For Lugones, “worlds are indeed permeable” (Introduction 16); they do not possess fixed boundaries as Kelly Oliver mistakenly assumes in her reading of Lugones’s

“world”-traveling (53). Conceptualizing “worlds” as permeable rather than self-enclosed deconstructs the compartmentalized spatiality of oppression imposed on us. Lugones

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relies heavily on spatial vocabulary with words such as “world”-traveling and trespassing.

She does so to illuminate her decolonial politics because our existence is always interconnected with the particular spatiality of the “worlds” we inhabit and experience.

“World”-traveling requires its travelers to trespass against the spatiality of oppression guided by a categorical and dichotomous logic. The epistemic shift catalyzed by traveling to others’ “worlds” to recognize “what it is to be them and what it is to be ourselves in their eyes” requires us to re-chart the relationality of space not only to re-conceive our sociality with people in different “worlds” anew but also to try out alternative interactions with them to create decolonial options collectively (Lugones, “Playfulness” 97; original emphasis).

While “world”-traveling helps us shift perspectives, a politics of memory also plays a crucial role in the process of complex communication. Lugones argues that the liberatory experiences lies in memory and in “resistant readings of history that reveal unified historical lines as enacting dominations through both linearity and erasure”

(“Structure” 58-59). We need to remember our other selves in different “worlds” in order to cross-reference different realities for the purposes of retaining our multiplicitous selves. However, merely remembering ourselves in other “worlds” and understanding ourselves as multiplicitous is not sufficient to achieve liberation as Lugones tells us

(“Structure” 62). What leads to emancipatory possibility is a collective practice “born of dialogue among multiplicitous persons who are faithful witnesses of themselves and also testify to, and uncover the multiplicity of, their oppressors and the techniques of oppression afforded by ignoring that multiplicity” (Lugones, “Structure” 62).

Remembering is both an individual and collective rebellion with a transformative and

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subversive potential. Through the strategies of “world”-traveling and remembrance, intersubjectivity achieved through complex communication begins from a coalitional starting point. If we are satisfied with our own compartmentalized space delineated by the oppressors, we will not be able to recognize other resisters as active subjects and will not begin to imagine emancipatory spatialities. In Dictée, Cha performs complex communication to read woman warriors across time and space alongside each other to recognize the intersubjectivity between them without collapsing their differences.

The serial relation between Cha’s mother and Yu Guan Soon discussed earlier is one prime example of intersubjectivity in Dictée. The occurrence of intersubjectivity can also be found in the section “Erato—Love Poetry.” Each photo, diagram, narrative in

Dictée can be seen as a “world” that Cha constructs. In “Erato—Love Poetry”, there are two juxtaposed “worlds” where Cha travels to locate the oppressive patriarchal force that drives multiple women’s stories. One is the “world” of St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s44 relationship with Jesus; the other is the “world” of an anonymous wife’s relationship with her husband. At the first sight, the two “worlds” are in parallel. Both stories are about heterosexual marriage, but one is divine and the other is mundane. Most of the storyline of the wife of the worldly couple occurs on the left side of the text while St. Thérèse of

Lisieux’s narrative is on the right side. However, sometimes the story of the wife will splash to the right side of the text; then, the boundary between the two sides of the story becomes muddy. For example, under where St. Thérèse of Lisieux’ marriage with Jesus is told, Cha writes, “Her marriage to him, her husband. Her love for him, her husband,

44 St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897) is also called Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus or the Holy Face. She was a Roman Catholic French Discalced Carmelite nun. She is known as “The Little Flower of Jesus” or “The Little Flower.” 167

her duty to him, her husband” (103). The two sentences make sense for both storylines.

For the anonymous wife, she has her everyday duty to her husband while St. Thérèse of

Lisieux has religious duty to her sacred husband Jesus. When reading the line quoted above, readers suddenly pass through the confinement of one narrative to the other, which makes conspicuous the permeable nature of the boundary between “worlds” in

Dictée that Cha delineates. The permeable boundary between “worlds” is what makes

Dictée equivocal. Sue J. Kim argues that Dictée as an equivocal text not only because it demonstrates “the inextricability of multiple interrelated voices” (168) but also because it makes emotions and experiences “inseparable from social construction” and “the experience of a single moment in time inseparable from other moments” (169). Cha refuses to compartmentalize a series of women warriors in their own time and space.

Instead, Cha curdles45 their lives together to draw a contour of a coalitional decolonial self whose intersubjectivity is highlighted.

The section “Erato—Love Poetry” does not merely show the permeable nature of the “worlds” in the use of shared lines but also illustrates the emergence of a coalitional decolonial self whose multiplicity can be located across different bodies. In this section,

Cha curdles the lives of Joan of Arc (1412-1431), St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897), and Yu Guan Soon (1903-1920). Cha starts with a photograph of St. Thérèse of Lisieux playing Joan of Arc in a convent play and closes with another cinematic photograph of

Mary Falconett playing Joan of Arc in Carl Dreyer’s film, La Passion. Kimberley Lamm

45 I use curdling in Lugones’s notion. According to Lugones, curdling is a practice performed by people who live in the liminal space between the oppressing and resisting forces and who “deny purity and are looking for the possibility of going beyond resistance” (“Purity” 144). Curdling acknowledges the impossibility of separating differences and ‘worlds” in a clear-cut fashion because of the pervious nature of “worlds.” 168

argues that “Cha distills a cinematic image of Falconett’s mournfully ecstatic face for the close of this chapter to evoke its melancholy and to emphasize Joan of Arc’s tie to the photograph of another political figure included in Dictée: Yu Guan Soon” (48). Even though the images of the three women are spread all over the text, they are tied together through their resistance to traditional masculine martyrdom that excludes and marginalizes women. Joan of Arc was a national heroine of France, who led the French army through several victories but was put on trial and burned at the age of nineteen for her nationalist passion. Similarly, Yu Guan Soon was also a martyr who was tortured to death for her rebellion and organization of demonstration against Japanese colonization.

As for St. Thérèse of Lisieux, she also desired martyrdom in a religious realm; she would

“present [her] neck to the sword, and like Joan of Arc, [her] dear sister, [she] would whisper at the stake Your Name, O JESUS” (Cha 118). Woman warriors are cross- referenced at multiple levels in Dictée. While Cha’s mother continues the life of Yu Guan

Soon in a different body through her resistance to Japanese colonialism, St. Thérèse of

Lisieux re-embodies Joan of Arc through performance. And as Lamm suggests, the mournfully ecstatic face of Falconett, who plays Joan of Arc, recalls the face of Yu Guan

Soon. It is important to note that although the women mentioned above are cross- referenced, Cha does not collapse their differences into a hybrid as Lugones warns us.

The distinctive identities and life stories of the women warriors can still be discerned, which is what I mean by Cha’s notion of interchangeability with difference following the logic of resistance that is in sharp contrast with exchangeability in the logic of oppression practiced by colonizers discussed in the previous section.

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The resistant interchangeability of women warriors through the act of cross- reference creates a coalitional decolonial self who possesses a field of individual decolonial selves. The coalitional decolonial self that can be seen as Cha if Dictée is read as Cha’s autobiography. Cha’s decolonial self is a coalitional one who insists on her multiplicity located across bodies and across time and space. Cha revisits often ignored and suppressed histories of resistance in official records through the lives of her mother,

Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, and St. Thérèse of Lisieux to build affective ties with and among them. By curdling the lives of these women’s through the resistant interchangeability with difference, Cha practices a politics of relation. According to

Aimee Carrillo Rowe, a politics of relation “moves theories of locating the subject to a relational notion of the subject. It moves a politics of location from the individual to a coalitional notion of the subject” (26). That is, a politics of relation informs that subjectivity does not originate from the individual interiority but is created by the process of belonging and leaning toward others to whom we long to belong. Cha’s decolonial coalitional self constructed in Dictée should be understood under Rowe’s framework of subjectivity. Cha tips towards the lives of several women warriors who resist colonial forces in the linguistic, nationalist, and religious domains across time and space. Forming a field of belonging to multiple women warriors who fight for decolonial possibilities in

Dictée, Cha delineates a coalitional decolonial healing self who insists on her irreducible multiplicity that is maintained through remembering other women warriors across differences.

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The Ripple Imagery

Tenth, a circle within a circle, a series of concentric circles. -Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

In Dictée, Cha unfolds two levels of a decolonial self in her process of healing from the violence caused by Japanese colonization of Korea, the memory of the colonial history, and the epistemic compartmentalization of differences. On the one hand, the decolonial self is embodied in each woman warrior who maintains her multiplicity at the fractured locus in the matrix of oppressive power. Cha highlights their resistance at the point of reduction of their lives, languages, and politics in different narrative segments in

Dictée such as the stories of Yu Guan Soon and Cha’s mother. On the other hand, reading

Dictée as a whole, Cha constructs a decolonial self who is also a coalitional self by creating a community of women warriors across time and space, as is the case with Cha’s situating herself in the serial lives of Yu Guan Soon, her mother, Joan of Arc, and St.

Thérèse of Lisieux. Cha creates an alternative genealogy of resistance through memory, cross-reference, and a sense of belonging to construct the decolonial self who is also a coalitional self. In recognizing differences, intersubjectivity is achieved in the construction of the coalitional dimension of the decolonial self through complex communication.

The two levels of a decolonial self are interconnected. To conceptualize the two levels of a decolonial self at once, I propose a ripple imagery to illuminate the spatiality where Lugones grounds her theory of multiplicity as it relates to her notion of a decolonial self. The ripple imagery is inspired by the visual image of the underlying tenth structure of Dictée that many scholars ignore. Critics are often misled to believe

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that the text is composed of only nine sections instead of ten. Each section is named in relation to a Greek Muse, such as “Clio—History” and “Calliope—Epic Poetry.” This is not surprising because the back cover of Dictée published by University of California

Press also states that, “The book is divided into nine parts structured around the Greek

Muses.” However, along with other critics, such as Wester and Jonathan Stalling, I contend that Dictée consists of ten sections rather than nine. In fact, at the very beginning of the autobiography, on the page right before the table of contents of the nine sections, we find the words written by Sappho, who is recognized as the tenth Muse. Moreover, after the ninth section, “Polymnia –Sacred Poetry,” Cha writes, “Tenth, a circle within a circle, a series of concentric circles” (175). I contend that the visual image of concentric circles serves as the underlying tenth structure of Dictée. Concentric circles are evoked three times throughout the text. In addition to the one quoted above, the concept of concentric circles appears the first time in the image of Chinese calligraphic characters

(see Figure 7) and reoccurs in the English translation of the image of Chinese calligraphic characters (see Figure 8). Both Wester and Stalling notice the tenth structure of concentric circles in their works on Dictée but the two scholars have different views on what turns the seemingly fragmented narrative segments in the text into a series of concentric circles. Wester adopts a Korean reading of Dictée by recovering Korean traditions and histories and common voices between the women in the text. She argues that the invocation of the mother in the frontispiece is the most crucial organizing structure of Dictée. In Wester’s words, “The mothers’ stories serve as the midpoint of the concentric circles” (170). Her serial reading of women’s stories, such as the narratives of

Yu Guan Soon and Cha’s mother, in the autobiography attempts to delineate a female

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genealogy of resistance across differences. Wester interprets that “‘Tenth, a circle within a circle, a series of concentric circles’ is the daughter who will continue the story” (187).

As for Stalling, he reads the tenth structure of concentric circles from a Daoist perspective. The line, “Tenth, a circle within a circle, a series of concentric circles,” is one of the Daoist aspects of the universe. Figure 7 and its English translation (Figure 8) list different stages of the origin of the universe that start from Taichi (太極), the universe, and end with Chung Wai (重圍), a series of concentric circles. Adopting a Daoist epistemology and cosmology, Stalling offers a reading of the linguistic and subjective void in Dictée as origin and entrance to plurality. Stalling suggests that Cha’s text is an inner-alchemic text whose ultimate goal is to return to the void, the origin that is non- being and ultimatelessness (無極). Stalling argues that Cha’s strategy to achieve inner- alchemy involves the Daoist notion of wuwo (無我), that is, self-emptying the

“expressive I” (175) and moving toward a neutral state of “in-betweeness.” In other words, it is through the process of negation that rejuvenation of the self can be achieved.

We can see the practice of self-emptying the “expressive I” that Stalling points out in the brokenness of languages and the evocation of multiple colonial languages in Dictée I have analyzed earlier in this chapter. Furthermore, Stalling argues that Cha’s desire for a return in her autobiography is “not a return to a ‘homeland’ or a ‘mother tongue,’ but a return to an ‘in-betweenness’” (178). I suggest that Cha’s hope for a return to the state of in-betweenness is to relive the colonial fractured locus that maintains the multiplicity of colonial subjects as Lugones informs us. To re-inhabit the in-betweenness, Cha makes her subjectivity permeable to others to construct an intersubjective decolonial subjectivity.

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Therefore, Cha writes, “She allows others. In place of her. Admits others to make full.

Make swarm. All barren cavities to make swollen. The others each occupying her.

Tumorous layers, expel all excesses until in all cavities she is flesh” (3-4). Inspired by

Cha’s notion of the permeable subjectivity through the visual image of a series of concentric circles, I propose the ripple imagery to visualize Lugones’s theory of multiplicity that can simultaneously exist in one single body and across bodies. I theorize the ripple imagery by detailing the forces and space that facilitate the emergence of a decolonial self. These include the simultaneously distinguishable and connected relation between non-dominant differences in the decolonial self and its underlying coalitional politics.

The ripple imagery is an energy field that consists of a series of concentric circles or partial circles. The circles are not always neatly concentric though. The shape of the ripple varies according to the distinctive topographic structure underlying and near the body of water. A set of visible circles in the ripple imagery is created by the intensification of both the oppressive force moving from the inside out and the resistant force moving from the outside in. The oppressive force is the energy accumulated when an outside object drops into a collective body of water. The outside object alone does not create the ripple itself. Instead, it is the energy gathered at the moment when the object violently collides with one point of the body of water that creates multiple layers of the ripple. Therefore, the ripple is the effect of the oppressing ß àresisting forces in

Lugones’s articulation rather than of a single force in itself. The visible layers of the ripple show that the oppressive force does not precede the resistant force; rather, the two

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exist simultaneously. The particular movement in the ripple imagery is well-captured by

Cha’s words,

You are moving accordingly never ahead of the movement never behind the movement you are carrying the weight from outside being the weight inside. You move. You are being moved. You are movement. Inseparably. Indefinably. Not isolatable terms. (51)

What connects the layers of the ripple together is the tension between the continuous resisting force and the dispersed oppressing force, just as the lives of Yu Guan Soon,

Cha’s mother, and Cha are connected in their shared resistance to Japanese colonization in reality and in memory.

Each visible swelling ripple layer can be viewed as an emergence of a decolonial self who maintains its multiplicity at the fractured locus of opposing forces. The fractured locus allows the self to see “a double image of herself” when shifting perspectives between different realities, which leads the self to recognize her incompatible attributes in different “worlds” (Lugones, “Playfulness” 92). The incompatible attributes make the self multiplicitous rather than unified. Furthermore, in the ripple imagery, each circle of the ripple field is a non-dominant difference with its own value and wholeness; there is no hierarchical relationship between layers in a horizontal field of the ripple. Unlike the hierarchical difference that privileges one dominant difference and views other differences as deviation from the dominant one, non-dominant differences are recognized in virtue of their own value without hierarchical evaluation. Communicating between non-dominant differences can nurture the repertoire for emancipation as well as extend the collective memory between resisters without privileging one difference over others.

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Conceptualizing each layer of the ripple as whole does not mean that it is isolated and self-enclosed from other layers. While layers of the ripple have distinguishable boundaries, a set of circles can also be mapped onto the same ripple field without a clear- cut separation from other layers of the ripple. In the ripple imagery, there is no possibility to separate one layer of the ripple entirely from another because the boundary between layers is permeable to the others. As Lugones writes, “worlds are indeed permeable” while being multiple (Introduction 16). Therefore, each discernible layer of the ripple is in itself whole but it is also a part of the larger whole of the ripple field. The creation of a whole field of the ripple does not erase the differences between its layers. Visualizing differences through the ripple imagery shows that the co-existence of the dual nature of individuality and interconnectivity in Lugones’s theory of multiplicity is possible.

Shifting the focus from individual layers of the ripple to the entire ripple field is to move from the first level of an individual decolonial self whose multiplicity is located in the liminal space between the oppressing and resisting forces to the second level of a decolonial self who is a coalitional self situating in a resistant community of differences.

It is also a shift from the “I” to the “we” in Lugones’s expression of “Iàwe”, where the arrow signifies “the transitional quality and dispersed intentionality of the subject”

(“Tactical Strategies” 227). Lugones uses the term “active subjectivity” to refer to the dispersed intentionality of resisters. What characterizes active subjectivity is its intersubjective nature. As Lugones argues, “Resistant intentions are given form necessarily intersubjectively” (“Tactical Strategies” 216). Lugones understands the intentionality of resisters as “lying between rather than in subjects” (“Tactical Strategies”

208; original emphasis). Furthermore, Lugones argues:

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Active subjectivity is alive in the activity of dispersed intending in complex, heterogeneous collectivities, within and between worlds of complex sense. The activity is not subservient or servile but in transgression of dominant sense. The dispersion includes a dispersion of meaning through a translation that does not rest on equivalences between words but on worldly connections in living in transgression of reduction of life to the monosense of domination. (“Tactical Strategies” 217)

Lugones moves away from the notion of agency to that of active subjectivity whose backing comes, not from institutional recognition, but from other resisters who are aware of the reduction of their lives and their multiplicity. Active subjects are not only oppressed, but also resistant against the spatiality of domination. The intersubjective nature of active subjectivity in the “Iàwe” move makes conceivable a decolonial self whose multiplicity resides not only in one body but also across bodies to become a coalitional self. But the move from “I” to “we” does not erase the differences between bodies that consist of the “we”. Similar to the relation between layers in a ripple field, the differences constituting the coalitional decolonial self are simultaneously individually distinguishable and collectively interconnected. In the example of Dictée, Cha retains the individual differences between women warriors but emphasizes the continuity of their resistant forces across time and space. The section of “Erato—Love Poetry” discussed earlier where Cha evokes the stories and faces of Joan of Arc, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and

Yu Guan Soon is a case in point.

The ripple imagery is a metaphor of being as well as doing. It illuminates two levels of Lugones’s theory of multiplicity in relation to her decolonial feminist thought: the ontological and the coalitional levels. Each discernable layer of the ripple manifests the ontological dimension of multiplicity; this multiplicity, in turn, makes visible the fractured locus between oppressing and resisting forces where the colonized are situated.

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The entire field of the ripple helps us grasp the coalitional aspect of multiplicity that renders seemingly discrete colonial differences into a sticky field of non-dominant differences with inseparable interconnectivity due to memory and complex communication. Lugones’s project of “decolonizing ourselves” requires understanding and praxis in regard to both levels of multiplicity at the same time. The decolonial self conceptualized in the ripple imagery is infinite, open, and always in the process of formation. The decolonial self can be expanded, condensed, and multiplied depending on whether the interaction between the oppressive force and the resistant force that drives the ripple imagery of the decolonial self is weak, strong, or multiple.

The ripple imagery helps elaborate the tilde symbol in my vocabulary of

“self~other.” It not only indicates the porous and permeable boundary between differences to allow for creative interactions at the levels of the body, ethics, and memory to take place. It also highlights the continuous transformation of the self through those very interactions. The formations of decolonial healing selves of Hogan, Anzaldúa, and

Cha can all be conceptualized through the ripple imagery even though they arrive at the ripple field through different journeys. Hogan’s ripple imagery is rooted in an indigenous ecological web where mutual flourishing of lives is valued. Anzaldúa develops her ripple imagery through her spiritualized porous body paradigm. As for Cha, her ripple imagery is embedded in her landscape of resistant memory.

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Figure 4: A biomedical diagram of the larynx in Figure 5: A diagram of Chinese medical acupuncture Dictée body in Dictée

Figure 6: A photo of execution in Dictée

Figure 7: Chinese calligraphic characters in Dictée

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Figure 8: English Translation of Figure 7 in Dictée

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Cyclical Conclusion as a New Beginning: On Eye, I, Ai,46 and Collective Healing

When I first proposed this research project in 2013, I did not know that this intellectual inquiry would turn out to be an imminent personal quest for healing.

Although my decision to explore the topic of healing was partly influenced by my witnessing my mother’s thirty-year’s chronic illness which was never fully diagnosed nor treated by biomedicine, I did not foresee that the search for decolonial healing in the communal would become imperative in my own personal life in order to complete this intellectual work. So this conclusion is not an end point of a linear theorization about healing in women of color self-narratives but a cyclical quest that marks a new beginning of my own praxis of creating a decolonial healing self that will continue even after the completion of the dissertation.

I decided to include my own personal narrative in this concluding chapter that reflected on my suffering and healing caused by my recurring eye problems that I experienced while working on this project. As a means of crafting this cyclical conclusion, I am going to weave my personal healing narrative into the construction of a decolonial healing self delineated in the previous three main chapters. I do so for two purposes: On the one hand, I choose not to assume a clear boundary between me as a researcher and other parts of my life, for my ongoing healing journey has informed and

46 Love (愛) is pronounced as ai in Chinese.

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been informed by my research on decolonial healing in the women of color autohistorias that I have explored. Separating the me who investigates from the me who searches for healing in daily life is to confine myself within a colonial spatiality obsessed with border demarcation. On the other hand, influenced by the women of color feminist notion of

“theory in the flesh” articulated by Cherríe Moraga (23), I see that blending of the theoretical and the personal, bridging the embodied and the intellectual, and connecting the abstract with praxis is to practice an epistemic border liquefaction that fosters a holistic experience in research and in life. In the main chapters of this project, I read women of color’s personal narratives to distill a theoretical framework that conceptualizes a decolonial healing self. In this concluding chapter, I turn the characteristics of permeability, multiplicity, and mutual flourishing in decolonial healing that I have theorized into praxis in real life, as is manifested in my personal narrative on healing. As the healing that Linda Hogan, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha search for, I also look for transformative wholeness in the communal to construct a decolonial healing self.

My Coatlicue47 State

When overwhelmed by the chaos caused by living between stories, you break down, descend into the third space, the Coatlicue depths of despair, self-loathing, and hopelessness. -Gloria Anzaldúa

On the Christmas Eve in 2013, I wrote on my journal after the last good cry of the year when another bout with bleeding in my retina occurred, a debilitating symptom of eye condition: “This is my Coatlicue state. I must cross over. I will cross over. And I am

47 For more information of Coatlicue, see chapter 2 of this dissertation (112). 182

crossing over from now on with my strength.” Taking Anzaldúa’s shamanistic guidance,

I wrote down the words to give myself mental hints so that I could awaken my “thousand sleepless serpent eyes blinking in the night” to witness the pain and wound I was suffering rather than to take control of them (Anzaldúa, Borderlands 73).

In October 2013, two months before I wrote the journal entry on my Coatlicue state, the bleeding in my retina caused by lacquer cracks due to degenerative high myopia relapsed after three years. The moment when blood from other layers of the eye tissue leaked into my retina, my vision was suddenly distorted as if a stone violently dropped into a body of still water turning a previously clear reflection of the outside world into a whirlpool. My life and future were also rummaged with the unexpected distortion of my vision, literally and metaphorically. During the fall and winter months of October through

January, the bleeding occurred monthly, at times even biweekly, sometimes in my right eye, sometimes in my left eye, and sometimes in both. Before the blood could be fully absorbed by my body, a new hemorrhage would often occur. The blood in the retina caused dark spots and distortion in my vision. In some occasions, the distortion even caused missing parts in a full picture or a word. Although the blood would be eventually be absorbed by the body after one to three months, the distortion of vision was not always fully recovered. My vision was no longer intact after continuous attacks of the blood in my central and peripheral vision. The frequency of the bleeding in my retina led me into a state of uncertainty and anxiety due to a lack of control of my own body. The sense of insecurity resulted from the fact that the bleeding in my eyes was unpredictable and untreatable. It can happen at any time and at any place and would only deteriorate without the possibility of restoration. And what’s worse, doctors could not do anything

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but only monitor it. The only comfort I got from my doctors after each uncomfortable invasive exam was their reassurance that at least the bleeding was not caused by other more serious problems, such as abnormal blood vessel breakage and diabetes. Since biomedicine offered me no hope at this point of medical development, I searched for alternative therapies, such as acupuncture and massage. Although all of the medical practices cannot treat my fundamental eye problems, faithfully going to weekly acupuncture and massage gave me a sense of agency by actively taking care of my body.

But I knew that nothing could stop the unpredictable physical bleeding unless the possibility of creating an artificial retina became available. Regular retinal checkups, acupuncture, and massage offered me temporary comfort to make sure my physical condition was still under control. But my mental disturbance could not be consoled by my healthcare providers. The healing I desired was not only at the physical level but also at the psychological and spiritual one.

After experiencing the frequent and unexpected bleeding between October and

December of 2013, I realized that the more control I wanted to take over my body, the stronger sense of disempowerment I experienced. Whenever I wanted to cling to the enclosure of my body, the unpredictable bleeding unrelentingly mocked my naiveté. My resistance to respect the autonomy of my body without my will forced me into a

Coatlicue state, “a rupture in our everyday world” (Anzaldúa, Borderlands 68). Anzaldúa sums up the necessity and the transformative potential of Coatlicue states in the process of forming new consciousness in the following paragraph:

We need Coatlicue to slow us up so that the psyche can assimilate previous experiences and process the changes. If we don’t take the time, she’ll lay us low with an illness, forcing us to ‘rest’. . . . Those activities or

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Coatlicue states which disrupt the smooth flow (complacency) of life are exactly what propel the soul to do its work: make soul, increase consciousness of itself. Our greatest disappointments and painful experiences—if we can make meaning out of them—can lead us toward becoming more of who we are. Or they can remain meaningless. The Coatlicue state can be a way station or it can be a way of life. (Borderlands 68)

Coatlicue states are painful yet productive, germinative, and liminal stages of consciousness if we are willing to make meaning out of the turbulence and chaos in life in order to rebirth ourselves. But to gradually move out of Coatlicue states, we must first give in to and endure rather than attempt to contain or to reign the “consuming internal whirlwind” (Anzaldúa, Borderlands 68).

Re-reading Anzaldúa’s Borderlands again while writing about her body paradigm in 2013, I took her words as a form of medicine to deal with my eye/I crisis alongside reading her concepts as theoretical inspiration to complete chapter 2 of this dissertation.

The recurring bleeding in my eyes literally forced me to rest and to recoil into my solitary world. Returning from an archival research trip to Anzaldúa’s collection housed in

University of Texas—Austin in the mid-December in 2013, I literally lay down on my bed most of the time during the remaining winter break except for necessary activities, such as eating, taking a shower, and doing grocery shopping. Due to my failure to develop hobbies that did not rely on sight, I could only sleep or listen to music when I rested. I decided to (but was also partly forced to) become inactive because I wanted my eyes to take a rest and because I was left alone when my friends were out of town during the winter break. During that period of physical inactive period, I actively looked for and attempted to identify my internal demons that used to be lumped into a huddle of fear.

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Eye/I Crisis

Ailments that cannot be fully cured such as chronic illnesses cause more than physically suffering; they also defeat one’s mental strength and break one’s spirits from time to time. I was no exception. Although hemorrhage under my eyes and the lacquer cracks in my retina did not normally cause physical pain, the questioning of my identity as a scholar and as a woman and the secret I had to keep from my mother were hurting even when there was no blood in the eyes. What frightened me the most during the frequency of bleeding in my eyes that began in 2013 was not only the possibility of going blind but also the fragmentation, alienation, and immobility I experienced along with the health condition, which resulted in my identity crisis.

Since I was as a pre-schooler, I have wanted to become a professor in college, a mother with daughters, and a round-the-world traveler. But my eye problems, including the thinning out of my retina and the bleeding associated with the lacquer cracks, could potentially hinder me from becoming what I dreamed to be. Vision distortion during my dissertation writing process greatly hurt my productivity because of the dizziness and headaches that occurred when I moved my eyes quickly between words, lines, and pages.

The inner anxiety on the uncertain question of “when will the bleeding return?” deprived me of mental peacefulness. During the relapsing months in 2013, I kept asking myself what I would be if I cannot read anymore. What future career could I take if not being a scholar? I was even wondering for a few times what would come first, completion of this dissertation or blindness.

My eye condition also restricted my mobility. The vision distortion caused by bleeding added challenges when I drove alone and/or at night. To lower the chance of

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retinal detachment, doctors warned me not to lift heavy objects, not to do strenuous activities, and to avoid being hit in the head and eyes. After the recurring hemorrhage in my retina in 2013, I felt the real threat of retinal detachment because the bleeding was a proof that my retina was thin and the cracks existed, which failed to prevent the blood in other layers of eye capillaries from getting inside. I became afraid of traveling alone because my eyes would feel tensions when pulling my checked-in luggage from a baggage carousel or putting my carry-on bag in the overhead bins of airplanes. I sometimes experienced pressure in my eyes during takeoff and landing. I could no longer travel alone with ease as I used to do. With the restriction to my mobility due to this unpredictable eye disease, the illusion of my ability to be a fully independent person as I was taught crumbled.

Furthermore, the possibility of having retinal detachment also made me question whether I could bear children and/or carry them in my arms after they were born. In addition to being concerned about my own motherhood, my recurring eye problem created an unexpected distance between my mother and me, which became one of the most stressful experiences in the past few years. I am very close to my mother. We talked to each other through Skype for more than one hour almost every day when I studied in the U.S. and my mother was in Taiwan in the past seven years. I could share most of the things in my life with her, such as the ups and downs in my daily life, research, and relationships. But I am often hesitant to share my health problems with her because what she expects from me the most is good health. My mother cares about everyone’s health in our immediate and extensive families; she values health the most in her life after suffering thirty years from chronic illness. She could become very worried when any of

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my family members feel ill. With regards to me, my mother is particularly concerned about my eye health above all not only because I have had high myopia since I was in high school but also because she and her mother both suffer from serious eye diseases.

My maternal grandmother was inflicted by cataracts and glaucoma, the latter causing blindness in one eye. My mother has suffered from macular degeneration for more than a decade and from cataracts recently. Although I am part of the maternal lineage in my family that suffers from eye and vision problems, I could not confide my fear to my mother regarding the vision distortion caused by the bleeding in my eyes. In the past years, whenever I thought about telling her my struggles associated with my eye condition, I silenced myself because I felt doubly burdened by her own fear of such a disease and by her/my deep love and concern over me/her. Since most of my doctors said that my degenerative high myopia that led to the thinning out of the retina was mostly likely to be hereditary, I knew that my mother would feel somehow responsible for my illness. It has been six years now since I experienced the first bleeding in 2010, but I only let my mother know that I have lacquer cracks without informing her of any of the bleeding I have experienced. My previous hesitance to share with her my struggle partly resulted from my inability to provide her with an alternative picture different from the world she imagined after her vision degeneration, an outline of an alternative future that could reduce her fear about my potential retinal detachment. We were in a collective trauma that trapped us physically and psychologically.

I bore the trauma of my mother’s deep fear for the loss of her eyesight. When I was about eighteen years old, I witnessed her first traumatic moment regarding the breakage of an abnormal blood vessel inside her eye. I remember vividly that the moment

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when I walked into our house after school one day before a mock college entrance exam, my mother was sitting on the sofa when she suddenly shouted with panic that she saw a lot of blood in her eye. She could not see anything other than fresh blood. I rushed to her and saw no blood from the outside. I panicked as well because neither of us knew what happened and what to do. After calling my father, my mother and I immediately went to an eye clinic around our neighborhood. But the doctor said we must go to a larger hospital with more advanced instruments for further examination. Unsure of what our future would become, we waited several hours at night in the emergency room at a national hospital before my mother got her exams. Later the bleeding in her eye was diagnosed as the result of an abnormal blood vessel that broke in her macula. Months later, the blood in her eye cleared up but the scar caused permanent distortion in her central vision. Like my bleeding caused by lacquer cracks, my mother’s macular degeneration was also unpredictable and untreatable. In the past decade, small breakages of abnormal blood vessels reoccurred several times in both of her eyes. As her vision became poorer and more distorted, her confidence in herself and her mobility shrank; her view of the world darkened. I kept hearing her saying that if she cannot see, she would rather die. My mother’s paralyzed view of her sight planted a poisonous seed in me for years before I experienced my first eye bleeding in 2010. Only until recently, during the last stage of dissertation writing, did I realize that my mother’s view about sight and blindness that I had internalized was an ableist perspective that hindered both of us with distorted and degenerating vision, preventing us from imagining healing beyond restoration. This ableist attitude impoverished our envisioning of alternative ways of engaging with the world in a prosperous way that did not rely solely on “normal” sight.

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Decolonize Darkness

Through the imperiousness of the cultural gaze, our very eyes are colonized. -Ellyn Kaschak

In On Sight and Insight, John Hull points out, “The whole structure of our ordinary, everyday conversation presupposes a sighted world” (26). We live in an ocularcentric society in which sight not only is given priority over other sensory faculties but also relies on blindness, its inferior other, to sustain its dominance. In the dichotomy between sight and blindness, there is “an intimate connection between seeing and knowing” while blindness is associated with ignorance (Hull 25). For example, in “On

Blindness,” Julia Miele Rodas looks into daily linguistic expressions, such as blind spot and blind rage, to illuminate how blindness is often associated with negative connotations. These linguistic expressions not only reflect but also reinforce the dominant understanding of blindness in an ocularcentric society. The blind become the projected others of the sighted; therefore, blindness no longer simply indicates a difference in the various capacity of our eyes. Instead, it is considered to be a deviation, defect, aberration, or lack in comparison to the ableist Self, the sighted. In such a culture that privileges sight over other senses, Beth Omansky argues, “Blindness represents darkness, fear, and powerlessness in the weakest sense of the word” (41).

My internalization of the negative connotation of blindness was reinforced after witnessing my mother’s suffering in an ocularcentric ableist society. Although neither my mother nor I was blind, my mother’s poor vision hindered her mobility outside of the house. I remember one day my mother called me in tears, saying that she ran into a glass door hard and the frame of her prescription glasses was tilted when she was about to exit

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a store because she did not see the closed door at all. My mother was frustrated because her poor eyesight deprived her of social grace and dignity, exposing her “clumsiness.”

The fear of embarrassment caused by her poor eyesight was a recurring sentiment she experienced whenever she was outside of her familiar territory. For example, on the

Chinese New Year’s Eve of 2015, my family went to a buffet together. My mother could not see clearly the dishes and their labels, so she had to lean closely toward the food in order to figure out what they were. But my mother’s poor eyesight was not externally noticeable; she got stares from other people who found her suspicious as if she was going to contaminate the food.

Like my mother’s eye condition, my vision distortion and the risk of retinal detachment were not externally visible to others. Asking additional help from others to assist me with daily activities caused me great uneasiness. For example, I became very anxious when I had to travel alone after the bleeding in my eyes. Colonized by the unachievable ideal of a possessive individual who was expected to be entirely independent and self-reliant, I felt uncomfortable asking help for the simple acts, such as lifting my carry-on in an overhead bin or pulling my luggage from a baggage carousal in the airport. But after the frequent bleeding inside my eyes, I convinced myself that it would be better to seek help than to risk injuries. However, one time after I traveled from

Taiwan back to the U.S, I gathered all my courage and asked a ground crew member who was waiting for the baggage of a wheelchair user to help me pull my luggage from a carousel. He gave me a look and said he could not. I felt embarrassed and exposed as I felt the suspicious looks of others around me. His look seemed to tell me that I should stop playing the “weak woman” card and do that simple act myself because my arms and

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legs were functional unlike the people he was supposed to help, such as the wheelchair costumer he was assisting.

Inconvenience, subtly hostility, self-consciousness, and powerlessness informed the experiences both my mother and I had when navigating the world with our non- externally visible eye conditions. Our interaction with the world reflected the ableist and ocularcentric stereotypes of those without “normal” sight who were clumsy, ignorant, and weak. Reflecting back on my deep fear over the deterioration of my vision, I realized that what gnawed my confidence, my strength, and my self-image was not only the material inconvenience caused by the distortion and blurring of my vision but also the pernicious stereotypes of blindness created by the ocularcentric and ableist society that I internalized. The insecurity I experienced in the past years resulted not only from the temporary loss of orientation in life when entering a new territory my eyes led me into but also from my mourning for the loss of the ocularcentric privilege I used to enjoy without acknowledgment. I also realized that my constant hope for restoration of my eyesight and intact retina before being harmed by myopia and bleeding was also trapped in an ableist understanding of healing—I wanted to deny and to avoid the inferior otherness associated with the “non-normal” sighted population. Clinging to restoration is an impasse in the search for transformative healing. As the previous chapters show, regeneration, rebirth, and reconnection instead of restoration are more productive avenues to mobilize the formation of a decolonial healing self.

Omansky concludes that “blindness is to be lived rather than overcome” after exploring the lives of legally blind people who do not fit neatly into the disabled/non- disabled and the sighted/blind dichotomies (182). Omansky’s words are inspirational and

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instrumental to me personally and intellectually. For a life that is considered to be not worth living or that is harmed by a society dominated by ableism, sexism, racism, homophobia, and other structures of oppression, the affirmation that such a life should be lived rather than overcome is powerful. It signals a shift from a colonial logic of conquest to a decolonial ethics of co-existence and mutual flourishing. The shift in the exploration of decolonial healing is illuminated in the previous chapters as well as in my own path toward healing.

Homecoming

In December 2014, during the time when I wrote the chapter on Linda Hogan’s homecoming as her decolonial healing journey, I also embarked on a journey of my own as I travelled back to Taiwan when the bleeding in my eyes reoccurred after lying dormant between winters. Hogan’s homecoming journey that rejected a colonial grammar of spatiality characterized by compartmentalization, exploitation, and alienation and moved into “a geography of healing” inspired me to take the first leap to move toward my path of healing (149). Similar to Hogan’s efforts to reconnect with her indigenous continent in order to rebuild relations with people, land, animals, and spirits from whom she was aliened, I also returned to Taiwan and re-connected with my homeland after years of leaving home.

In 2014, seeing a pattern that bleeding inside my eyes occurred almost always in the cold snowy winter months, I recognized that my body was not in harmony with the environment and weather in Ohio. After years studying abroad alone, being away from

Taiwan, my body finally showed its wound to force me to face its strong longing to go

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home with warmer weather, the support of family and friends, my feline companion, and local food. Although I recognized that my body needed to take a rest, my mind and body were in a constant tug-of-war. In 2014, I struggled between speeding up my writing to complete this dissertation that might risk my health in order to graduate in May of 2015 and placing self-preservation as my first priority in life. I chose the latter thanks to women of color feminism reminding me that the dichotomy between mind and body was a colonial product. To decolonize our intellectual work, life, and healing, we need to first change our relationship to the body. As Anzaldúa’s quote included in chapter 2 emphasizes, “For if she changed her relationship to her body and that in turn changed her relationship to another’s body then she would change her relationship to the world. And when that happened she would change the world” (“Dream of the Double-Faced

Woman” 71; original emphasis). Putting my intellectual learning into practice, I decided to change the relation with my body from an exploitative one to a caring and co-existing one.

In December 2014, I finally listened to my body’s needs. I returned home. I was not sure whether it was a coincidence or like Hogan’s experience that homecoming was indeed a medicine for a wounded body that re-found physical, emotional, and ecological harmony in a land with the weather, food, emotional support that one longed for after years of being away. During the winter months from December 2014 to February 2015 in

Taiwan, I experienced no bleeding. But I did not naively think that my eyes were fully healed. As my project emphasizes, decolonial healing is never a once and for all end product but an ongoing praxis that requires a continuous unmaking and remaking the self.

Reducing the frequency of bleeding inside my eyes at that time only signaled a positive

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feedback to reassure myself that I was moving toward a more harmonious direction in my current life. Adjusting my professional life and daily routine to respect the longing, needs, and agency of my body with which my mind forms a symbiosis would be a dynamic project that I have to take in my whole life in order to ensure the mutual flourishing between my intellectual, bodily, and spiritual aspects of my life on a path to healing. In her unpublished archival entry titled “SIC: Mal De Ser,” Anzaldúa informs us that “[h]ealing [is] not just for the moment but as a way of life.” Decolonial healing is not about temporary palliation; instead, it requires a restructuring of the way of living and a change in perspective that will allow for the rebirth of the self, as the transformation of

Sedna in Hogan’s autohistoria demonstrates. Intellectually theorizing healing in this dissertation has guided me to gradually move out of my Coatlicue state by understanding vision distortion and the bleeding in my eyes from a new light, which in turn catalyzes my process of transforming from a wounded self to a healing self.

A Sign

On a flight from Columbus, Ohio, to Taiwan in December 2014, I came across an independent film, I Origins (2014), which I later considered to be a spiritual sign about my healing journey. I Origins is a sci-fi drama written and directed by Mike Cahill. The film uses eyes which are traditionally considered to be the windows of the soul to explore the themes of love, faith, existence, and reincarnation. Tensions about the different perspectives on the world, the soul, and the existence arise mainly between the main character, Ian Gray, and his lover, Sofi, who dies young.

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Ian is a molecular biology lab student who firmly believes in science and shows hostility toward spirituality that cannot be proven by science. His research is to fill in the steps in the evolution of the eye. Obsessed with eyes, Ian takes pictures of many people’s eyes. He takes photos of Sofi’s beautiful eyes at a Halloween party. In the party, Sofi is all covered up in black; only her eyes can be seen. Later, Ian finds Sofi after seeing her eyes in a billboard as an eye model, and soon they fall in love. But Ian and Sofi are two people on the opposite ends of a spectrum in terms of their personalities and beliefs. In contrast to Ian, who is into the scientific and against the spiritual, Sofi is spiritual, emotional, and sensitive. An underlying tension between Sofi and Ian and in the exploration of life throughout the movie is that Sofi believes in reincarnation and spiritual signs while Ian only believes in evolution and scientific evidence. However, the notions of reincarnation and soul are only intimated in the movie. The director purposefully avoids religious words. In an interview with Germain Lussier, Cahill said: “the movie doesn’t use any religious words. Like the word ‘reincarnation’ is not in the movie at all.”

There is only one moment when Gray’s wife, Karen, uses the word “soul”, but Ian quickly mocks her. Intentionally avoiding religious vocabulary, Cahill wants to look into the concepts of reincarnation, afterlife, and the soul that are traditionally explored in the field of religion studies from a new light. As Cahill said in the interview with Lussier: “I wanted to somehow try and create a movie that used science or the language of science to look at phenomenon that, you know, maybe called one thing or the other, but not using any of those words and saying.”

The relationship between Ian and Sofi does not last long. Before they can get married, Sofi is killed in an elevator accident. Ian is depressed for a period of time after

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witnessing Sofi’s death. The film flashes forward a few years. Ian’s life moves on and he marries his previous lab assistant, Karen. When their son is born, the hospital runs an iris scan of him. Mistakenly, the database identifies their son’s iris as the one of Paul Edgar

Dairy, a man who died just before their son was conceived. Curious about the iris pattern match, Ian contacts his former research partner, Kenny, who is the creator of the iris database. Entering some photos of the eyes of the deceased, Ian and Kenny want to find out if there are any recent matches. Surprisingly, a match with Sofi’s iris pattern shows up. The recent iris scan of an orphaned Indian girl, Salomina, matches that of Sofi. With the encouragement of his wife, Ian goes to India to find Salmonina. Weeks later, Ian finally meets Salomina and takes her back to his hotel for a test. Ian and his wife, Karen, design a simple test to see if Salomina might be somehow linked to Sofi. Ian shows a set of three pictures each time to Salomina and asks her to choose the picture that she likes the best. One of the three pictures is an item, a location, or a figure that is related to Sofi.

While at first Salomina uncannily chooses the ones that are directly connected to Sofi, the result at the end is only within the probable range of random chance. At the end of the test, Karen asks him over Skype how he feels about the result; Ian feels foolish and determines the test is meaningless. But when Ian walks Salomina out of the hotel room and is about to take an elevator down to the lobby, Salomina panics and throws herself into Ian’s arm. Ian holds Salomina tight and the two cry together. Instead of taking an elevator, Ian takes her down by the stairs.

Whether Ian believes that Salomina is a reincarnation of Sofi is open to interpretation. But the ending of I Origins hints at a possibility of rebirth in a spiritual realm and opens up an unknown world that Ian keeps refusing to acknowledge with his

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training and his own religion of science. Watching I Origins on my healing journey back to Taiwan allowed me to rethink the complicated relation between eyes, the self, the permeability of bodily boundaries, and rebirth that I was trying to tease out in my personal life. The message of rebirth in the film became a spiritual sign that prompted me to explore how I could give my wounded eye/I an alternative meaning not confined by the physiological and ableist understanding of my eye condition to rebirth myself.

From Whirlpool to Ripple

In December 2013, a few days after another bleeding episode in my retina, I went to Anzaldúa’s archive housed in the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas—Austin. I remember vividly my bodily reaction when I came across

Anzaldúa’s journal entry titled “S.I.C.: Spiritual Identity Crisis: A Series of Vignettes” that detailed her experiences with undergoing a fluorescein angiogram and laser treatment after bleeding in her retina caused by diabetes. Cold sweat seeped from my palms and my back when I was photocopying that entry. The bodily reaction reflected an unsettling feeling at that moment—I was afraid that my body would become Anzaldúa’s.

Her written details of her fluorescein angiogram reminded me of my fresh memory of going through the same exam a few days before encountering her journal. Although my intellectual work was first and foremost influenced and informed by Anzaldúa’s work, I never expected that there was an overlap in our embodied experiences. The shared struggle over bleeding inside the eyes caused by the fragility and permeability of our ocular tissues bound us together at an embodied level although our bleeding resulted from different diseases.

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Reflecting back on the initial reaction when I encountered Anzaldúa’s details of her eye exam, I realized that my unsettling feeling partly came from the bodily interchangeability in the sense that our bodies could be any body afflicted by the similar disease we suffered. The uneasiness regarding the overlap between Anzaldúa’s bodily experience and mine was similar to the one regarding my anxiety that my vision would deteriorate into my mother’s vision in the near future. The recognition of overlap and the blurring of our bodily boundary might trigger fear and anxiety, but a hope for collective healing hinges on the very characteristic of permeability. As my research argues throughout the project, decolonial healing requires liquefaction of the boundary between differences by disrupting a colonial spatiality that emphasizes compartmentalization and categorization of differences. While the initial discomfort for permeability of the bodily boundary is undeniable, it is also the very permeability that provides a potential nexus for collective healing. Recognizing the permeable boundary between differences allows us to be able to situate ourselves within an infinite coalitional community of healing. In such a communal healing field, we share a physical or spiritual boundary with each other.

Furthermore, each member’s action can inspire transformation of another member, which could set a series of collective changes into motion.

At this early stage in my healing journey, I make efforts to use the permeability between my eye tissues that originally signals an open wound like Anzaldúa’s notion of

B/borderlands as a transformative opportunity to create an interrelated field of a healing self as visualized in the ripple imagery discussed in chapter 3. To create such a relational field of the healing self, I practice resistant re-memory to reclaim a maternal genealogy that decolonizes not only the literal darkness caused by different eye diseases but also by

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the social darkness that an ocularcentric ablest society imposes. Although I am already in a maternal lineage of suffering caused by eye disease, I used to disassociate myself from the otherness associated with impaired vision that my mother and grandmother embodied in an ocularcentric society. During the period of time when I only immersed myself in wounding rather than healing, my internal voice that shouted “I don’t want to be them” not only maintained an “us versus them” mentality my research intended to deconstruct but also prevented me from loving my mother and grandmother fully in all aspects.

However, with the progress of my intellectual inquiry on decolonial healing, I realize now that I have to take back the otherness I used to look down upon in order to seek decolonial healing. Only when I can reconcile, reconnect, and affirm with the otherness the women in my family embody can I begin to love myself. To regain the ability to love them and myself is to be able to practice a relating epistemology and to take accountability toward each other’s suffering as the love politics theorized by feminists of color. Rather than separating myself from the despised otherness, i.e. my grandma’s blindness and my mom’s distorted vision, I consciously relate to it by searching for resistant memories that my internalized ocularcentric ableism forces me to forget. As

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha performs a politics of memory to situate herself within a resistant genealogy of different women’s lives across time and space to construct a decolonial healing self, I also begin to remember the strength and love my grandmother and mother demonstrate when enduring blindness and distorted vision as I search for my own healing.

When my maternal grandmother was alive, she was an active member in a women’s association in Taiwan. When she lost sight in one eye, she still maintained her

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mobility and refused to be confined to a domestic space. Only a few months before her death, in her sixties, she traveled to Europe with my grandfather and other members in her women’s association in 1997 when international travel in Taiwan was not as common as it is now. In addition, my grandmother kept her agency out of the love she had for her children and grandchildren. For instance, although her blindness in one eye made using a knife a big challenge to her due to the difficulty in estimating correct distance between objects, she insisted on cooking abundant food during Chinese New Year at the risk of hurting herself. She did so to nurture her children and grandchildren during our annual visit. By shifting the focus from her blindness to her strength and love, I now acknowledge that my grandmother exemplified Omansky’s powerful argument quoted earlier in this chapter: “blindness is to be lived rather than overcome” (182). My grandmother’s life and love continued to flourish after being blind in one eye by co- existing rather than submitting herself to blindness.

In comparison to my grandmother, my mother is less energetic and more confined in a domestic space because of her chronic illness in addition to her impaired vision. It is undeniable that my mother’s previous darkened view on life, the world, and blindness after her continuous abnormal blood vessel breakage in the macula has infected me for a long period of time. I am still trying to decolonize my internalized ableism. However, in my search for healing in the past years, I have learned to appreciate the strength my mother shows in her solitary endurance in her own darkness. Like her mother, my mother’s love for her children is what sustains the light in her life when braving her own ocular, psychological, and spiritual darkness. It is also the love she has for me that guides her to laboriously cross from one tunnel of sickness to another on a daily basis. Recently

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during our several conversations over Skype, my mother told me that she began to feel tired after enduring her illness for almost two decades and asked me when I would graduate. She wanted to see me move into another stage of life and start my own family with her remaining eyesight. I finally realize that no matter how frustrated she feels toward her illness and eye condition from time to time, she never gives up living because of her love for me. Her resistance is not eventful but an everyday feat; it is manifested in mundane survival and perseverant endurance with pain that cannot be fully alleviated.

Resistant remembrance of my grandmother’s and my mother’s love and strength when living with their eye illnesses has allowed me to understand my maternal genealogy from a new perspective. This genealogy used to be defined by a suffering that I wanted to disassociate myself from. But now the defining characteristic of the genealogy becomes resistance and love. Furthermore, the collective field of the healing self where I situate myself is not bonded by blood relations only. I also draw strength from those who I consider to be my intellectual mothers who walk with me spiritually to light up an alternative path toward my healing. Anzaldúa, whose writings enlighten my intellectual work and whose lived experience inspires my own life, is a case in point. Witnessing

Anzaldúa’s active search for medical intervention in her archival document to treat hemorrhage inside her eyes in order to secure her essential identity as a writer marks a transformative moment to me. Anzaldúa’s way of dealing with her bleeding opens up an alternative to me that is different from how my mother deals with her eye bleeding. While my mother used to be reluctant to seek outside intervention because she thinks nothing could entirely treat her macular degeneration, Anzaldúa showed her determination and strength to take action in order to continue reading and writing. My mother’s pessimistic

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view of her eyes partly hinges on her clinging to the unattainable end result: restoration of her distorted vision. Since the end point is not feasible, my mother gives up trying. She even refuses to do annual eye checkups to monitor her macular degeneration. By contrast,

Anzaldúa focuses on the here and now and on the process of seeking healing itself even though laser treatment would not guarantee that she would not experience bleeding again.

Anzaldúa shows me that healing is about a dynamic and ongoing process of adjusting life and taking action from moment to moment to respond to pain or illness. If we cling to an understanding of healing as a concrete known product that only means restoration of woundedness to a state before being harmed, a search for healing could lead to disempowerment rather than empowerment especially when restoration is not in sight.

Although my mother’s dealing with her bleeding in her macular does not spark hope in me, I pass the healing energy I have received from Anzaldúa back to my mother when I begin to gain the courage to actively confront my internal demons related to my eye condition. Sharing the healing energy is an integral part of decolonial healing guided by love politics to ensure that individual healing is linked to the communal and that we are accountable for each other’s suffering.

In 2015, one day my mother told me that after she threw heavy trash bags into a trash truck, part of her central vision was covered by a dark shadow and she saw flashes in her peripheral vision. Both of us knew that the dark shadow was likely to be caused by the familiar bleeding in her macula again because of the heavy lifting she did, but we were concerned with the flashes she saw. Initially, my mother refused to see an eye doctor because she thought going blind was her fate; she had no hope to have her vision improved. But I kept urging her to see a doctor because flashes may signal retinal

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detachment as I was told by my doctors. Asking my mother to face her own eye condition was also helping me confront my own nightmare, namely retinal detachment. Still reluctant, my mother finally gave in to my nagging; she went to see a doctor. Fortunately, she did not have retinal detachment. Even until today, her doctor does not know what causes the flashes that she still sees occasionally. But during the checkup, her doctor told her that, unbeknown to her, she had serious cataracts in both eyes. The presence of these cataracts explained her increasing vision blurriness in the recent years. The doctor suggested surgery within the week to remove cataracts from one of her eyes and another surgery for the other eye two weeks later before they were too advanced to be removed.

Months after the surgeries, my mother’s world was lightened up literally and metaphorically. With the implanted intraocular lenses in both of her eyes, my mother’s vision was significantly improved although the distortion caused by macular degeneration still existed. Along with the transformation of her eyes thanks to the intraocular lenses, she also had a renewed outlook of herself. She enjoyed better quality of life and her view on life and the world became more optimistic and hopeful. Actively participating in her gradual healing, my mother encouraged other people around her who also suffered from eye diseases to take action.

During the healing process after her cataract surgeries, my mother suffered from corneal abrasion in her left eye. Before her cornea was fully healed, I experienced my first corneal abrasion in my right eye. Her suffering intertwined with mine during the period that both of us suffered the same eye problem. Both our wounded eyes became a pair; our individual bodily boundary seemed to dissolve in the shaping of a new contour of our collective wounds. Because of the coincidence of having corneal abrasion at the

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same time, I realized how our body did not end with one’s skin as Anzaldúa and Hogan emphasized. My eye tissue was literally part of my mother’s body because it was she who gave me life. During the time we suffered corneal abrasion together, my mother and I also participated in a process of healing together by discussing which eye lubricants worked the best for us. We also openly shared our eye pain with each other. Though I still did not mention the incidents of bleeding in my eyes with my mother, talking explicitly with her about my eye pain related to corneal abrasion was a healing moment after years of remaining silent.

As demonstrated in chapter 2, Anzaldúa allows the spiritual energy to move among different bodies and life forms to create a collective self with a permeable boundary between differences. Similarly, I also use the healing energy generated through the practice of a resistant politics of memory to remember those spiritual ancestors who walk with me in order to redraw my contour of the body and subjectivity. Allowing the healing energy to circulate between multiple wounded eyes to liquefy the boundary of differences, I weave each individual wounded eye/I of my grandmother, my mother,

Anzaldúa, and the people my mother has encouraged into a collective healing community of eyes/we. After encountering her journal entry in her archive unexpectedly, I received the healing energy from Anzaldúa’s direct confrontation with her bleeding caused by diabetes to assure myself that bleeding inside the eyes and vision distortion did not necessarily prevent me from being a scholar. Seeing alternative possibilities toward my impaired vision from Anzaldúa, I passed the energy back to my mother, who was worried about the new symptoms of flashes inside her eyes. I also reminded my mother of the strength her mother showed when living with her blindness. Encouraged by me, my

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mother gathered her courage to take action to have her cataracts removed within a very short period of time. In return, her newly emerging hope thanks to her vision improvement not only consoled me when I faced my bleeding again in my retina but also brought light to those who also suffered eye diseases around her. Together, Anzaldúa, my grandmother, my mother, and I participate in sustaining an ecology of healing with mutual flourishing: we not only receive healing energy from those who walk before us and together with us but also bounce the energy back to give hope to those who are still disoriented in the darkness. We are in each other’s struggle and contribute to each other’s healing. Situating myself within a healing community formed by those who struggle, endure, and confront the wounds related to eyes, a contour of my decolonial healing self starts to take shape.

A Healing Vision

Let us give ourselves permission to have high expectations for a full, erotic life and let us support each other, prioritizing our personal and collective well-being as ‘whole’ people in relationship to all that lives. -Irene Lara

After three years of researching and writing on decolonial healing envisioned in women of color’s autohistorias in this project, I begin to see a glimpse of healing beyond restoration in my own life. About two and half years ago, the frequent and unpredicted vision distortion caused by the bleeding in my retina ruptured my life, which forced me into a Coatlicue state that I had to cross over in order to form new consciousness about my body, my life, and the world I saw. At this last stage of completing my dissertation, taking in the teachings on healing the authors I have examined offer, I am able to gradually turn the whirlpool of my vision that used to drag me into a bottomless black

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hole into a ripple imagery of a coalitional healing self so that I can take back the otherness associated with non-normal sight, thus finding healing in the communal. What catalyzes the transformation of the whirlpool into a ripple is love.

Before I wrote this concluding chapter, I told a close Taiwanese friend that I was going to write a personal narrative on eye and I. He misheard the English word eye/ I as the Chinese word for love that is also pronounced ai. Now as I reflect back, I realize how apt the misreading was. Love politics informed by women of color feminism not only encourages me to decolonize my internalized ocularcentric and ableist view on impaired vision in order to love myself but also mobilizes me to practice resistant memory politics and relating epistemology. This practice, in turn, allows me to (re)connect with those who also struggle with eye/I issues, including individuals who came before me and those who struggle alongside me. As Hogan’s words in her memoir remind me, “It wasn’t healing I found or a life free from pain, but a kind of love and kinship with a similarly broken world” (16). The bleeding inside my eyes may reoccur at any time and it might still frighten me. But now I have more courage to face it and to live with the wound within the relational field of a decolonial healing self that I have created for myself. I am on my ongoing journey to create a transformative wholeness out of the fragments and alienation caused by my bleeding eye/I.

At the end of this dissertation, some readers may want a closure like I used to do in terms of talking openly with my mother regarding the bleeding inside my eyes to facilitate my process of healing. However, I am only at the beginning stage of my healing journey, so I am not sure whether one day I would talk to her explicitly about

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my struggle associated with eye bleeding. But reflecting back, I realize that my previous strong desire to talk with my mother about my pain associated with eye condition could be selfish to some degree. I wanted to relieve my emotional burden by telling her immediately because keeping secretes was tiring, but my sharing could cause additional anxiety and fear in her life that was already burdened with her own chronic illness and her fear toward her mother’s blindness and her own degenerating vision. In order for me to talk with my mother openly about my bleeding, I think I would need to empower her before honest revelation can happen. As I mentioned earlier in the chapter, I used to silence myself partly because I was not able to provide my mother with an alternative picture of how a life could still flourish after impaired vision or even blindness. At this point of my life, my plan is to show her that alternative outlook of a future both she and I search for mainly through my embodiment rather than through my words. I want her to witness my flourishing as a dreamer, a scholar, a daughter, and a mother in the future alongside my continuous efforts of dealing with my eye conditions. I believe that when she can see me grow strong in the following years to come, my revealing of the bleeding would not be as hurting to her then as it would be now. My decision to keep the bleeding to myself right now is neither to avoid honesty that women of color feminists value and promote nor to impose silence on myself again. In fact, it becomes an expression of my love to my mother with a hope for mutual healing in the near future when she acknowledges that an alternative prosperous life with impaired vision is possible, a life that she has never been able to conceive and to live.

I also hope my work could be a loving ofrenda, an offering, to anyone who has been wounded, fragmented, and trapped by the colonial logic and spatiality of

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compartmentalization, alienation, and domination over differences and who longs for finding a collective healing community to rework an individual wounded self. Similar to

Irena Lara, I also envision my writing to be a “prayer for social justice, healing, and the greater good” (“Sending the Serpent” 113). I want to share with those who read my work the healing energy generated through my documentation and theorization of the decolonial healing selves that Hogan, Anzaldúa, Cha, and I envision, search for, and create in our lives.

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