Reading Response #24

          “Tlilli Tlapslli: The Path of the Red and Black Ink” is an article written by Gloria Anzalda, from her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza—the general public—that talks about writing to the author; why it is “a blood sacrifice” to her soul (Writing About Writing, 225).  Writing, to her, does not have the “aesthetic of virtuosity” (221), where its has to “move humans by means of achieving mastery in content, technique, feeling” (211) through any means necessary, or “importing Greek myths” (222) away from its’ origins, but towards different kinds of spiritual shifts. So as the text transforms into Spanish language, then back to English, the idea that a “lack of belief” in the creative self “is a lack of belief” in the “total sense and vice versa” (222). Ah she explains to interviewer Andrea A. Lunsford in “Towards A Mestiza Rhetoric”:  

                    I am always rethinking and responding to something that I value, or rethinking
                    somebody else’s values. If the value is competition, then I start thinking about
                    how when you compete, there is a certain amount of violence, a certain kind
                    of struggle. Okay, behind that violence and that struggle I experience some
                    kind of emotion: fear, hesitancy, sadness, depression because of the state of
                    the world, whatever. In order to backtrack to the theoretical concepts, I have
                    to start with the feeling. So I dig into the feeling and usually the feeling will
                    have a visual side while I’m pulling it apart. (232)  

Once that visual side becomes visible, where ”the metaphorical mind precedes analytical consciousness” (222), Anzalda would then transform into the purest form of her character: The nahual (220) who writes out of “psychic unrest” (224) towards personal expression; her identify, based on heritage, that belongs to nobody but the writer.              

          This self-journey of figuring out identify of writers brings me back to the last couple of Reading Responses, and how those same identifies can be brought back to group thinking through a simple concept: applying identify to dominant/nondominant discourse communities. “The various Discourses which constitute each of us as persons,” according to him:  

                    are changing and often are not fully consistent with each other; there is often
                    and tension between the values, beliefs, attitudes, interactional styles, uses of
                    language, and ways of being in the world which two or more Discourses
                    represent. Thus, there is no real sense in which we humans are consistent or well
                    integrated creatures from a cognitive or social viewpoint, though, in fact, most
                    Discourses assume that we are (and thus we do too, while we are in them).
                    (Writing About Writing, 485)
                     
 The assumptions that form those community principles results in different theories towards writing constructs; what inspires one author will be too manipulative to another writer. As such, an article like Lisa Delpit’s “The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse,” where Gee’s idea of a individual “born” into a discourse threatens political environments, shows that at some point, acknowledgment at “students’ home language without using it to limit students’ potential” (Reading About Writing, 186) will not reflect an entire community; some can perceive Lisa’s article as “matters of sheer mechanical ‘correctness’” (192) that has nothing to do with the true construction of a language. Even trying to further understand the members’ identification, “informed by prevailing, politicized, and personal definitions of gender and sexuality” (198), will only result in further questioning that might threaten the order of certain communities towards disconnections of both the members and their community. If those questions are not raised, then those communities will target their superiority of their own self towards “gender-ambiguous individuals” that must “face significant harassment” (202) to survive, or to a new, developing discourse “with its own preferred forms of socialization and language use” (268).  Those fights is what Anzalda struggles over; while one discourse “is always whole and always ‘in power’” (221), she has to find herself inside a community that lets her “become the me of me” (177), and once she does, she can find her soul, her body, in “mythological soil” (222) and rise as an unique member of a discourse community. Until then, she must write a story that looks inside herself, and be the person she really is: Gloria Anzalda, the individual of her “people, the Indians” (220).                          

          Is her position inside her own discourse community let us see any distinctions between the art of Western culture, and her community’s tribal art? Through her writing, painting the “[e]thocentrism” (221)  the defines western culture as cutting “themselves off from their spiritual roots” (222) compared not to their favor, but towards her own. So while Anzalda condemns the “housing their art works in the best structures designed by the best architects” (221), where the best are needed to get by, the tribe’s thinking of “scarification” becomes appealing to readers. As her tribe’s artifacts becomes “transported into an alien aesthetic system where what is missing is the presence of power” (221), the separation of the symbol and nature belongs to myths beyond their own understanding; not seen with their own eyes, but through the power told by others. In other words, instead of exploiting the “body of the earth” (222), western civilization should “share and exchange and learn” (222) in ways that benefits all races towards better understanding. That is what art culture has to face; as a more individualistic culture, they risk the possibility of falling apart through personal means. If they want to be free of this fight, and become more communal, they have to be free of the traits that allow corruption to exist, find ways of showing art beyond exploration, and believe not only in the character that form artists, audiences, and stories, but also in powers they do not understand at all. If that is not possible, then difference will not matter, as long as the author’s expression resonates audiences, no matter how individualist the members of that audience may be. That defines current literacy, a discourse community, into both art culture: as long as the art brings together everyone into spiritual agreement, no matter how personal the author is towards the art towards the self, then the distinctions becomes fascinating, as cultural studies, to communal thinking, leading for individual growth, benefiting all towards the understanding of art (in theory). So to answer the question of  “current literacy and/or art culture becoming more communal or more individual,” I say it applies to both in exhilarating ways.              

          Exhilaration, as a concept, is what Anzalda aims to capture in her article. To make it work, to get that “voice, a style, a point of view” (233), she has to use literacy devices to become herself. A stranded academic format would only distract the motivation of her writing; it is not the application of other’s ideas that attracted her to writing, it was the connection of words and images that did. In her own words:  

                    An image is a bridge between evoked emotions and conscious knowledge;
                    words are the cables that hold up the bridge. Images are more direct, more
                    immediate than words, and closer to the unconscious. Picture language
                    precedes thinking in words; the metaphorical mind precedes analytical
                    consciousness. (222)

          All in all, Anzaldúa’s article is the perfect way to end these Reading Responses: if you write powerful work, express yourself in a way others cannot, the words will carry beyond the intention and become personal not just to the author, but to everybody. If the author can shift themselves into territory that appeal to a core emotion, based on circumstances, surroundings, characteristics, and objects of the individual that defines the author’s self, then a community, or a member inside that community, will listen and be responsive either intentionally or in their subconscious. Anzaldúa understood that, both visually and textually, and after working on these reading responses throughout this semester, I understand with her. She has expressed herself through her article, and I have too. To the both of us, I say, Mission Accomplished.