The difference between poetry and rhetoric

is being ready to kill

yourself

instead of your children.

–       Power, Audre Lorde

Lorde’s opening verses from her monumental poem Power kept coming back throughout the readings of the week. These words are always with me, I find them comforting when trying to live a committed and congruent life in the midst of seduction and cooptation (an easier path, no doubt). The difference between poetry and rhetoric is action, action in words: putting oneself in the writing, the writing being one’s own body with movement and pain (estar ¡Presente!, pues).

El Laberinto de la Soledad is a very problematic text, to say the least (I need to be measured because if not I’m not going to be heard/read –   ¿secuelas de opresión?).  Paz is a white, Eurocentric, heterosexual man that in talking about el mexicano y su mexicanidad, rapidly starts talking on behalf of el mexicano y su mexicanidad. This, he was perfectly aware of.  Octavio Paz was the chosen intellectual of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the Mexican political party that was in power, as a cloaked dictatorship, for more than 70 years. El Laberinto de la Soledad was conceived as a project to construct a national identity in accordance to this party’s interests at this specific time. This is well known.

Another colonizing strategy soaked in applause?

Who was Paz walking with? I have trouble believing that this (obviously amazingly written) essay has any kind of collective energy. Paz was never part of that mexicanidad he enunciates because he is the one who sees it; being conscious sets you apart (The Intelectual). On the other hand, the mexicanidad he describes is created by his pen, and the men and institutions that backed him up.

How was Paz being Present/e? Who was he being Present/e for?

With the authority of the one who can speak, who speaks for others, who creates… nothing but a prison of stereotypes for others and invites them to come in because it’s warmer inside, dice.

This is why Lorde’s words are so vital;

and Jesusa’s words. I say them outloud:

The way you do this, you do everything. The way you do this, you do everything. The way you do this, you do everything. The way you do this, you do everything. The way I do this, I do everything.

The way I write this, I do everything.

Yes!