“Presente”, to be present, in the present, a wrinkle that merges time and space together, to be present, a call for embodiment and attention to our surroundings, an interpellation of the environment …. shouting to us: “stop… and listen”.
Reading Diana Taylor’s text “Presente” is especially relevant in the progression of our class, the text not only summarizes the main debates of our seminar but also establishes critical connections towards a possible decolonial practice in the academia. Starting with Columbus letters, I believe the text “moves” towards a critic of language and cultural translation, that problematizes the figure of la Malinche and situates her in a continental debate of global Epistemicides and repression. The text draws a constellation, that highlights the evident but commonly overlooked relationship between post-colonial studies, biopolitics (Arendt, Mbembe, Sousa do Santos), and alternative epistemologies from non-western thinkers, like the ones of Cusicanqui, and Anzaldua. It is a text that unifies and traces a coherent trajectory of our conversations in class.
Furthemore, during our last seminar, Jesusa Rodríguez performance encapsulated in the verb “Decir” the politics of translation, the uses of masks, and the travels of communication and power from the Colony to today…. Sadly, not much has changed, it seems that we don’t understand each other and that we say a lot but do not communicate. Her performance was more eloquent than any critical essay written in the academia, and full of humor.
With that in mind, I want to propose a parallel reading of Paz and Anzaldua, arguing that the latter is very “presente” in her writing, while the former repeats a petrified discourse (like a totem), that acknowledges certain characteristics of “Mexican identity” but doesn’t consider a way to think “alternative” ways of being Mexican.
Octavio Paz is seen as one of the founder fathers of Mexican academia, national discourse, and of course, Mexican literature, he is the canon. Despite his contribution, his speech is very phallocentric, and masculine (in a Western way). In Mascaras mexicanas Paz distinguishes the differences between that which characterizes the “Mexican macho” and femininity in Mexico. He proposes a gendered and dualistic classification that highlights solitude as the main trace of mexicanness: the man is always concerned with his image, historically reduce to a passive subject and identified as a feminized male, the contemporary macho “no se raja”, punishing the women for his own complex of vulnerability.
Paz writes that, in this line of thought, women are inferior beings “because, in submitting, they open -themselves up-“ (Paz 30). I believe Anzaldua explores that open wound of the mestiza, of the Mexican women, and from that wound, wrinkle, from that scar, and mark that defines her sex, she writes and becomes “presente”. Because the mestiza has no visibility and is neglected by a social discourse that constitutes itself in the discrimination, Anzaldua decides to locate her voice in that undetermined zone of language; in the ambivalent movement between visibility and invisibility. Anzaldua’s writing is hybrid: prosaic, humorous, dramatic, academic and poetic, Mexican, and Chicana. It finds its power in that space/time conjured in the “presente” where historical and geographical crossroads meet.
She speaks from and with a body that cannot be easily associated with a nation of with a particular history, and identity, it belongs nowhere… and because it doesn’t belong, it writes from itself, from the wound, in contrast to Paz, that writes from the top of the mountain of political and historical authority. However, there are two points of conjunction between Paz, Taylor and Anzaldua, the importance of “FORM” and the possibility of “LOVE” as theory. Paz writes “Perhaps our traditionalism, which is one of the constants of our national character, giving coherence to our people and our history, results from our professed love for Form” (32), form is important, but which one? The search for “A Form” is probably the most present we can be in the “presente” … the question and the love for Form should always be present in our doing (as writing, and existence)
Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1985. Print.