Liminal Subjects

Weaving (Our) Liberation

Sara C. Motta

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786608123
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Colonialismo e post-colonialismo

Through the stories of women in movement in the Americas, Europe and Australasia, this book explores a decolonising and feminised politics of liberation which is being weaved through the words and worlds of black, colonised and subaltern women. These stories demonstrate the complex and multiple forms of critique as practice that are being developed by women in movement in multiple sites of the Global South. Written through story, prose, poetry, analysis and offering case-studies, methodologies, practices and generative questions the book expresses and contributes to the (co) creation of a new language of liberation. This is an enfleshed language in which there is a return of the world to the word, of the body to the text, and of the heart/womb to thought. This is a language of the political in which a new political subjectivity that is multiple, deeply relational and becoming is formed. The book offers a window onto the complexities and depths of the wounding enacted by patriarchal capitalist coloniality through these stories but it also offers, through sharing and conceptualising prefigurative and dialogical co-creation of critique, the gift of practices of healing as emancipation, and the conditions of possibility for our collective liberation.

Part 1

Speaking from the Silence(d)

1

Untamable Women

I begin on Samhain, on the dark moon, a time to let go of all that no longer serves.

I let go of the silence. I let go of the unworthiness. I let go of the wounds that have separated me, exiled me from myself and you, you from me.

I give thanks for my strength, resilience, joy and for our capacity to create works of art, life, love, and possibility, of exquisiteness, out of the pain.

For we are lotus.

Figure 1.1. The Grandmothers

Natvienna Hanell, Shamanic Artist (http://www.holywomanholygrail.com)

I.

I write this as an act of defiance, as a work of carving myself into being, and as a passing down the line of the wisdoms of our women of survival and of the groundwork out of which we might weave our liberation. I write this as a testimony to the war that is waged and has been waged for over 500 years against our women, our daughters, our sisters, our mothers, grandmothers, ourselves. I write as mestiza woman, as a political and epistemological choice and pathway of becoming other. I write, then in the traditions of racialized women who know how our philosophizing is cut like diamonds through the struggle to maintain ourselves alive and to create out of our wounds a healing that is beautiful and multiple. Our healing refuses to be contained within the disembodied epistemological borders and boundaries of modernity for whom we have always been the non-subject; the present absence whose silent screams haunt Your claims to Reason, Progress, Knowledge, and Revolution.

I realize that I cannot keep waiting, for a time will not come when I have the luxury of time and space to think and let words and thoughts flow onto the page in the leisurely breeze that comes from the open window and a vista of peaceful waters. I realize that the only way in which I can write is to write in the cracks of my/our attempt to make sense of the traumas inflicted upon the women of my line and the communities to which I belong and where I have found my home-comings. And that this writing could never be separate from those traumas, could never or should never claim to create a sanitized distance from our red blood that flows in defiance of the claims to know us/me, the raced and feminized body politic under the White patriarchal gaze of capitalist-coloniality.

I make no apology that this does not resemble the texts of high theory, that there is no attempt to mimic, imitate, or complete. When the (mis)naming comes (as they always name us, before we have had time to speak), of this as folkloric, ethnic (read concrete vis-à-vis your universal), unphilosophical, a politics of identity, a recuperation into hegemonic normalcy, a disappointing fake, an irrational monstrosity my reply is “FUCK YOU.” No apology. I will no longer hide. I will speak in tongues, on our terms. No attempt to explain in Your language for we have always had to explain and contort our bodies and minds and souls into such frames, grammars, worlds. Well now, it is time to LISTEN.

A text message from my dear friend, my little girl misses me, for we are separated as I must split myself in two like the barbed wire of which Gloria Anzaldúa speaks:

1950-mile-long open wound

dividing a pueblo, a culture,

running down the length of my body,

staking fence rods in my flesh,

splits me splits me

me raja me raja

This is my home,

this thin edge of

barbwire.

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,

Yemaya blew that wire fence down

(Anzaldúa 1987, 24–25)

I speak with my youngest daughter. I remind her to imagine roots growing out of her small broad feet to ground into mother earth. I remind her to imagine starlight flowing into the night sky to connect with the ancestors, our guides, to cosmic mother, to hug her mermaid an...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Speaking from the Silence(d)
• Chapter 1: Untamable Women
• Chapter 2: Silence
• Part II: Becoming Woman
• Chapter 3: Knowing (Our)Selves
• Chapter 4: Our Serpents’ Tongues
• Chapter 5: Sacred Erotics
• Part III: The Black Mothers
• Chapter 6: The Storyteller-Medicine Woman
• Chapter 7: The Guardian-Gardener
• Chapter 8: The Priestess-Shamanka
• Part IV: Homecoming
• Chapter 9: Liminal Subjects
• Chapter 10: For You
• Notes
• References
• About the Author