Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Response to 9/11

Abstract

Abstract “Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Gloria Anzaldúa’s response to 9/11” examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s experimental dissertation—a collection of essays, poetry, and art—that she intermittently edited until her untimely passing in 2004. Published and edited in 2015 with annotations by multicultural scholar, AnaLouise Keating, Anzaldúa’s final text has not received its fair share of scholarly attention, as most is paid to Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). This article focuses specifically on the first chapter from Luz en lo Oscuro titled “Let us be the healing of the wound,” which responds directly to the events of 9/11. Anzaldúa’s postnational imaginary, her reflection on Azteca goddesses, and the bilingual nature of her writing set the essay radically apart from the canon of post-9/11 literature in English. Anzaldúa’s post-structuralist philosophy of conocimiento—“the potential of knowing within, an awareness and intelligence not grasped by logical thought” (117)—rejects the theory that atrocity is “beyond words,” and instead “voices” critiques and complaints that embrace the value of shared vulnerability. “Let us be the healing of the wound,” therefore, should also be read in light of Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), which similarly situates the attacks of 9/11 not in relationship to silencing (via trauma theory) but to the historical precarity of excluded populations in a global community—populations living often in national borderland contexts with long-standing legacies of colonialism and slavery that render their lives both precarious and disposable. As this article indicates, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro deserves more scholarly attention as Anzaldúa’s last work and also as an important text in the post-9/11 canon.