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Part 1, Section 5: How to Tame a Wild Tongue
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Borderlands / La Frontera, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Borders, Hybridity, and Identity
History and the U.S.-Mexico Relationship
Chicana Feminism
Language, Storytelling, and Ritual
Summary
Analysis
Anzaldúa starts this section with a Mexican proverb: “Out of poverty, poetry; / out of suffering, song.” As a child, Anzaldúa loved reading with a flashlight in bed. The adults in her family—like many Mexicans—were master storytellers, and learned to make up stories for her sister, which eventually she started writing down.
The proverb and Anzaldúa’s memories both capture how literature can capture the voices of a disempowered people, as part of a response to oppression. Notably, Anzaldúa’s concept of literature is grounded above all in oral storytelling—which was the dominant form of literature for human history, and still is in many parts of the world. This foreshadows her coming discussion of the difference between Western and Indigenous assumptions about the structure and function of literary texts.
Themes
Invoking Art. Native shamanic storytelling traditions merge art’s “religious, social and aesthetic purposes.” They understand that stories transform the people who tell and witness them. These traditions have inspired Anzaldúa’s approach to narrative in this book, whose core ideas and structural patterns she sees clearly. But she also recognizes that each story she tells in the book is like “a crazy dance” with “a mind of its own,” which cannot be reduced to these ideas and patterns.
Indigenous oral narrative traditions articulate and transmit the community’s collective beliefs (religion), history and power hierarchy (social), and values (aesthetic). Anzaldúa turns to such traditions for the same reason she promotes Indigenous deities and approaches to gender: she thinks they are more compatible with the society she hopes to build because they are better at accommodating hybridity and contradiction. Of course, these traditions are also simply more relevant to her community’s history and reality.
Themes
Before she writes, Anzaldúa always performs a ritual involving incense, corn, candles, and water. Once immersed in her writing, she can go for hours at a time, or even all day. Whereas western culture views stories as inert texts whose beauty depends on their internal structure and meaning, Anzaldúa sees stories as living vessels for the energies of the people and spiritual powers in them. When performed, read, or “enacted,” her stories use those energies to shape the real world.
For Anzaldúa, literature is both a ritual form and the product of a ritual. Indeed, one way of viewing her work is as the trace that her Coatlicue states leave behind, a record of the experiences that enable her to grow and shape herself. In turn, reading her work means not just appreciating her writerly talent and moving experiences from a distance, but instead ritually putting oneself in her place, living through her experience, and deriving power and knowledge from the process.
Themes
In western museums, where the person witnessing the art is a passive viewer rather than an active participant, non-Western art loses “the presence of power invoked through performance ritual.” Yet westerners still collect non-western art and copy its aesthetic elements, which Anzaldúa views as an attempt to compensate for their lack of “spiritual roots”—particularly their preference for exploiting the earth instead of living in harmony with it. She suggests that Americans should “root ourselves in the mythological soil and soul of this continent” by respectfully learning from native arts and cultures.
Again, Anzaldúa views reading as the ritual activity of immersing oneself in a text, then allowing it to strike and transform the self. This contrasts with the Western intellectual mode that she criticizes here, which involves analyzing literature from a distance and trying to arrive at a complete or correct interpretation of it. As a result, her literary priorities are fundamentally different—for instance, in her poetry, she prefers to offer her readers powerful, memorable images rather than elegant plotlines or internally-consistent conclusions about the world. This is important to keep in mind when reading the second half of her book.
Themes
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Ni cuicani: I, the Singer. The Aztecs used writing in black and red ink (called “tlilli” and “tlapalli”) to communicate between our world, the spirit world above, and the underworld below. Anzaldúa compares writing poetry to pumping water out of a well. Images are “bridges” connecting our feelings and our conscious awareness, she argues; we think in metaphors first and words only later.
After defending Indigenous approaches to literature as a ritual form, Anzaldúa now turns to one specific tradition that she finds particularly salient for Chicana/o writers and artists. Tlilli and tlapalli use the writing ritual to produce images that bring us into contact with the other worlds of Aztec cosmology—to keep the universe in harmony.
Themes
The Shamanic State. Anzaldúa enters a kind of “trance” when she lets stories play themselves out in her mind. When she writes them down, she often has to reconstruct traumatic experiences—but also give them meaning. To achieve this trance state, she plugs her ears, covers her eyes, and lies down. Sometimes, it lasts hours. It initially feels like watching a movie in the theater, until she feels she is becoming part of the drama itself. Eventually, she must escape the story to write it down. She describes these stories, which are usually about metamorphosis, as “the myths I want to become.” They enable her to overcome her fears and link the different words within her.
The trance state Anzaldúa describes here is closely related to the Coatlicue state she outlined in her fourth essay. Namely, both involve deliberately confronting painful tensions that are buried deep within the unconscious, but both help resolve those tensions by doing so. The Coatlicue state does so by evolving the self and this shamanic state does so through the writing it yields. Of course, these two goals are deeply connected: Anzaldúa suggests, implicitly but unmistakably, that writing is a powerful technique for personal growth.
Themes
Writing Is a Sensuous Act. Anzaldúa describes feeling her body while she lies in bed and watches images flutter around her room. In her hunger to create, she picks out certain images to use, and then she writes, which is like turning her blood into red ink, or squeezing the voice out of her own throat.
Anzaldúa’s description of her writing process contrasts spectacularly with the conventional Western image of a writer at their desk, slowly planning out and crafting a narrative through trial and error. In contrast, writing is “sensuous” for Anzaldúa because it centers on images, feelings, and psychic resonances. While these originate from within the self, Anzaldúa experiences them from the outside—much like the way she described looking at herself in the mirror in her essay on the Coatlicue state.
Themes
Something to Do with the Dark. After quoting the proverb “quien canta, sus males espanta”—one who sings dispels their own sorrows—Anzaldúa describes a toad emerging from her brain, sapping her energy and leaving her like a dried snakeskin that blows lazily across the landscape. She implores the “musa bruja” (witch-muse) to banish her demons, then to stop breaking apart her body apart and using her innards to sew her words together.
All three of these resonant images—the proverb, the toad, and the musa bruja—capture the sense in which writing feels like pulling something foreign out of the self. Yet Anzaldúa also suggests that there is an element of healing in discovering and banishing the otherworldly elements that live within us (like animal spirits, forgotten deities, and so on).
Themes
Anzaldúa describes the anxiety she feels when she has to look deep into herself to write. This “psychic unrest” is a special kind of Borderlands. Anzaldúa compares it to being pricked by a cactus needle that keeps working its way deeper and deeper into the flesh. To remove it, she has to dig down into her skin until she reaches the bottom; the pain always gets worse before it gets better. She quotes a famous old Náhuatl verse about using song to scatter one’s flowers so that one does not die.
If writing involves extricating something from the self in order to give it a separate existence, then it provokes “psychic unrest” because it requires confronting, blurring, and then redefining the borders between the conscious/unconscious and the self/other. Again, this is closely related to the Coatlicue state—and the experience of living in the Borderlands prepares people like Anzaldúa for both.
Themes
Anzaldúa must believe in her “creative self” to write, but writing is also the way she creates and defines that self. The beauty and mystery of Borderlands life comes from accepting this contradiction, this Coatlicue state. Writing means subjecting the self to constant transformation. Anzaldúa compares this to constantly being pregnant, or having images and words fight a battle in her body, trying to commandeer her mouth. These Coatlicue states mark moments of personal and collective transition, and by surrendering to them, Anzaldúa becomes “an agent of transformation” who can reshape not just herself but her world. Writing is her raison d'être, but she lives with it like a victim offering daily blood sacrifices to a vampire—or the Aztecs.
Anzaldúa summarizes the contradictory psychic dimension of writing: it resolves tension into a single voice, enabling healing through suffering and collective transformation through personal sacrifice. She explicitly connects this to the Coatlicue state, as both depend on experiencing the self as a subject (agent of transformation) and object (thing to be transformed) at the same time. Holding these two contradictory perspectives at the same time is the key to taking charge over our own selves, lives, and communities.
Themes
