Spirit, Culture, Sex: Elements of the Creative Process in Anzaldúa’s Poetry

Abstract

Crossings from poetry to theory, from lesbian-feminist to queer, are among the many borderlands Gloria Anzaldúa inhabits. As with most dichotomies, she defies them. (“Deconstruct, construct,” she writes in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza [104].) Yet, while many critics have commented on Anzaldúa’s “poetic” prose, Borderlands has been treated almost exclusively as a work of prose theory, virtually as though the second half of the book—“Un Agitado Viento/Ehécatl, The Wind,” 102 pages comprising thirty-six poems—did not exist.

Not so long ago, in a community very close by, lesbians spoke poetry. We gathered in throngs to hear Judy Grahn and Pat Parker electrify crowds as women talked to death and refused to be partners in womanslaughter. Yellow Woman spoke the words of a woman who breathes fire—a transcendental etude during periods of stress, building bridges to our own power. Poetry was Not a Luxury. ¹

So what happened?

“Women’s culture” imploded. Presses vanished, bookstores closed their doors, literary journals disappeared. AIDS emerged, and with it a virulent new strain of homophobia. We became queer, and queer was theorized and commodified more forcefully than it was lyricized.