Fighting Amnesia as a Guerilla Activity: Poetics for a New Mode of Being Human

In the ethno-poetics and performance of the shaman, my people, the Indians, did not split the artistic from the functional, the sacred from the secular, art from everyday lift. The religious, social and aesthetic purposes of art were all intertwined. Before the Conquest, poets gathered to play music, dance, sing and read poetry in open-air places around the Xochicuahuitl, el Arbol Florido, Tree-in-Flower. (The Coaxihuitl or morning glory is called the snake plant and its seeds, known as ololiuhqui, are hallucinogenic.) The ability of story (prose and poetry) to transform the storyteller and the listener into something or someone else is shamanistic. The writer, as shape-changer, is a nahual, a shaman. --Gloria Anzaldua (1987/1999, 88) I do mean guerilla--in the battlefield sense. (1) Guerilla warfare is a familiar topic of study in historical sociology. Movements are studied in South and Central America, South East Asia, Africa, and Afro-Asia (known as the Middle East)--all places where political, economic and military repression occurs. The terms guerilla and war, however, are rarely used in reference to goings on inside the political borders of the "United States." Greg Thomas argues, "[d]espite its living history of genocide, slavery and endemic state repression, which is to say, its continued definition as a settler-colony and slave state, the 'United States of America' is rarely construed as a 'war zone' by Western Academics." However, the wars in North America, are central to the ability of the U.S. to conduct wars elsewhere. Thomas adds, "even these police actions are no less avoided by 'intellectuals' who prefer to focus on other, internecine conflicts, out-of-context, when that context is contemporary imperialism spearheaded by a neo-slaver and neo-colonialism that is synonymous with the 'U.S.A.,' nonetheless" (forthcoming: 3-4). "Amerikkka," as named by Assata Shakur, needs to be acknowledged as the war zone that it truly is--today. Simultaneously, sociologists must shake off their middle-class academic perspective concerning where, how, and upon whose bodies the battles are fought (17). War goes far beyond one-dimensional discussions of military tactics or the election of popular political candidates. As Thomas writes, "resistance, rebellion and revolution are to be had in matters of sex or eroticism, creative arts, spirit, styles of dress, speech or language as well as guerilla struggle in arms, especially when had among the masses" (2004, my emphasis). One of my favorite essays by Anzaldua, well-cited at this conference, is "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" (1999). In between a recount of a trip to her dentist where he remarks, "We are going to have to control your tongue," whereby Anzaldua describes the visit with vivid detail, complete with the stench of draining puss and "wads of cotton, pushing back the drills, [and] the long thin needles" and her dentist fighting against her tongue that is persistently in the way, and a story about her being punished for speaking Spanish at recess, she quotes Ray Gywn Smith, who said, "Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?" (75). Anzaldua's dentist had proclaimed, "I've never seen anything as strong or as stubborn" (75). I don't think he knew what he was up against. This war in defense of the human tongue is only getting warmed up. I would like to pay tribute to Anzaldua at this conference dedicated to her by engaging the subject of "ethno-poetics" and her insistence on the potential for the poem to retaliate in warrior fashion against the violent robbing of peoples' tongues (and, hence, their culture), and in doing so, to invent what Sylvia Wynter calls a new mode of being human (1984; 1991; 2000). That this restitution and thereby re-invention is not only possible but necessary through poetry is one of Anzaldua's foundational premises. Why this message would be of significance to sociologists interested in human rights is the question subject I wish to address. …