[-empyre-] Remembering the white rainbow

Lissette Olivares liolivares at fulbrightmail.org
Tue Nov 12 13:28:37 AEDT 2019


The sky was dark, illuminated only by yellow orange artificial light - snow and wind pierced through the air as my entire world threatened to fall apart on January 11th 2011, as mi amorcito Luk Kahlo underwent another surgery to try to save his life.  It was that night, as we awaited a call from his surgeon, that the white rainbow came.  In that spiral of snow and bitter cold, in the middle of NYC’s samsara, we looked at each other and death did not exist, and for a moment, we felt calm, and then exuberant.

It is no coincidence that on November 11th, 2019, almost eight years later, we begin an incantatory series of conversations to reconnect with the enchantment of Terra as we dare death again in the midst of intense global wounding that is neither new, nor nearly at its endpoint yet.

As I attempt to seduce you into this conversation I know that you are probably reeling from the bad news, the sadness, the suffering, which is ubiquitous everywhere, and maybe even in your own body. We hurt. We are taking care of others in pain. For me, each week the amount of time I have to work with seems to spiral further out of control, to be able to care not only for those I love, but also to offer the basic care I need for my own body. Nonetheless I resist wearing a watch to manage my time because I cannot help but trace its functionality back to the dawn of capitalism and affiliate its technological complicity in the invention and management of wage labor.

It seems to me that capital and accumulation have bewitched us for at least five hundred years. I will never forget the fervor with which Peter Lamborn Wilson insisted that capitalism is evil, an evil possession, and that to try to approach it rationally would never allow us to exorcise its grip over our lives. Undoubtedly the insatiable hunger and drive for gold and silver and surplus and power and superiority and now metadata has cast its curse upon earth beings relentlessly. It is worthwhile to remember Marx and his theorization of commodity fetishism, where he reveals how strange the commodity is, with its “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”

Every time I am searching for a way to understand how to heal from colonial wounding, how to mobilize collectively while appreciating the pluralities each of us carries within and beyond, I turn to Gloria Anzaldúa. I am grateful to Katie King for giving me the trace to Anzaldúa’s theorizations of nepantla and nepantlera, Náhuatl terms that Anzaldúa activates for elaborating what she calls a new mestiza consciousness.

“Nepantla is the Náhuatl word for an in-between state, that uncertain terrain one crosses when moving from one place to another, when changing from one class, race, or sexual position to another, when traveling from the present identity into a new identity.” (Anzaldúa 2009, 180) *[1]

Mariana Ortega offers a nuanced study of the polysemy of Nepantla in Anzaldúa’s extensive work and argues that it is the tolerance for ambiguity and contradictions which Anzaldúa finds absolutely necessary for the new mestiza’s possibility of transformation and resistance. (Ortega 2016, 27) By calling out to Nepantla I also attempt to identify the middle world within each of us, the contradictions and complementarities that spin together from Coatlicue’s cosmic wind, breathing change and transformation through our bodies. After reading about this I am convinced that yesterday it was Coatlicue’s’ winds that anointed me with the new name I have been seeking, Ciclón, a windy storm that emerges from the naga’s loop.

Let us then be intoxicated with Anzaldúa and practice from the middle world, what the jhankris of Nepal call Guru Gom, as I invite you to collectively naguahl, to shapeshift, with this group as we share methodologies.

In the midst of the extractive pain and in search of the magic, which we cannot forget also abounds on Terra, I feel the need to call upon fellow practitioners who are devoted to technologies of consciousness, who will help us to decolonize mind and body with their own customized toolkits. More than just a conversation, I am confident that we will be mobilizing our shared breath, our prana, in an effort to heal one another, that we will join forces and leave a haunting on this technological platform.

[1] Cited in Mariana Ortega in In Between: Latina, Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self, NY: SUNY Press, 2016, pg 27.



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