Translated by Coatlicue: Anzaldúa’s Shadow-Beast and the Bridging of Duality
Gabriel Hartley, Ohio University
Projections change the world into the replica of one's own unknown face.
— Carl Jung, Aion
Abre los ojos, North America, open your eyes, look at your shadow, and listen to
your soul.
— Gloria Anzaldúa, “Let Us Be the Healing of the Wound”
One of Anzaldúa’s primary contributions to translation practice is her transformation of
psychoanalytic theories of the Shadow in her exploration of the mechanisms of
internalized colonization—the ways in which oppressed groups internalize the Shadow
projections of the dominant groups. In other words, she explores the ways in which we
both project onto others and introject the projections of others into our own psyche. To
project is to throw (jacere) forward or outward, to externalize an inner part of oneself,
whereas to introject is to throw or draw inward, to absorb or swallow the
characterizations made by others. We usually speak of identification in this context in
that we identify with the opinions about ourselves that are expressed (ex-press, to push
out) by others, even when under certain circumstances those opinions about us are
negative. Anzaldúa’s depiction of the Shadow-Beast shows these mechanisms of
throwing out (projection), throwing in (introjection), throwing up or vomiting (abjection),
and throwing back or away (rejection). My argument ultimately is that as Anzaldúa
translates psychoanalytic theories of the Shadow (Jung and Kristeva) into the terms of her
own shamanic experience (being swallowed up by Coatlicue), she herself and her willing
Shadow / 2
readers are translated into a stage of higher consciousness that allows for the bridging of
the oppressive dualities we confront in this moment of late patriarchal colonialism. As
Anzaldúa’s embrace of the Shadow-Beast develops from Borderlands to her later essays
(especially “now let us shift” and “Let Us Be the Healing of the Wound”), her own
transformation provides her (and us) with a key for transpersonal shifts in planetary
consciousness—once we let ourselves “be the healing of the wound.”
The Challenge of the Shadow-Beast
A common reading of Gloria Anzaldúa’s sense of the Shadow-Beast is to see it as
women’s impulse to rebel against patriarchal authority and limitation. Erika AignerVaroz, for example, writes, “Anzaldúa rebels against the patriarchal constructions of
power with her Shadow-beast, defying what culture, religion, and the conscious mind
have labeled as taboo” (Aigner-Varoz 59). True, Anzaldúa appears to confirm this
reading, having herself written “There is a rebel in me—the Shadow Beast. It is a part of
me that refuses to take orders from outside authorities” (Borderlands 38). Chapter Two of
Borderlands/La frontera, in which this passage appears, is after all entitled “Movimientos
de rebeldía y las culturas que traicionan,” rebellious movements and cultures that betray.
Sonia Saldívar-Hull picks up on this Shadow-Rebel notion as well, placing it into a
biographical context:
Dogmatic rules and assumptions prescribed Anzaldúa’s life as a child and
young woman in Texas, but now she understands that “rules” are manmade and can be unmade with feminist logic. She offers specific examples
of how she was restricted even from a life of the mind and recounts her
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rebellious resistance to incorporation by the family and community
customs. Her testimonio relates the limitations placed on many subaltern
women under the rule of fathers and male-identified mothers. The feminist
rebel in her is the Shadow-Beast, “a part of me that refuses to take orders
from outside authorities” [. . .] . The Shadow Beast emerges as the part of
women that frighten men and causes them to try to control and devalue
female culture. (Saldívar-Hull 4-5)
According to this reading, the Shadow-Beast is the feminist rebel inside women that
frightens men. The authoritarian practices of patriarchy, then, are seen as the defensive
response of men to the inner strength of women. The rebellious nature of the ShadowBeast, by extension, provides women with a source of female strength, a ready-made
weapon against patriarchy.
Despite Anzaldúa’s own rebel statement, nevertheless, for her the Shadow-Beast
is not simply a weapon against oppression but more importantly a problem for the self
(personal and collective). I want to explore the function of the Shadow-Beast in
Anzaldúa’s conceptualization as a tool of oppression and internalized colonization. If we
read Anzaldúa’s statement on the rebel nature of the Shadow-Beast in its context, we will
see that the situation is much more complex than the simple Shadow-Rebel analogy
allows for. After bringing up the Shadow-Rebel who refuses the commands of outside
orders, Anzaldúa adds: “It refuses to take orders from my conscious will, it threatens the
sovereignty of my rulership. It is that part of me that hates constraints of any kind, even
those self-imposed. At the least hint of limitations on my time or space by others, it kicks
out with both feet. Bolts” (Borderlands 38). This Shadow rebels not only against external
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authority but against all authority, especially that of the self. The internal rebel, then, is a
threat to the domesticated comfort and reliability of the everyday self-consciousness of
the ego.
One critic to perceive this troublesome side of the Shadow-Beast is Emma Pérez,
who points out its haunting nature and its relationship to the equally troubling Coatlicue
state. The Coatlicue state, Pérez argues, “is that crucial time when we’re haunted by the
shadow beast, our inner selves, that part that won’t let us rest, that part that says, you’re
never going to meet the ideal expected of you. I call my own shadow beast that egodriven, maniacal, Eurocentric minded part of me immersed in inner battle” (Pérez 5). The
critical addition here to the Shadow-Rebel motif, beyond pointing out its troubling,
haunting nature, is the recognition that women of color are often driven to internalize the
Shadow of the Eurocentric patriarch, to perceive its denunciatory and devaluing voice as
one’s own inner demons.
So yes, the Shadow-Beast seen by men in women does sometimes rebel against
patriarchal domination. But as we shall see further, this anti-patriarchal figure is
originally the Beast internal to men themselves—one that men then project onto women.
So ironically, the anti-patriarch that men fear inside women is nothing but the projection
of their own inner Shadow-Beast, that internal rebel (challenging their own definitions
and rituals of masculinity) that men themselves must externalize and see as the other’s
Shadow, that which they need to externalize.
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Jung’s Shadow
As Anzaldúa points out in her discussion of the ways institutionalized religions repress
the power of women, she gets the notion of the Shadow from Carl Jung—“what Jung
calls the Shadow, the unsavory aspects of ourselves” (Borderlands 59). Jung’s concept of
the Shadow refers to a creature of the unconscious whose power and ferocity (and
rebelliousness) arise from its repressed condition: “How else could it have occurred to
man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a
bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had
the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the
invisible and unknowable unconscious?” (Archetypes187). Being incapable of accepting
our own dangerous and destructive inner side, we project these qualities onto some
external entity. Such is the case, for example, with sexism, heterosexism, racism, and
classism, in which an other figure functions as the scape-goat, the embodiment of our
own internal destructiveness—a point brought home to Jung all the more by the frenzy of
fascist racism organized by Hitler:
The change of character brought about by the uprush of collective forces is
amazing. A gentle and reasonable being can be transformed into a maniac
or a savage beast. One is always inclined to lay the blame on external
circumstances, but nothing could explode in us if it had not been there. As
a matter of fact, we are constantly living on the edge of a volcano, and
there is, so far as we know, no way of protecting ourselves from a possible
outburst that will destroy everybody within reach. (CW 11: 25)
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In a characteristic moment of self-revelation Anzaldúa acknowledges her own
explosiveness: “Debajo de mi humillada mirada está una cara insolente lista para
explotar” [“Beneath my humbled gaze is an insolent face ready to explode”]
(Borderlands 37).
Our repression of such internal explosiveness must find expression, nevertheless,
and so we project those inner qualities of our own onto others: “A man who is
unconscious of himself,” Jung writes, “acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition
fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in
himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbour” (Alchemical
Studies
335).
Conventional ethical systems depend on such projection and externalization in
order to maintain community identity and cohesion as opposed to the stigmatized “evil”
other. A broader, more open ethics is possible, however, if one can sustain the effort and
survive the inner conflict required in order to embrace our projections. “If a man is
endowed with an ethical sense,” Jung explains, “and is convinced of the sanctity of
ethical values, he is on the surest road to a conflict of duty. And although this looks
desperately like a moral catastrophe, it alone makes possible a higher differentiation of
ethics and a broadening of consciousness. A conflict of duty forces us to examine our
conscience and thereby to discover the shadow” (CW 18: 17).
When we view the Shadow in terms of Jung’s discussion of the archetype of the
self in his book Aion, we see clearly how it is positioned in relation to consciousness and
unconsciousness. For the main issue under discussion in Aion is that of the increasing
development of consciousness from out of unconsciousness through the apprehension of
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and struggle with crucial oppositions. As Jung writes towards the close of that book, the
“self is a complexio oppositorum precisely because there can be no reality without
polarity” (Aion 267). The Shadow prods us onto the path of conscious development
through the unity-in-difference that Jung refers to as individuation. In order for the Ego to
be integrated into the Self, the ego-consciousness must confront and integrate the
personal and collective archetypes that function as way-stations on the path to
individuation (or psychic unity), namely 1., the Shadow; 2., the Anima and Animus; and
finally 3., the Self. In other words, the integration of the Shadow archetype into the egoconsciousness is an early stage of total psychic integration culminating in the archetype
of the Self.
As individuals, each one of us must strive to become conscious of our Shadow in
order to avoid unconscious collisions with Shadow elements. But this task is by no means
simple, for to become conscious of the Shadow “involves recognizing the dark aspects of
the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of selfknowledge” (Aion ¶ 14). So long as we are unconscious of our Shadow, we are chained to
our illusions and projections onto the world. In order to avoid recognition of our Shadow
side, we project all that we refuse to accept about ourselves onto people, things, and
conditions presumably outside ourselves. In other words, “Projections change the world
into the replica of one’s own unknown face” (Aion ¶ 17). The Antichrist, in these terms,
is simply the projection of those aspects of the whole that Christians prefer not to
associate with the Christ or, ultimately, with themselves. The Jungian prescription,
however, demands that Christians integrate the Antichrist into the Self if they are to
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achieve psychic unity. This understanding of personal and collective Shadow projection,
as we will see, lies at the heart of Anzaldúa’s psychological journey.
From Projection to Introjection—Internalizing Oppression
In terms of internalized racism, it is the Anglo, the Gringo, the euroamerican who
projects his Shadow onto and into the Chicano-Mestizo-Indian. Not being able to cope
with his own acts of aggression—expropriation and genocide—the white man (gendered
as masculine according to the patriarchal inflection of conquest since Cortés) abjects his
own filth outward, embodied as the “dirty” Mexican or Indian: “The Anglo, feeling
inadequate and inferior and powerless, displaces or transfers these feelings to the Chicano
by shaming him” (105). As a result, feeling inadequate when in the presence of Anglos,
(non-U. S.) Latinos, and Native Americans, the Chicano suffers from an “excessive
compensatory hubris [. . . that] overlays a deep sense of racial shame.”
This is compounded when the Mestizo or Indian is a woman:
The worst kind of betrayal lies in making us believe that the Indian
woman in us is the betrayer. We, indias y mestizas, police the Indian in us,
brutalize and condemn her. Male culture has done a good job on us. Son
las costumbres que traicionan. La india en mí es la sombra: La Chingada,
Tlazolteotl, Coatlicue. Son ellas que oyemos lamentando a sus hijas
perdidas. [It is our customs that betray. The Indian woman in me is my
shadow: the fucked (Malinche), Tlazolteotl, Coatlicue. It is they whom we
hear lamenting after their lost daughters.] (Borderlands 44)
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Interestingly, Anzaldúa perhaps unintentionally complicates her identification with the
native woman—presumably seen as herself but in fact seen as within herself—when she
labels the india “in” her as her sombra, her shadow. Indigeneity is here conflated (and
thereby objectified and held apart as a separate being) with the racist and patriarchal
caricaturizations of the mythologized native female figures listed above. They are
separate enough from her own conscious being to be invoked as an other, someone like
her but therefore not her:
Las invoco diosas mías, ustedes las indias
sumergidas en mi carne que son mis sombras.
Ustedes que persisten mudas en sus cuevas.
Ustedes Señores que ahora, como yo,
están en disgracia.
[I invoke my goddesses,
submerged in my flesh
you Indian women who are my shadows.
You who persist mute in your caves.
You who now, like me,
are in disgrace.]
(Borderlands 53)
The Shadow and Abjection
In addition to her Jungian roots, Anzaldúa also displays a kinship with another
psychoanalytic system and symbology, Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection. The abject,
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according to Kristeva, is a carry-over from the maternal pre-oedipal, pre-Symbolic stage
in which the infant cannot yet successfully and completely distinguish between self and
mother. Even after entry into the Symbolic, the abject resurfaces and must be held at bay
in order to prevent the breakdown of meaning. The abject threatens to suck the self back
into the archaic presymbolic maternal relationship that would to destroy the subject by
breaking down the clear borders between sense and nonsense, self and (m)other. “The
abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to the I. If the object,
however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for
meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to
it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws
me toward the place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 1-2).
The abject scapegoat becomes the figure most applicable to the Shadow logic that
Anzaldúa identifies. “La mestiza has gone from being the sacrificial goat,” Anzaldúa
claims, “to becoming the officiating priestess at the crossroads” (102). For Anzaldúa,
however, this abject condition becomes a source of growth, helps the abjected one
develop a tolerance for ambiguity, and welcome the psychic growth that can result from
the terrifying encounter with Coatlícue, the embodiment of multiple, fused identities.
The age-old condemnation of female power as witchraft exhibits the fear and
animosity males (as institutionalized in mainstream religions) feel when confronted by
the projections of their own inner insubordinate and “animal” desires. Anzaldúa writes:
Humans fear the supernatural, both the undivine (the animal impulses such
as sexuality, the unconscious, the unknown, the alien) and the divine (the
superhuman, the god in us). The female, by virtue of creating entities of
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flesh and blood in her stomach (she bleeds every month but does not die),
by virtue of being in tune with nature’s cycles, is feared. Because,
according to Christianity and most other major religions, woman is carnal,
animal, and closer to the undivine, she must be protected. Protected from
herself. Woman is the stranger, the other. She is man’s nightmarish pieces,
his Shadow-Beast. The sight of her sends him into a frenzy of anger and
fear. (Borderlands 39)
Rejection: Gringo, Accept Your Doppelganger!
In the “Somos una gente” section of Chapter Seven, Anzaldúa asks that white society
recognize and embrace its shadow: Chicanos and other minority groups. “Gringo,”
Anzaldúa calls out, “accept the doppelganger in your psyche. By taking back your
collective shadow the intracultural split will heal” (Borderlands 107-8). In short, white
society must carry out a complicated task of self-healing through self-recognition. That
recognition demands that this society 1. acknowledge the historical and current wrongs it
has perpetrated on its darker self, 2. acknowledge that these wrongs grow out of its own
self-splitting into good and evil elements, 3. recognize that it has projected its own inner
demons onto its racialized other, 4. recognize that it has repressed this projection, 5. state
that its racist contempt for its other grows out of fear, 6. admit that Mexico—the
doppelganger of the Gringo psyche—is its own shadow, 7. take back its shadow,
reintegrate its psyche, and finally 8. tell Chicanos and all other minorities what they can
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do for white society in its act of self-healing. Only then, through the reciprocal
recognition of each other’s needs, can the intracultural split be healed—the United States
here positioned as one culture self-divided into separate racial societies.
This is the Jungian prescription. The shadow of white society has manifested
itself in the Chicano, the dejected embodiment of white culture’s internal contradictions.
The Chicana such as Anzaldúa—having done the work of confronting, recognizing, and
coming to terms with her own Shadow—now asks the same from white society if there is
ever to be a social healing. But as Jung points out, this is hard and frightening work:
If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his
projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick
shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts.
He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say
that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against.
He lives in the "House of the Gathering." Such a man knows that whatever
is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his
own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded
in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social
problems of our day. (CW 11, p. 140)
In this extended passage Anzaldúa provides her own example of just such a brave
individual:
We’re afraid of being abandoned by the mother, the culture, la Raza, for
being unacceptable, faulty, damaged. Most of us unconsciously believe,
that
if
we
reveal
this
unacceptable
aspect
of
the
self
our
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mother/culture/race will totally reject us. To avoid rejection, some of us
conform to the values of the culture, push the unacceptable parts into the
shadows. Which leaves only one fear—that we will be found out and that
the Shadow-Beast will break out of its cage. Some of us take another
route. We try to make ourselves conscious of the Shadow-Beast, stare at
the sexual lust and lust for power and destruction we see on its face,
discern among its features the undershadow that the reigning order of
heterosexual males project on our Beast. Yet still others of us take it
another step: we try to waken the Shadow-Beast inside us. Not many jump
at the chance to confront the Shadow-Beast in the mirror without flinching
at her lidless serpent eyes, her cold clammy moist hand dragging us
underground, fangs bared and hissing. How does one put feathers on this
particular serpent? But a few of us have been lucky—on the face of the
Shadow-Beast we have seen not lust but tenderness; on its face we have
uncovered the lie. (Borderlands 42)
And the key to discovery that core of bravery in oneself comes from what Anzaldúa calls
the Coatlicue State.
Coatlícue: Confronting the Shadow-Beast
Much of Borderlands is devoted to outlining this Coatlicue State. In Jungian-shamanic
fashion the Coatlicue state, as “a prelude to crossing” (70), stages a confrontation with
the Shadow-Beast. The abject figure, “the mutant stoned out of the herd” (65), is afraid to
look within, afraid of what she’ll find there. Shamed, abnormal, alien, the young
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Anzaldúa’s psyche is paid many a visit by Coatlicue, swallowed by the serpent. “The
Coatlicue is being in the dark night of the soul, hiding oneself in the dark cave, reaching
the bottom” (“Coming into Play” 13).
Her self-deprecation is the internalized mirror of social abuse. She is marked by la
Rajadura, the slit of her being, the slice of her psyche into duality, which is the result of
the hateful gaze of hegemonic power (sexist, homophobic, racist): “Her soft belly
exposed to the sharp eyes of everyone; they see, they see. Their eyes penetrate her; they
slit her from head to belly. Rajada” (65). When the frenetic repetition of distracting
activity breaks down under the weight of shame, she becomes paralyzed, alone: “Alone
in the presence in the room. Who? Me, my psyche, the Shadow-Beast?” (66).
While the Shadow-Beast marks the internalization of social abjection, Anzaldúa’s
main point is that it also points the way out of and beyond social oppression and
fragmentation. The letting go into the dismembering of self that characterizes one
moment of the Coatlícue state is simply the prelude to the imaginative reintegration of
that self, making soul, or—as Anzaldúa puts it elsewhere—putting Coyolxauhqui back
together (“Putting Coyolxauhqui Back Together”). The Coatlicue state enacts a crossing
over to a reunited self, a bridging of la rajadura resulting in a new imaginative fusion of
conscious and unconscious selves, of light and dark, of quotidian self and shadow. As
such, the Coatlicue State for Anzaldúa is a process of “making soul.” It is a necessary
process in our psycho-spiritual development. Compulsive repetition comes to a halt in
states of depression, a need to hibernate, to cut oneself off from the frenetic social
activity that normally keeps the self distracted.
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We need Coatlicue to slow us up so that the psyche can assimilate
previous experiences and process the changes. If we don’t take the time,
she’ll lay us low with an illness, forcing us to “rest.” . . . Those activities
or Coatlicue states which disrupt the smooth flow (complacency) of life
are exactly what propel the soul to do its work: make soul, increase
consciousness of itself. (68)
As she points out in a footnote (Borderlands 118, n. 6), Anzaldúa gets this notion of
making soul from the post-Jungian writer James Hillman. In Re-Visioning Psychology,
the book Anzaldúa refers to, Hillman writes:
Not I personify, but the anima personifies me, or soul-makes herself
through me, giving my life her sense—her intense daydream is my “meness”; and “I,” a psychic vessel whose existence is a psychic metaphor, an
“as-if being,” in which every single belief is a literalism except the belief
of soul whose faith posits me and makes me possible as a personification
of psyche. (Hillman 51)
Hopefully, the Coatlicue State will initiate the following stages: slowing us up (in
which the psyche can assimilates previous experiences and processes the changes) (68);
confrontation (in which Coatlicue “opens and swallows us, plunging us into the
underworld where the soul resides, allowing us to dwell in darkness”) (68); germination
(in which the ego is “allowed to rest and recuperate, to withdraw into the ‘underworld’”)
(70); crossing over (during which our imagination provides us with a totalizing process
that counters the paralysis of conscious fragmentation, allowing us to recognize that our
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Shadow is a critical part of our ultimate being and that major human conflicts derive from
the rejection [and then projection] of that Shadow) (72-73); and ultimately a state of
reunification (coming out of Coatlicue with a new awareness and sense of the
interconnectedness of all things beneath the superficial fragmentation of modern
culture—“Completa”) (73). The resulting condition, Anzaldúa claims in Borderlands, is
Mestiza Consciousness:
The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object
duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the
images in her work how duality is transcended. The answer to the problem
between the white race and the colored, between males and females, lies in
healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our
culture, our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic
thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of
a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of
rape, of violence, of war. (102)
Anzaldúa states that mestiza consciousness is characterized by, among other things, a
tolerance for ambiguity which otherwise feel like “floundering in uncharted seas” when
the “borders and walls that are supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out are entrenched
habits and patterns of behavior; these habits and patterns are the enemy within. Rigidity
means death” (101). When rigidity means death, the answer to the ambiguous swamping
of the self, then, is not the instinctive reflex towards rigidly upholding habitual borders
but its opposite: a flexibility which allows the psyche to stretch “horizontally and
vertically.” La mestiza must shift away from “convergent thinking, analytical reasoning
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that tends to use rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent
thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more
whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes.” Indeed, “nothing is thrust out,
the good, the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned.” But this
ambivalence is a temporary moment in a larger integrative process: “Not only does she
sustain contradictions, she turns the ambiguities into something else.” This something
else is the third perspective of Coatlicue beyond mere duality and simple synthesis but
rather “something more” (68). This something more, a third point beyond duality, is the
result of “making soul,” a higher underground moment that jars la mestiza out of
ambivalence into a new consciousness, the final result of the Coatlicue state. This remedy
is available to all who suffer the introjection of shame:
The struggle is inner: Chicano, indio, American Indian, mojado, mexicano,
immigrant Latino, Anglo in power, working class Anglo, Black, Asian—
our psyches resemble the bordertowns and are populated by the same
people. The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in the outer
terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes,
which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the
“real” world unless it first happens in the images in our heads. (109)
Anzaldúa’s remedy is not an oppositional or counter-hegemonic politics, what she refers
to as a counterstance. Just as mestiza consciousness does not surpass dualism by a mere
reversal or even a simple synthesis of the terms of duality, neither does it surpass
oppression by posing a counter-position that would engage in direct battle with the forces
of Anglo domination by standing “on the opposing riverbank, shouting questions,
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challenging patriarchal, white conventions,” locked into a duel of oppressor and
oppressed. A new consciousness demands that we “leave the opposite bank, the split
between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at
once and, at once, see through the serpent and eagle eyes” (101).
Borderlands offers a visionary version of the Chicano nationalist call to a cultural
if not political secession from the Union, dominated by the image of “el retorno” to the
mythical homeland of Aztlán. The shaman-poet—encoded through the Aztec figures of
the tolteca and the nahual—becomes the liberator, the one seasoned via the Coatlicue
state. This is the visionary who can go down to the elemental levels of existence and
weed out the negative from the positive, throw out the muni-bart metromaps and her
money while keeping her knife, “bones, pieces of bark, hierbas, eagle feather, snakeskin,
tape recorder, the rattle and drum.” Furthermore, she can sift through the debris of
cultural inheritance and salvage what is worthwhile from her native, Spanish, and Anglo
roots. Deconstructing and then constructing, she becomes the Jungian Aztec shaman who
“learns to transform the small ‘I’ into the total Self” (105).
Conocimiento, Desconcimiento, and the Shadow
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In her later work the question of Mestiza Consciousness is transformed into a broader
notion that Anzaldúa calls “conocimiento,” which, among other things, signals a shift to
what she then calls Spiritual Activism. The knowing that Anzaldúa refers to in her essay
“now let us shift” comes from the same higher source that forces our confrontations with
Coatlicue when we refuse to acknowledge our Shadow-Beast (whether personal or
collective):
Conocimiento will not let you forget the shadow self, greedy, gluttonous,
and indifferent, will not let you lock the cold "bitch" in the basement anymore. Though modern therapies exhort you to act against your passions
(compulsions), claiming health and integration lie in that direction, you've
learned that delving more fully into your pain, anger, despair, depression
will move you through them to the other side, where you can use their
energy to heal. (Light-Luz 132)
Importantly, conocimiento is opposed here to desconocimiento, knowing versus
unknowing, consciousness versus unconsciousness, as she makes clear in her extended
essay “now let us shift.” Just as in Borderlands, “now let us shift” lays out a sequence of
stages that mark the distinct (though at times overlapping) moments of making soul in the
integration of the shadow into our higher self. I list the subtitles from the essay in order of
presentation as they delineate the stages of this Anzaldúan take on the process that Jung
refers to as individuation:
1. el arrebato . . . rupture, fragmentation . . . an ending, a beginning (124)
2. nepantla . . . torn between ways (126)
3. the Coatlicue state . . . desconocimiento and the cost of knowing (128)
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4. the call . . . el compromiso . . . the crossing and conversion (134)
5. putting Coyolxauhqui together . . . new personal and collective “stories” (138)
6. the blow-up . . . a clash of realities (143)
7. shifting realities . . . acting out the vision or spiritual activism (149)
But this process is extremely disruptive. Anzaldúa asks herself, “Are you sure you're
ready to face the shadow-beast guarding the threshold—that part of you holding your
failures and inadequacies, the negativities you've internalized, and those aspects of
gender and class you want to disown? Recognizing and coming to terms with the
manipulative, vindictive, secretive shadow-beast within will take the heaviest toll” (137).
But if she is to progress on her path of conocimiento (knowing, wisdom, insight,
consciousness), she must take this risk. For as we have learned in Borderlands, Coatlicue
will shake her out of stupor of desconocimiento (denial) one way or another. Any “threat
to your identifications and interpretations of reality enrages your shadow-beast,” who
instinctively and conservatively protects the “belief that posits the self as local and
limited to a physical body, a body perceived as a container separating the self from other
people and other forms of knowledge” (147).
But this shadow confrontation promises the reunification implied by the image of
the integration of Coyolxauhqui’s severed body parts into a new whole self.
Coyolxauhqui, the daughter of Coatlicue, attempted to kill her mother when she
discovered that Coatlicue was pregnant with the future sun god of war, Huitzilopochtli.
But being a god (even if only in embryo), Huitzilopochtli divined Coyolxauhqui’s
murderous intentions, forced his own premature birth, and then dismembered
Coyolxauhqui, throwing her head into the sky where it became our moon. This tale of
Shadow / 21
family violence marks the onset of patriarchal violence; the re-membering of
Coyolxauhqui signals the memory function of conocimiento, recalling us to our true and
inner selves. Significantly (although Anzaldúa does not specify this herself), what this
includes for Coyolxauhqui is the remembering of her own Shadow-Beast—the part of
herself capable of matricide and fratricide. If she is to be true to her inner calling, the remembering of her true self in its higher aspect where conocimiento becomes capable of
gnosis (120), she must accept the lessons of spiritual activism already inherent in her
memory store:
With racial and gender oppression and other modern maldades—not so
much the seven deadly sins, but the small acts of desconocimientos:
ignorance, frustrations, tendencies toward self-destructiveness, feelings of
betrayal and powerlessness, and poverty of spirit and imagination. The
spiritual practice of conocimiento: praying, breathing deeply, meditating,
writing-dropping down into yourself, through the skin and muscles and
tendons, down deep into the bones’ marrow, where your soul is ballastenabled you to defuse the negative energy of putdowns, complaints,
excessive talk, verbal attacks, and other killers of the spirit. Spirituality
became a port you moor to in all storms. (154)
Spiritual activism seeks to dissolve conflict through reflective dialogue. As it enlarges
our capacity for compassion, it “permits an expansive awareness that finds the best
instead of the worst in the other” (154). For the true Coyolxauhqui you are remembering
is yourself—as you, “like the ancient chamana,” call the “scattered pieces of your soul
back to your body” (155). And as we tell the shamanic stories of such soul retrieval—
Shadow / 22
such making soul—we and all other “nepantleras forge bonds across race, gender, and
other lines, thus creating a new tribalism” (156). And in this way we become the healing
of the wound.
Let us be the healing of the wound
In “let us be the healing of the wound,” the final essay published in her lifetime,
Anzaldúa addresses the intricate relationship between personal and collective shadows. In
the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 and the
eruption of violence in U. S. culture that ensued, Anzaldúa found herself still trying to
escape her “shadow beasts (desconocimientos): numbness, anger, and disillusionment”
(Light-Luz 10). We are not really at war with some outside force, she explains:
As I see it, this country's real battle is with its shadow—its racism,
propensity for violence, rapacity for consuming, neglect of its
responsibility to global communities and the environment, and unjust
treatment of dissenters and the disenfranchised, especially people of color.
As an artist I feel compelled to expose this shadow side which the
mainstream media and government denies. To understand our complicity
and responsibility we must look at the shadow. (10)
And if we succeed in looking at our shadow, at integrating those aspects of ourselves into
our higher being, we might then recognize how our own projections come back to haunt
us. Turning to those who promise mighty national retribution— “Bush and his cohorts”—
means turning to “the darkest aspects of our collective psyche, the parts of our culture
that act without corazon y sin razon (without compassion or intelligence) and do so with
impunity” (16). We're “responsible for the failure of our collective imagination” when we
Shadow / 23
empowered such modern-day Huitzilopochtlis in the first place. And in just as modernday a fashion we need to move beyond our habitual knowings and habits and create new
ones:
Conocimiento urges us to respond not just with the traditional practice of
spirituality (contemplation, meditation, and private rituals) or with the
technologies of political activism (protests, demonstrations, and
speakouts), but with the amalgam of the two—spiritual activism, which
we've also inherited along with la sombra. Conocimiento pushes us into
engaging the spirit in confronting our social sickness with new tools and
practices whose goal is to effect a shift. Spirit-in-the-world becomes
conscious, and we become conscious of spirit in the world. The healing of
our wounds results in transformation, and transformation results in the
healing of our wounds. (19)
This healing begins with testimonies to our shadow:
Levántate, rise up in testimony. Let's begin by admitting that as a nation
we're killing the dream of this country (a true democracy) by making war
and depriving many of life and basic human rights. Let's acknowledge the
harm we've done, the need to be accountable. Let's stop giving energy to
only one side of our instinctual nature—negative consciousness. When we
own our shadow we allow the breath of healing to enter our lives. (21-22)
Only once we have learned to “use internal and external conflicts and wounds to enter the
soul” (22) can we truly begin to recognize and integrate our Shadow-Beasts into
ourselves.
Shadow / 24
Works Cited
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Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La frontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd Edition. San
Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999
———. “Let us be the healing of the wound: The Coyolxauhqui Imperative.” Light in the
Dark / Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. Edited by
AnaLouise Keating. Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP, 2015.
———. “now let us shift . . . the path of conocimiento . . . inner work, public acts.”
Light in the Dark / Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality.
Edited by AnaLouise Keating. Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP, 2015.
———. “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together: A Creative Process.” In How We Work, edited
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———. Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry Into the Separation and Synthesis of
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———. "Psychology and Religion" (1938). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West
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———. Alchemical Studies. CW 13. Translated by Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull.
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Pérez, Emma. “Gloria Anzaldúa: La Gran Nueva Mestiza Theorist, Writer, ActivistScholar.” NWSA Journal 17.2 (Summer 2005): 1-10.
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