dear body,

why have you always been a source of anxiety for me?
i used to be blissfully ignorant of your existence during my younger years, oblivious to the pain you would later inflict upon me.
and then i moved from a field of colored faces to become the embodiment of a blatant smear across a white canvas. i was never good enough.
then i scrutinized every bit of myself because they scrutinized every bit of themselves. every untamed hair that grew like weeds, every marble line that appeared not unlike cracks on a marble statue etched forever, every stubborn brown spot. these were the banes of my existence. there was even a summer i refused to show my toes which were imperfect according to one of those many white faces.
body, i was never good enough for you. and my culture and my youth bound my hands with heavy rope. how i fought against those ropes! i screamed and i kicked and i cried, but i was not heard.
and finally, after years of torture, years of daunting, years of questions i could not answer, the ropes gradually loosened, and my 17-year-old self took pity on you, body.

shave those legs.
forget the glasses.
thread those eyebrows.
paint these nails.
braces.
wear these clothes.
cut that hair.
apply makeup.
always wear jewelry.

and now the behavior. body, work with me here.
i need to show “confidence” right?
just maybe arch my back slightly, just enough to have “good posture.”
hold my smile a little longer, like the people in pages of a glossy magazine.
let my eyes linger and flit about like the twinkling of a firefly.
i think i’ll flip my hair about some more, have it snag in the wind.
crossing my legs won’t hurt either, especially in these heels high as skyscrapers.
and always, always, keep smiling making sure to hold gazes, at least for three seconds.

make yourself attractive, but don’t let them know your schemes.
make it seem natural, like childbirth.

yours truly.

The above was a compilation of the emotions of a blindly stumbling teenager, at least the ones I deemed important enough to acknowledge in writing during my years on the brink of ending high school.
The below is a regurgitation from the faucet of my brain. It has simply rolled out of my fingertips like waves along a coastline and like tears down the length of my cheeks.

this body can be hardly more than a derivative of other bodies, morphed slowly over time through breeding and cross-breeding. a mutt, bred to exist, a creature with the best of all its components.
bred slowly but surely,
a ladder of images climbing to the heavens,
images of my mother
images of aunts
images of bollywood actresses
images of hollywood actresses
images of magazines
images of the television
images of the girls in school
images of the girls on the street
images of the imprint of myself in the mirror
images of all these images, re-and-mis- interpretations.
all of these collided, and after that big bang, i emerged
a new star with elements i snatched, stolen from all of them.

and with all these alterations and this new image, i spawn syncretic identities.
sometimes blending together like some deceptively innocent coffeechocolatelattefoammilkdeliciousness from starbucks,
sometimes curdling like creamy milk and fizzy cream soda, poured respectively into a glass far taller than it is wide,
sometimes mixing, remaining very much together and yet apart at once like chocolate chips in sweet mint ice cream,
sometimes parting, like ice floating to the top, leaving as far behind as it can the savory brown of cocoa beans. and sugar settling to coat the bottom of the glass, disregarding the miserable coffee yearning to make peace between cool ice and warm sugar.

You see, reconciling the body and living these multiple schizophrenic identities has undoubtedly shaped my personality.
You see, the familiar feeling of the string above tightening swiftly followed by an involuntary loosening of my neck into a nod has been a regular occurrence.
You see, growing up a multi-racial West Indian who went to public school in “a good part of Queens” then a “bad part of Brooklyn” then a “mad rich, mad white prep school in the LES” has really done very little for the emotional life of a youth on the brink of adolescence.
You see, feeling like the exception in the room has been the norm for many, many years, so much so that it feels strange to blend in as part of the endless waves.

Today, I see my body as a site of contestation, a site
where the worst of history meets the best of today,
where the past refuses to be silenced,
where cycles begin again.

the past is always with us.
my grandfather’s face,
my grandmother’s hair,
my mother’s smile,
my father’s limbs.
and this strange jigsaw puzzle, pressed together with krazy glue, inseparable and yet separate.

It is the reconciliation of these multiple identities passed down through generations that we must acknowledge in order to understand ourselves. I have tried many a time to run from it, to forget it, to pretend never to have known a native Guyana. And each time I have looked in the mirror, I have found it there, reflected for me and for the world to see, buried within tumbling dark waves and crescent moon smiles. Returning to one’s native land is never an easy task. But it is a necessary one, one we do each time we look into the mirror, each time we are reminded by friends, “You look so much like your mother!”

How strange are mirrors,
distorted images of truth!
With each glance I turn and find yet
another face of a woman telling lies,
weaving lies, like the braid wending
its way down the back of my head
culminating finally into a wisp
of a ponytail that should have
run the length of my back had
I not impatiently let, no forced,
her to finally sever its hubris,
feeling the weight of the past
lessen more and more with
each snip of those scissors.

And though I cut and cut and continue to do so,
each time this hair wraps first my neck and then continues its way down my back.
Each time, the need to shrug off this insistent shawl, shedding bits of myself along the way
like the need to look away each time this deceitful mirror ridicules me.
Each time, it writes a new story.
Two return again and again like carvings on the mast of a ship:
the story of my mother’s childhood snickers;
the story of my father’s incessant drive.

And just so I remain manifestations of these semblances, never quite the same.
Each time, I enter a room -
-with the grace of Alicia Keys
-with the finery of a supermodel
-with the cleverness of my best friend
-with the coquetry of Sharmila Tagore
-with the finesse of my mother
-with the surety of my father
-but never without confidence.

Even though these days I try to convince myself that I do not belong to this hegemonic order worshipping immaterial dollars, my self-presentation often begs otherwise. I’ve got the hair cut in progressively shorter styles, the Western clothing I’ve been donning for a hundred years, the Converse sneakers I choose to wear not just because they’re cheap but because they’re “in style.”
But there are some uncommonalities; the nose-ring is a usual giveaway despite its current status as a “hip piercing for the young.” The toe ring, the anklet, the two yellow gold bangles and rose gold ring that never leave my right hand, they all suggest a covertness. And of course there’s always the brown skin if none of that whispers “other.”

dear body,

it has been quite a journey, hasn’t it? but i think we understand each other now… if only in that we understand that this relationship we share will be as tumultuous as a ship rocked by the waves and gales of a storm. take care not to capsize this poor ship and leave me marooned on some foreign island,

for in it is carved all of me,
all that i was,
all that i am,
all that i will be.

yours truly.

A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. – Gloria Anzaldúa

I am a border.  My body is a borderland.  Each day I wake, I carry with me the reality of having a Mestizaje body:  both Anglo and Mexican.  Mentally and emotionally, I am situated on the border and in the US/Mexican borderlands, specifically Texas, where el río bravo marks nation/state territory.  I exist in these always rushing and sometimes violent waters.  I always exist in between nations and cultures and languages.  It is an inescapable reality, a never-ending borderland.

Life is complicated with a Mestizaje body. Without the sun, my body varies in shades of brown.  And, therefore,  ways in which my body is read by some give me certain privileges. Yet, when my body is read by others (those of varying colors), I am situated as having a Mestizaje body.  Yet, when I speak, I am confusing to certain people.  My Tejana accent, the way my mouth speaks and utters both English and Spanish, the way my body speaks its language–each of these moments disrupts the stasis of my world further situating me in the Río Grande, most times without a life vest.  This is particularly pronounced in academic spaces and when I am with Latin@ communities.  I belong to both, yet do not fit in either space.  And, while I become visible to some during these moments, the reality of the/my Mestizaje body remains invisible to most.  My Mestizajeness remains invisible to the White culture.  I am perhaps read as an ambiguously raced person, but the Other, the White Other, defaults to naming me as a White person.  For others, however, I am a light-skinned Mejicana.  Invisibility becomes a living, embodied reality.

In many ways, the reality of having a Mestizaje body is the reality of vagueness and invisibility.  I am unnatural and exist in between worlds.  I am colorless or invisible to the visible world of color around me and remain living life in treacherous river waters as I navigate both the Anglo and Mexican realities.  The river in which I reside is in constant transition; it is not home and I do not belong.  As a result, I am always in constant transition.  I am without a state, without a nation, and only have an invisible body.  The Mestizaje body, MY Mestizaje body, has no home, no permanent space to which it belongs.  This/my body seeks to take root wherever it is welcome.  In this vein, I echo the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, who, in search for a place to be visible and in which to take root, writes:  “And if going home is denied me, then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture — una cultura mestiza — with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture.”

Aimee Carrillo Rowe, in her article entitled “Be Longing: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation,” speaks of home space as a site of belonging, implicating the politics of location.  Home is a location, a particular space from which we relate.  That, a “politics of location” is a “politics of relation.”  Carrillo Rowe contextualizes this article by locating herself, her physical body–making herself visible in the space where English words are constructed into sentences and sentences become paragraphs resulting in an article.  Likewise, in an effort to make my Mestizaje body visible to the larger world, while traversing and attempting to survive this (my metaphorical) river, and in an attempt to become particularly visible to the reading world, in order to find a liminal location from which I can relate and Be-Long, I will locate myself using words.

In many ways, words are a place of home for me.  It is a primary place where I am visible to both the Anglo and Mexican worlds.  I can shift in between these realities, these cultures, these liminalities.  It is a move in becoming a nepantalera, one who exists in between things, realities, worlds, people.  I do believe that I regularly construct a home with words.  Perhaps even in words.  Language wraps my body in ways that allows my body to perform my Mestizajeness.  I find a sense of belonging, a home, in the beautiful braided reality of multiple languages, particularly Español y Ingles.  For me, for my Mestizaje body, this is the place of napantla, that very particular in-between space where the river, my life, flourishes.

Initially, when I began drafting this narrative, I was sitting in my favorite chair, which is khaki in color.  The sun was shining through the windows and there behind me was a beautiful view of the Rocky Mountains and a deep blue sky (I am writing from the United States, Denver, Colorado to be precise).  Now, however, as I finish this narrative, I am sitting in a Latino/a home, not far from mi casa, where the language of the home is Español and the ethos is welcoming, and I belong here.  I belong because the language shifts between English and Español and the interactions are not part of the dominant culture.

In many ways, this transition in writing and the act of writing from different places highlights my everyday life:  the always in transition and the never fully be-longing.  Likewise, using the metaphor of the river as a site for locating myself, my body, and as a way to highlight the lack of belonging is key.  In order to belong, I must first know where my body will land and in which direction my feet will tread.  It may not be home, but it is a space for relating.  Yet, though a river is visible, and in particular this river that flows between Mexico and Texas, much of the river’s life or activity is invisible, like my Mestizaje body.  This concern of invisibility highlights home space and the challenge to belong.

Both Carrillo Rowe and Anzaldúa write about concepts of home, belonging, and space.  For Carrillo Rowe, home is a contested space, which reveals the political nature of space and relating.  The term that she uses in the above article is “location.”  The contested space of home is a political location for the body.  The contested nature of space is laden with the politics of identity, too, which thereby implicates our bodies.  Identity, she indicates, assumes elements of belonging.  Similarly, Anzaldúa writes about the urgency of taking space and building a home.  Anzaldúa is prepared to build a new culture rooted in the nature of the Mestizaje body should home be denied her.  And, what is profound about the work of Anzaldúa is that she grew up in between different worlds and cultures, navigating the radical differences she encountered.  It was surely contested, and it was certainly a challenge to find a space from which she would relate.  Both Anzaldúa and Carrillo Rowe incorporate these experiences into their academic work as a way to construct belonging, take space, and contest the dominant paradigm.  Looking to them as examples, I am able to see my body become visible and belong, albeit colorless, in a world full of varying color.

The challenge to belong is also political.  Connecting my invisible Mestizaje body to a world full of radical differences and color challenges me to put my body into motion, in transition, and to traverse the varying elements of el Río Bravo.  It is in this way that my invisibility becomes political and my body’s potential emerges into something valuable.  Traversing the river implicates my body in ways unseen.  Belonging in between worlds and cultures, that is, being a nepantalera, is the place of movement , transition, and belonging, where the politics of relating are actualized.  “Belonging is that movement in the direction of the other: bodies in motion, encountering their own transition, their potential to vary”  (Aimee Carrillo Rowe, “Be Longing: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation”).

My brown body is flesh. What was mixed and stirred together in the messiness of two bodies from different corners of the earth coming together became my flesh. In my case, the brown body that entered the world brought about a life-threatening tearing up of the brown world it came from. Literally. My mother’s womb was torn, and then torn out after my birth, and so was her culture, her language, her world torn from her and by her as her body raised mine.

My mother worked hard on prevent her brownness from seeping into me, when unsuccessful, we attempted to weed it out. Making me a white person required her to separate herself and me from that which nourished and grew her. Yet my body is mixed, my body is flesh, and my flesh knows. Like her flesh knows the scars that my body produced, my flesh knows that part of the soil it grows in is her brown body. Deconstructing my whiteness in my brown body is a messy and beautiful journey. It is messy because this body grew up in German hills with different concepts constructing and shaping the bodies that inhabit the space – and now this body moves in a land where different structures absorb bodies into a different violent system. It is beautiful, as it allows me to eat from the bitter and sweet fruit of the colorful migrant garden my parents grow.

Self-disclosure (does color always require an explanation?). I grew up in a rural area of Southern Germany as the daughter of a resettled World War II refugee and a Thai immigrant mother. To my childhood friends I have never been not German. To others, who couldn’t make sense of thick lips and brown skin speaking perfect German and even perfect dialect, I was always a hyphen (“you’re German and…?). While my skin takes on different shades of brown through the seasons, I trust my childhood friends when they declare that they somehow don’t seem to notice my color. However, I do know for certain that whatever it is that my skin signifies, most likely others attached it to my mother – who stuck out like a sore thumb. Sore from her visible and invisible difference, sore from her constant negotiation of difference and blending in, sore from her experiences of being othered. From my mother I learned the art of being as German as it gets: speaking, acting, thinking and moving as to blend in and to excel in the system. Excelling in language, both my parents insist, is the key to success. Becoming white meant becoming articulate.

My encounters with postcolonial discourse, especially postcolonial feminist theory and theology have provided me with grounding experiences (albeit in ever shifting, moving soil). It provided me with texts and language to do think about and within the context of my brown body. I found a discourse where my body is a valid source of reflection of all things theological and social. Now this body walks and grows on this earth more aware of the stakes that uphold the systems we all live in. Yet a theory in the flesh always needs to grow into more than learning to be articulate. Theory in the flesh is this brown body becoming a body of knowledge, a body that knows. Knowledge is grown in, tended to, expressed in and transmitted to the flesh and the soil of our land and our families, our ancestors, all our relations.

Words will always fail to tap into material experience. If religion (whatever that is, sighs the postcolonial scholar) is what orients us in the world, what gives our place in the world significance, then bodies are religion. Bodies can tap into memories, ruptured through migration and oppression, ground themselves in experiences and wisdom gained across time and space, tap into truths of pain and healing, and embody the knowledge that has gotten other bodies through in this world and towards others. This body knows when it is othered, when fear of the other becomes abjected and projected into my body. Bodies know when they are othered for being a body that is female, queer, asian, differently abled, differently colored. Because othering is embodied. When discourse can arrange and re-arrange bodies and knowledge about them, the flesh knows the suffering that comes with it.

The body knows that there is no such thing as the singular self in the singular body. Physics tells us that there are strings, energy vibrating throughout the universe. Material particles, that have been close together once, can respond to each other across space. Bodies of knowledge know that they are bodies connected to bodies connected to land connected to bodies connected to life. Our bodies might look the same, but never know, think and act the same. But bodies can feel together. This body feels the tension and pain that seeps in and out of my bones and flesh and seeps into your skin. What touches your body, mother, even as you are growing in a different soil, touches mine, and both our bodies are vibrating together like one string. Music? Physics? Only bodies know how to play and feel this tune. This body knows when all the white hurts my eyes and keeps blinding me to the colors of my flesh. Because knowing is not always seeing, my body knows nausea induced by eating from the tree of the universal rational for too long. This body knows that your white body has some brown flesh in it as well. And your body knows it too.

My body knows when it is loved, when it is respected, when it needs sleep. My body knows when yours is anxious, when you ache for a loving touch or some distance to recover yourself. This body feels the mixing of colors, colors that never blend. The body of knowledge knows that it is mixed, and this body feels the tensions, the rawness of the rubbing edges, the misfits. This body taps into the still bleeding wounds of my mother’s womb, the strong and careful hands of my father, touching the knowledge that helped their bodies survive and grow life in a different soil.

My body becomes the means by which I remember and grow a different understanding of who I am, where I came from and where my place in this world is. In the midst of the beautiful struggle to affirm the humanity and dignity of all with those who embrace me in their community – women, people of color, queer folks – my body is fed and feeds into meaning that is outside my language.

The fumbling towards words in this essay is my feeble attempt to tell what only my body knows. It is an attempt to know in and through the body. Am I romanticizing the body in a perpetuating body-mind split? I hope not. But somewhere inside and out I know that body is mind is soul is body is earth is body is you is me. And any body-mind split is exactly that. A splitting of what is not meant to be apart – and maybe that is so strung up together tightly we cannot tell one from the other unless we make it so. My body grows in knowing that happens when I stand, dance, sway, hold, touch, embrace, hurt, eat, stomp, hum, curl, leave. My body knows with your body, as your heart, breath, sound, touch, gaze, warmth, moving is vibrating with my own. Walking the walk of postcolonial theology is walking with the grain and the rhythm of our bodies. It is feeling the religion of our bodies in our bones, going crazy in a body of knowledge that draws us towards the flesh of others. And only with our bodies in this world can we build a reality, a reality that is based in knowledge that our bodies in themselves can make meaning and goodness, can orient us towards each other and our stories in this space we grow in.

** The alert reader will notice that I am indebted to and have dug in the intellectual and poetic gardens of Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Marla Morris, Rainer Maria Rilke, the Indigo Girls and Charles Long.