Gloria Anzaldúa's Decolonizing Aesthetics: On Silence and Bearing Witness

This article is one in a series of attempts on my part to think (from) the in-between of traditionally juxtaposed claims of voice versus silence. It takes seriously both claims that voice is lived as liberatory by many, on the one hand, and that the deployment of voice may not only reify colonial power dynamics that continue to oppress many, but also that words may be inadequate to convey or remember the humiliation, pain, and systematic degradation of trauma and violence, on the other. Thus situated, this paper turns to silence to locate resources for the renewal of sense. Specifically, I turn to Gloria Anzaldúa's iterations of the myth of la Llorona in "My Black Angelos" and Prietita and the Ghost Woman and propose that her deployment of silences is such that the past is remembered in its absence, as loss. As such, I suggest, the deployment of deep silences is key to a decolonizing aesthetics; it bears witness to experiences of coloniality by upholding, rather than eliding, opacity, thus inaugurating decolonizing sensibilities attuned to silences rather than speech and transparency.