I first read pieces of this book in college, in the Intro to Lit Theory course that I took with Bill Ray (a class that really rocked my world, both when I took it and then again, repeatedly, when I thought back on it over the years. How much I learned there! How little I understood at the time!). My 19-year-old self found the book totally off-putting: inaccessible, confusing, kooky, self-indulgent (even though it would seem that I was dying to think about multilingualism and identity at that phase of my life; maybe this was too close to home?). But I nonetheless wagered that the book might be of interest to a group of Ukrainian college students who wanted to study feminist theory. So we read it together, slowly, over a week, and my main question to them was, how does this text speak to contemporary Ukraine? What does it offer you?
And our conversations were every bit as fascinating as I’d hoped. Really, the conversations were between them and the text, and I was privileged enough to listen in and occasionally mediate.
I had chosen the book because I thought that the idea of life on the border, and especially, life within cultures that crush you in various ways, would be resonant. I was particularly curious about what they’d make of Anzaldúa’s multilingualism — would the large blocks of Spanish alienate them, or would they thrill to a text that switched languages in a way that many of them also do? When I last read the entire thing (I teach it every year, but usually only a chapter or two) in the Spring of 2019, teaching a class on feminist utopias, I was really focused on the way that the book itself operates as a kind of utopian space of creation and experimentation. I hoped that it would model such possibilities for my students, too.
For my own part, what I especially noticed this time around was the discussion of ritual and the process of writing. I suppose that I am more aware, these days, of the need people feel to defend their desire, and right, to write, and to explain what made them start doing it. Anzaldúa’s writing process is extremely elaborate — hours of preparation. Who has the time? But I appreciated how she insisted on writing (and writing about herself) as necessary and important. It may seem like we take this for granted now, but I’m not so sure.
My students were amazed by how resonant this work by a Chicana feminist of the 1980s was to their own experience. One of them commented that it made her feel less alone to know that her country is not the only one where people have lived through such things. Another said that it gave her a way to understand identity as composed of fragments and the spaces between them, rather than as a homogenous whole. It seemed to me that it Borderlands/La Frontera was just the right amount of both familiarity and strangeness — proximity and distance — for them to really appreciate the text.
It was fascinating for me to hear them talk about their relationship to the languages they speak. The guilt many feel over the fact that they often think in Russian was less surprising to me than their lack of appreciation for surzhyk (which is a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian). Perhaps this is just like what Anzaldúa writes about Spanglish — the sense that it is inferior, not a ‘real’ language. Largely undiscussed in our class was their relationship to English (though some commented on their relationship to another acquired language, such as German), and its dominating force.
One of the things that really stuck with me was a moment where someone expressed indignation at the use of metaphors of war and violence. How dare you use this language, she reported thinking, when literal bombs are falling around me? This made me think about violence and abstraction, and the varying degrees of separation involved. Structural violence and linguistic dispossession are grounded on inter-personal violence, but still, there’s some distance. For my students, the trauma is ongoing, consuming. There is no breathing room. I hope the class gave them just a little bit.
Kasia Reads 