Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Gloria Anzaldúa's Response to 9/11

Abstract

In the months following the 11 September attacks on New York’s World Trade Center, Gloria Anzald ua penned a powerful multilingual response to the event in the form of a thirteen-page nonfiction essay titled “Let us be the healing of the wound: The Coyolxauhqui imperative—La Sombra y el sue~no.” This essay, which critiques the US military response to the attack and the ensuing “War on Terror,” became the first chapter in Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, her PhD dissertation manuscript compiled and published posthumously by AnaLouise Keating in 2015. Anzald ua’s postnational imaginary, her reliance on Azteca goddesses, and the bilingual nature of her writing in her response to 9/11 set the essay radically apart from the canon of post-9/11 literature in English, as defined by critics and creators of that canon. More specifically, literary critics have overlooked the significance of Anzald ua’s 9/11 essay in the following ways: first, its centrality to what Paul Petrovic refers to as the “first wave” of the post-9/11 literary canon (“Emergent” x); second, its connection to the ethical, postnational imperative espoused by Judith Butler in Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004); and third, its instrumental role as the literary and philosophical bridge connecting Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) with Anzald ua’s writing of the early 2000s in Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro. Anzald ua’s dissertation should be considered a major part of her long literary career, particularly in light of the mythical figures she calls forth in her unique expression of mourning after 9/11; moreover, “Let us be the healing of the wound” expands post-9/11 American literature and establishes an important connection between Butler and Anzald ua in their joint embrace of global precarity. Anzald ua began to write her dissertation in 1974 in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin and would work on the project intermittently (1975–77, 1988–2003) for over twenty-five years, nearly completing the task at the University of California, Santa Cruz, before her untimely death in 2004. It should be emphasized that despite its initial status as a “dissertation,” Anzald ua breaks formal and institutional rules for academic writing by deploying personal anecdotes; Spanish, English, and Azteca prose; and her own poetry, but