Artist Statement:
I chose to translate Gloria Anzaldúa’s How to Tame a Wild Tongue. I’m presenting a video in which I wrap a metal wire tightly around my head, then untie it. The accompanying audio is a recording of me struggling to speak a poem in Gaelic, then presenting it in English.
In How to Tame a Wild Tongue, Anzaldúa situates Chicana identity as a distinct and meaningful identity while maintaining its diversity and fluidity. Chicana is inseparable from language, an answer to colonialism from both sides of the border. Chicana, according to Anzaldúa’s piece, is to rise above, or to extend beyond the reach of rigid colonial rules and to create a new, lovely, and difficult identity that was born on a settler-colonial continent but that has its own set of relationships to other New World colonial histories.
In considering how to translate this project from Anzaldúas decolonial essay to my own efforts to decolonize myself, I recalled a series of conversations with a friend about decolonizing and deradicalizing white people. He said succinctly, “When I talk about a world with no white people in it, I don’t want all white people to die—I just need you all to stop being white.”
Whiteness is a dual trauma; it is an utterly brutal history of enslavement and genocide. White people, in the quest for domination and subjection, have also deeply traumatized themselves and their progeny. I don’t mean to compare the traumas—they are incomparable. I am trying to say that, when you commit as deeply and unyieldingly horrendous crimes such as these, your soul cannot escape unscathed.
There is a tendency, I’m sure we’re all familiar with it. “I’m ½ Dutch, but also part German, English, French, Southern French, Italian, and Greek. And part Mexican and part Choktaw.” White people try to rely on a mythological culture to draw evidence of their superiority and to justify the international system of white supremacy as inevitable. The Nazis had their Aryan civilization. The alt-right in the US uses poorly constructed myths out of the driest bones of the Roman Republic to that same end. Discussing what can exist behind or beyond whiteness risks falling into this pattern of justification, and I attempted to closely scrutinize this work and to avoid these land mines (Land Mines is a great example of what I’m talking about, and a terrible metaphor—better would be land mines that hurt someone else when you step on them).
My goal is different: White people cling to whiteness because we know at some level that whiteness is not inherently anything. It is exclusively a relationship to crimes against humanity and the benefit of those crimes. Whiteness is hollow, empty. Like my friend said, in order to get people to stop being white, we must understand that something else must exist to break the fall. What we had to give up in order to become white, broadly speaking, is culture. Language is close to the center of culture—as Anzaldúa shows again and again. What would this effort to translate “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” into “How to Wild a Tame Tongue” look like? How to reconnect the severed soul to the land and to history? It would require, in part, a reclamation of language. The messiness, the fraughtness, the fluidity, and the apparently inescapable event horizon of whiteness in self-decolonizing efforts is what I hope to portray here.