Borderlands and Taming the Untameable

Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands is a book that finds its way in my bag on every major life changing journey. The first time I read it, I had it on loan from a mentor in a Newcomer Animation Program I was enrolled in. I had to leave half way because I received news that my mother had cancer not longer after I’d had a hard coming out. Alejandra Higuera at first suggested I get the book as a companion for the journey, but when I couldn’t find it in any bookstores she let me borrow her copy. I flew across continents with it, carrying it as a roadmap and talisman.

Even though Borderlands was published the year I was born and is rooted in her experience around the physical borderlands of Texas and Mexico which I have never traversed, Auntie Gloria’s pen is a force that resonates beyond time and space. Borderlands’ historical and mythic queer inquiry languaged that which for two and half decades of my life prior to encountering the book I had not known how to even begin processing. I have a similar revelatory experience each time I read it, with same or new sections of the book. Phew, the power of visionary gifting!

In my first intake I was deeply struck by the diagnosis of our state of being. She called into account cultures on both sides of the border for colonial patriarchal separation of good and evil and suppression of the wild queer untamed divine feminine. She draws a direct comparison between the suppression of Coatlicue, the Serpent Goddess, and the taming of Kali.

In passage that cut deep into my experience of that moment, Auntie Gloria shares an anecdote where a lesbian student says that she thought homophobia was the fear of going home. She writes:

“I thought, how apt. Fear of going home. And of not being taken in. We're afraid of being abandoned by the mother, the culture, la Raza, for being unacceptable, faulty, damaged. Most of us unconsciously believe that if we reveal this unacceptable aspect of the self our mother/culture/race will totally reject us. To avoid rejection some of us conform to the values of the culture, push the unacceptable parts into the shadows. Which leaves only one fear - that we will be found out and that the Shadow-Beast will break out of its cage. Some of us take another route. We try to make ourselves conscious of the Shadow-Beast, stare at the sexual lust and lust for power and destruction we see an its face, discern among its features the undershadow that the reigning order of heterosexual males project on our Beast. Yet still others of us take it another step: we try to waken the Shadow-Beast inside us. Not many jump at the chance to confront the Shadow-Beast in the mirror without flinching at her lidless serpent eyes, her cold clammy moist hand dragging us underground, fangs barred and hissing. How does one put feathers on this particular serpent? But a few of us have been lucky - on the face of the Shadow-Beast we have seen not lust but tenderness; on its face we have uncovered the lie.”

Of the many versions of Kali, only are some are found in home shrines. Most images of Kali have her stepping on Shiva with her tongue out. One version of the story is that after Kali kills a being wrecking havoc on the world and drinks his blood, her appetite is whet. On her way to continue her rampage and satisfy her desire, she finds Shiva laying in her path. She mounts on top of him, copulating and channeling the destructive force into a creative force. Kali being on top signifies nature’s supremacy over humans. Another version of the story - and these days the more widely shared version - is that in order to stop Kali’s continuing rampage Shiva lies in her path. When Kali steps on him she sticks her tongue out in embarrassment for having stepped on her husband. Thus Shiva, through shaming, tames Kali’s wildness. The same wild Kali he invokes when his foes are beyond his considerable powers to defeat.

Who does Kali have to become to become part of the household? To be part for the social order? What does she have to give up, compartmentalise, reduce, eliminate? Bloodlust is turned into vegetarianism, nakedness is covered up by domesticating jewellery. Her bold sexuality written out of the narrative. The tongue stuck out in mockery for social norms and thirst for desires to be satisfied turns into a tongue stuck out in embarrassment.

Kali is valued because she protects from the darkness, the wild unknown. But she is the darkness and the vast wilderness. So in order to be in the household she has to protect others from herself? Often societies have an obsession with chasing highs and feeling only good things all the time. But can highs truly be experienced without lows? What meaning does light have without darkness?

Kali is darkness embodied. She is desire and pleasure embodied. Mother to all creation. Divinity so vast and varied that surrender to the infinite is the easiest way to experience her.

But at home, she is lessened. She is tamed. Her stories aren’t about how she’ll show you the darkness within & in doing so expand your consciousness, instead the stories are about how she will absorb the darkness, defeat the darkness for you (and then become wifely). The onus of transformation and witnessing the divine within no longer on you. This separation of divine and self is also the separation between nature and humans.

We are nature. We are wild. We are divine. The world outside is the world within. Kali is in us. And she is untameable. Even in home shrines her hair is unbound. Her tongue is outstretched. She is still atop Shiva. Kali is still a force unmatched. Her presence unmistakeable. No amount of attempts at taming can change that. How queer is that?