There are connections I am making everyday between art, my life, film, and reality. These networks seem clear to me, but they are also unclear in that they evoke a sense of displacement within contemporary society. Am I missing something? Is there some universal force that operates under the guise of fatalism? It is uncertain, but it brings to question the idea of culture and heritage. I am Mexican, Honduran, Caucasian - a mutt if you will - and I am Adopted. Already I begin to notice the schism between my body and land. This is one of the infinite links I've established lately; a disassociation within a cultural stigmatism results in connecting certain truths with identity; that a society in which perpetrates the idea of identity/conformity, as it relates to locality, creates a non-identity; a cyclical uncertainty that informs the soul which navigates the body which translates and exposes the land. Who is navigating these eyes that make a metaphor for life? I am missing something.
Wrapped in chains when my people first set foot on this soil, and wrapped in chains presently as I discern my connections to those Latinx ancestors, who patiently waited their turn to live. The locus of my schism comes not only from adoption, but from my heritage and colonialists. At one point my people harbored their own kingdoms, recited their own languages, and chose their own vocations. This was detrimental to the land and the cultivation of ideas. In our emergence we solidified our relationship with the land and thus our identity as community and individuals. What was given to the dirt sprung anew, and we repeated this cycle religiously. We were a thriving people. But when conquistadors and foreigners invaded our city of gold they began to covet, distort, and react in a way that left my people detached from their land: crops and aviaries were burned, temples ransacked, aqueducts destroyed, topography restructured, women raped, men impaled, children corrupted, all for the benefit of allegiance. We were told it wasn't our soil anymore, wasn't our society anymore, and we sunk into the carapaces of our identity, shielding our hidden truths so as to survive. Our literature and our art were incinerated for the sake of renewal and omission. The new lexicon of my people would be that of institutionalization. We were educated - or rather dictated to - of a new sanctimonious God, one in which would free the hearts of the now imprisoned, one who cared for all manners of life. But to educate through violence and stentorian attitudes is to wrap in chains what was once born free. Soon, the land we rose from became the land we broke, along with our identities, and we became foreigners in our homes.
Now traverse centuries, numbers, legacies, mountains and rivers, to present day, June 17, 2016, U.S. of A. The land is still broken. The colonials once strapped in steel and chain mail, now garnished with gunpowder and kevlar. Once riding on horses, now mechanical birds. We've upgraded our dissociation with the land to include pestilence and rubble. No bodies are safe. All flesh is consumed for the sake of Hyper Capitalism. Time is a matter of labored importance - what was once thought as cultivation is now exponential growth and decay. It is here, in Megatropolis, that the body is used to hammer into mountains, and dam the streams currents. Here that trees are uprooted and crops are sprayed with disease. Here that livestock and human lives become currency. Here that the color green represents false idols rather than purity. Here that men deceive each other. Here that men fail to recognize each other. Here, that links are restored as the West triumphs and tramples over it's so called enemies, again and again, meddling in affairs that beg not of saviors but revolution. Just as time circulates the universal body, and governs its life streams, conversely men in suits circumnavigate the Earth's body and dictate life as it appears to their subjective ideologies.
I can see how it began, how the governments and politicians and patriots decided to exercise their power as a means of control. In their attempt at global domination they've corrupted what chance we had at living peacefully within our own territories (i.e. that of imaginary borders and our own flesh). Our homeland is not recognized anymore. Crime has taken over our cities, industrial complexes have ushered in a rapid change of our evolution, and war has made us virulent in nature. What was once seen as a safe haven for refugees, as an American Dream, has now distorted into a dystopian nightmare. Domiciles and vehicles, gated communities, towns, cities and states, fences/walls/borders, they have become our surrogate bodies - one in which can be scarred and ruthlessly torn apart for the benefit of expediency. And so the land holds memory in its scar tissue; only when you close your eyes and ears do you hear the wailing of trees and babbling brooks. I think of my ancestors - those bodies now gone back to the Earth - and make myself believe it is their souls that cry out in the void of flesh. I can see how it started, with a dream, only to find oneself in the midst of another colonial rapture that involves odious machinery and self prescribed identities. Even those in power don't know themselves, it's just repetition, repetition, repetition. Nightmare after nightmare after nightmare.
Attributing to the sense of dissociation I turn my eyes towards the arts. I find a lot of Latinx literature, film, and painting, encompass the themes of amputated identities from the land they now harbor. Chilean writer, Roberto Bolaño, and his novel, The Savage Detectives (1998), about four misfits traveling Mexico city in search of a famous Poet, possess the divorce between body and land as they rove around the desolation and beauty that is Mexico. Along the way meeting similar souls who question and ponder the existence of life and their place within it. But it's this anxiety of separation that fuels the travelers: they must connect their bodies with an idea of permanence in order to ease the pain of separation. And so they wander the familiar landscape, severed from reality in search of it, in search of a ghost. The cities themselves unrecognizable but familiar. What is one to do but move? And they do, whether on foot or in vehicle, the characters are in constant movement, nomads in a city that should feel like home, where home takes the place of solidarity. The sense of internal geography has been replaced by borders and designations, so the characters move so as to remain still.
I turn now to the film Güeros (2014), by Alonso Ruizpalacios, wherein similarities uncloak themselves to that of Bolaño's novel. The title itself already refers to dissociation by implicating a skin color to one who is Mexican but not necessarily "Mexican" because melanin stands in the way of heritage. (I am Honduran and Mexican, but I'm still referred to by most Latinx's as güero because I have lighter tones. This further pronounces my complications with connection to my culture insomuch as it creates an internal fear of affirming myself with my heritage by speaking Spanish to those who call me güero.) And so we come into the company of another four mavericks who travel the intestinal highways and roads and alleys of Mexico city in search of a famous musician. All the while, again prompting the question of existence and identity crisis through the lens of city vs. man, or rather, land vs. body. The internal and external vexes of both groups seek to reconcile the notion of homeland by searching for it. In the end both the poet and the musician have little importance for the rovers because they are not the final lesson to be taught: They are the spark for the wildfire in both group's hearts. What becomes apparent is that the journey to oneself is as crucial, as important, as association. To live is to move, to navigate and migrate, but eventually one will stop and settle. Painful as it is to watch/read this, to occupy the same tormenting feelings of disunion between one's identity and the place it occupies, is to solidify the threads of a cultural tapestry once thought to be destroyed but ever vibrant in the soul. We find in Bolaño and Ruizpalacios the need to connect, to place roots. We find settlement within our bodies.
In terms of painting and it's painters, I look to the works of Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and of course, Frida Kahlo. These three women - all associated or complicit with the surrealist movement emerging out of Paris - embody the perfect themes that go with dissociation whilst projecting those ideologies upon the canvas. All three transcend the idea of femininity by correlating the body to the land, and how the landscape alters the bodies perception by severing certain ties of womanhood that associate fertility with their femininity. Each painting solidifies their anxiety with the social consciousness of how women are to look, to act, to respond, and in that agitation they resurrect a surreal self-image that knows no borders of the body. Nature and its purity envelope most of the women's paintings, from water, sky, plants, animals, to the very body itself, which is represented as either domicile or abstraction. This idea, that bodies become our temples, is one that perpetuates the land. Though we may be separated from what is considered a homeland we occupy a very different home, one that is restless, scarred, metamorphosed into flesh that speaks. Carrington, Varo and Kahlo, understand this restlessness and use the disquietude of their integument to rally ancient winds.
What I love about their paintings is the ease and destructiveness of the line and colors. It's not that the paintings are incorporated with a disastrous attitude, but that they revel in the destruction of a perceived disaster, one that surrounds the body and the acknowledgement of that body. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that they're women; due to cisgender normatives, women have to acknowledge their bodies, and their place within that flesh, before men do. In that recognition I'm sure there is an uneasiness, an informal revelation in which places upon women a subjective exposition. But these painters exacerbate the stereotype of what female/femininity is, by placing their analogues between ideology and geology. Kahlo utilized self portraits as her voice. Her paintings are an impression of her body, a thought that witnesses and conveys. But it's her depiction of stoicism as she wraps herself in Death's arms, flowers and vines, trees, dresses and jewelery, that intensify and rejuvenate the (dis)connection of her body to land, for Kahlo was not comfortable with her physical distortion and so she deconstructed her emotions unto a canvas. Her body became this beautiful destruction of regeneration, of strength. Kahlo embodied her resurrection and death all at once. Although it is not just Kahlo who was renewed, but the landscape itself as she cultivated memories of her ancestors and translated their struggle through her flesh. Her schism harkens back to those deeply rooted connections within the soil, enticing the viewer for a sense of history. Kahlo gives us back our legacies as a thriving beautiful people - her paintings remind us of a reality suspended in color, fantasy, life and death.
Although, what's interesting about Carrington is that she was not Mexican herself. She was born in England but spent most of her adult life in Mexico as a painter, political activist, and organizer. Her trials with body and land derive from locality: England, UK. Notoriously driven with imperialistic conquistador bravado, we find the British have a knack for invasion. Various increments in history have allotted to British occupation extending throughout 90% of the world. Either through empirical formation or military force, Britain has existed to invade foreign territories (making an ironic statement as to what is classified in civic discourse as immigrant/illegal). Insert Carrington growing amid the ideology and political rhetoric that informs one of identity and heritage. For Carrington there is a deep sense of stranger within her paintings, a dream like quality that infers upon identity because it seems so fantastical. Her dissociation with her homeland confounds the prescribed existence of conflating invasion with privilege. But Carrington's paintings surround an immortal vacancy of the mind, the inner personality. Her delineations pierce the conceptual veil that surrounds our borders as she emits pure emotion and pure being. The connection here is that through her birth as perceived imperialist, as hereditary conqueror, she erodes the imposed identity for the sake of a new one. She sacrifices her homeland for the renewal of another. She gives to Mexico what was taken from their childish minds and their wonder; Carrington gives us back our dreams, and in that slumber we find a piece of ourselves that is pure identification, pure harmony in blood and soil.
Varo on the other hand was born in Spain. She left at the height of the Franco-Spanish Civil War and fled to Paris where she was greatly influenced by the surrealist movement of André Breton and team. From Paris she was exiled when World War 2 broke out and German forces occupied France. Upon a ship, amid other refugees, she sailed the seas towards Mexico where she lived the remainder of her years. Immediately the ties/disseverment between body and land take shape. Varo embodies all sense of dissociation as each city and country she inhabits falls prey to war and ruins, further exemplifying the unstable relationship of identity to solidity. She is a true nomad, a wanderer, seeking out stability so as to obtain identity. It's no wonder she fell in with the surrealist's who evade identity for the sake of pure expression. In Varo's work there is a metaphysical occupancy that derives from fractured personalities and identity - I can only attest to the fact that this resembles a separation from land. She was driven from her first home, planted roots in another, only to exhume those very tendrils to travel towards another land where identity had become passé. This outdated or archaic notion of identity permeates throughout Varo's work. The way each painting occupies a dimly lit phantasmagoric space, re-imagines the idea of identity as it relates to physicality and locality. For instance, one's perception of reality is limited to their own subjective interpretations of what one sees, but the internal cognizance emerges from the relationship between perception and viscereality. That is, Varo uses her canvas and her inner identity to inform the landscape. Her awareness of these severances allows the viewer to occupy their own spacial capacity whilst exposing their true form as phantom linked to reality, or body linked to land. Through exile Varo excelled in translating her broken relationship towards stability by firmly planting herself in the space between body and land: that of the internal existence.
Now, a lot of this information may seem overbearing, but that doesn't mean we should forget it or not acknowledge it. For the only way we defeat these so called prescribed identities is by confronting those parts that fail to recognize the body as a landscape. Right now, in the 21st century, I have witnessed a reemergence of ideology and cultural stability implemented through the younger generations who are sick and tired of being force fed doctrines that fail to validate our stance as human beings. We are fighting back, saying no to the degeneration of our bodies, and rebuilding the internal image of cultural identity. There is ever more awareness of the schism that has separated and marginalized us, propagating the loss of a necessary singularity. For too long the borders of our flesh have been placed upon the peripherals of history, and so we have been ignored, exploited, made to fight against each other instead of for one another. But now we are recognizing each other, recognizing fellow brothers and sisters. All participants in the daily crucible of uniting body and land.
It is here that we have separation, dissociation, and severance, all attributing to and producing the informal body as split from the land. What is one to do amid such confusion? Amid such antiquated ideals such as identity, unity, and harmony? I believe it comes down to an internal revolution. The body is so resilient to conform, as is the soul, and to unite the two is to maximize identity. We, as a nation, as refugees and migrants, as a lost people, must look to the arts, to literature, to film, to photography, history, geography, in order to capitulate to our flesh. Only in our sacrificial offering of body to soul can we hope to renew the spirit of the land. There is no time to waste because the body grows old and withers each day. And so the links and connections I interpret through life's histrionics reflect on one idea: that through legacy and cultural attribution one's body is restored to the land. Whether that be through movement as Bolaño and Ruizpalacios's characters do, or stability through inner transformation of identity as Kahlo, Varo, and Carrington translate, we may find peace. The erasure of imaginary borders and political vocabulary that reinforce our separation also attributes to internal harmonization of body and land. In conclusion, I return to those same roots exposed by my ancestors, and I drink plenty from the waterfowl of history and culture. As the ground shakes so to does my flesh, and I am one again, at peace, with blood and soil, flesh and tree.
