2023-05-03 22:18:41
Jimmie Durham’s major exhibition, Humanity is not a finished project, at the Madre Museum in Naples is regarding to end (May 8), with its suggestions on art, identity, indigeneity and their radical reconfigurations beyond the “white gaze” (to quote Nicholas Mirzoeff) and of his framing of the world. Stresses also evoked in Border lands. The frontier. The new mess (Edizioni Black Coffee, 2022) by the Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa, which border studies experts José David Saldívar and Paola Zaccaria, translator of the book into Italian, have spoken regarding recently at the University of Naples L’Orientale.
So let’s start with snakes, with animal life considered external to our own, even if, like all of Nature, seemingly under our sway. Both Jimmie Durham and Gloria Anzaldúa make explicit use of snakes. Snakes, like us, are part of the landscape. But they move in spite of our borders and our categories. Thinking not regarding them but with them already means creating a disturbance on our colonizing impulses which dominate the rest of sentient life.
Both artists, in their writing – and Jimmie Durham also in his visual work – explore this line of flight from the apparent realization of the human, now triumphantly brandished in the ignorant individualism of the neoliberal subject.
ATTRACTING US in the borderlands where the certainty of identity – heteronormative, white, native – crumbles in the constant negotiations of place, transit and belonging, these artists push us beyond ourselves. More deeply, they force us to confront the legacies of colonialism, with life in the white colony of the United States that defines not only a global political agenda but also its lexicon and definitions of “freedom” and “democracy.” .
Jimmie Durham’s extraordinary colorful and decomposed Malinche, all wood, shreds of cloth, wool, leather, feathers, shells, and a necklace in plastic fragments, through the collage tells a composite, mestizo subject, which acts as a transit between the colonized and the colonizer, between the American, transatlantic and Mediterranean shores. And it seems a sign of destiny that this mending of a sea route whose memory has been lost now leads back to Naples.
Emblem of she who allegedly betrayed her own people, becoming the translator and lover of the conquistador Hernán Cortés (who also leaves her mark in the Villa Pignatelli Cortes on the Riviera di Chiaia in Naples), Malinche is the image of the forked tongue, like that of the serpent, to become, also in Gloria Anzaldúa, the vindication of many belongings, always fleeing the attempts of caging of identity (the embalming of identity, to say it with José Saldívar).
In a book by Native American theorist Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialismwhich Durham had read shortly before his death, reads of white settlers of European descent pursuing happiness through land tenure with “their stubborn determination never to admit any wrong.”
NATURALLY, the same argument might be applied to all societies of white settlers, to the British in India, or to the French in Algeria, as today to the Jewish population in Israel. What both artists add to this familiar tale are the poetics and politics of undoing the simple return to an alternative or repressed identity. Both mess up and alienate our points of reference.
WHEN HE WROTE Border lands (original title Borderlands/La Frontera) in 1987, the Tejan writer Gloria Anzaldúa had not yet seen today’s abnormal expanse of thousands of kilometers of wall erected along the border between Mexico and the lands of the US Southwest, which at the time were scattered here and there with wire mesh, and barbed wire only between Tijuana and San Diego, to stem the unwanted, the migrant, the clandestine.
ANZALDÚA HAD defined this boundary a open wound, an open wound, in which the first world scratching once morest the third forms a bloody, festering wound that never heals. An image that evokes contamination, contagion, infection, but also closeness, mingling, union, mixing, birth of the new, of the unexpected.
Lesbian/Mestizo/Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham, whose identity was denied when the Cherokee Nation adopted the colonial logic of blood purity to claim racial identity, speak from the out of place in where the nation’s narrative crumbles to a stammer at complexities that cannot be assured by a passport or a flag or color of skin, for they draw on rejected memories, where Texas and the entire Southwestern United States they were once part of Spanish-speaking Mexico.
Turtle Island and the rest of the continent were already inhabited by indigenous peoples from the Bering Strait to Tierra del Fuego, before the invasion, massacres and genocides began. This atavistic past of responses to colonialism and also to its metropolitan post-colonial critique proposes a deeper historical and cultural sedimentation.
IN ONE OF HIS POEM hanging on the wall of the Madre museum in Naples, Jimmie Durham turns to snakes to seek the eloquence and directness of a rattlesnake, and the effectiveness of the bite of a black and red coral snake. Defiling language with what it cannot contain and destroying its claims to a single truth is what unites Jimmie and Gloria (as well as another woman, native: Trinh T. Minh-ha, whose book Woman, Native, Other still waiting to be translated).
With Gloria Anzaldúa the serpent is not only the “forked” language, the Spanglish that unites, mixes, combines Spanish and English, making it a new language, in fact, mestizo, bastard, clandestine, but it is the sinuosity itself of a serpentine text which is like a mural, full of fragments and suggestions, where the words are continuously transformed passing from prose to poetry, from history to biography, from anecdote to theory, to mix up in a contaminated, mixed, disordered compound, which is like matter land of life itself, where everything combines and recomposes overcoming borders and norms.
The divinity invoked in the book of Anzaldúa is a chthonic divinity, all earthly and subterranean, it is the primordial chaos, Coatlicue, the serpent divinity whose name is also that of the great mountain sacred to the Aztecs, before the conquistadors tamed it, transforming its name from Coatlicue to Guadalupe, that Virgin of Guadalupe who is the Catholic face with which they wanted to hide the tremendous primordial chaos, the earth, the snake, the abyss, death, the ancient symbiosis between man, earth, animal.
The place that emerges in the works of Gloria Anzaldúa and Jimmie Durham is not fixed in a timeless authenticity, but is rather indigenous to the stratifications of land and languages that allow both artists to emerge and move. Like snakes that hug the ground, they shed their skin, change position and move, continuing to carry stories that interrupt ours.
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