Embodied rhetoric

I was in a not-so-great American Literature course when I was an undergrad. The professor—a smart guy with no sense of pedagogy—did say some things that stuck with me for one reason or another. One had to do with Thoreau and his obsession with walking—not the action, mind you, but the mechanics of it. The miracle that our legs as flesh and bone allow us bipedal movement across terrain. “At this time,” the professor told us, “the body was of diminished importance, losing its standing to the mind and soul.” Western philosophers were, as my professor put it, obsessed with thought and soul-searching. They were far less concerned with the mechanics (the electrical, plumbing, and circulation) of the body.

            In a class like American Lit this is a fair statement. We did, after all, spend the bulk of the term talking about early America’s identification with England and classical narrative structures of Rome and Greece and how they were re-manifested and/or subverted. This literary tradition is a view recognizes the absence of the body; but while acknowledging the absence, it negates the cultures that were emphasizing the importance of embodiment. In a way, this Americanized view of otherness, re-colonizes the canon in the most violent of ways—by destroying the body of the other. (I’m reminded of Ann Cvetkovich, “Marx’s Capital and the Mystery of the Commodity,” where she interprets Marx’s Das Capital as a murder scene—but here there is a murder with no body but all of the bloody evidence that there was a crime.)

            The bodily violence in our readings seems to center on the mouth. In Borderlands, the opening image is one of oppression and uncomfortable imagery as the tongue is “tamed”—a metaphor picked up by Baca in his essay. Reminiscent of Cixous and the violence surrounding the lovely gagged mouth of the female figure (1526), Anzaldua’s own voice resists being tamed, shaped, colonized, and populated with the voices of other more dominate cultures. In terms of Bakhtinian dialogism, this would be like going to join the chorus of heteroglossia, but finding out that your utterance is actually the speech of someone else entirely. Anzaldua provides us with vignettes (which, in another essay, I might say reflects the structures of memory) where she takes in the various cultures and language formations and traditions surrounding her. She forms thought through inner speech and when she opens her mouth to tell as story to her sister, it is her own remixed voice that comes out.

            I should pause here for a moment and point out the section called “The Shamanic State”  (1594) wherein the connection between the body and mind is made explicit. Physical sensations generate from Anzaldua’s writing—fevers, joy, healing, etc. What’s more is that she gets physically ill when she goes without writing. In reading Anzaldua, we come to see writing not just as an activity of the mind or soul, but one that is of the body and tied to physical existence. [I view this in the way that sociologists look at the need for human contact at a young age. Infants need to be held and talked to in order to thrive. When infants die because they were not engaged with as humans, the term is known as “failure to thrive.”]

            All of the sudden the university’s prohibition on chicana literature takes on a new heir of violence and oppression. (And Anzaldua as an academic in that institution had a failure to thrive.) So the violence is actually done to the thing that gives us voice, that allows us to join into a discourse community. By ripping out the tongue or stitching a mouth shut, knocking out a tooth or any other number of violent acts, the mouth is not simply shut—rather, the individual with her voice and thoughts is destroyed. To paraphrase from earlier in the semester, the link between mind and tongue is severed. But let’s not view this as a metaphor; let’s put it into a colonial perspective where speaking out of turn literally resulted in the muscle of the tongue being sliced out of a mouth with a razor. When we ask “what’s at stake?” during a classroom conversation are we being this visceral? Should we be? Shouldn’t Douglass’ broken arm be analyzed as part of the context in which he was speaking? Genocides begin with silence and in order to be successful in their mission, they need to stay silent. If we forget about the body, aren’t we silencing the most important aspect of rhetoric?