Thawing Hearts, Opening a Path in the Woods, Founding a New Lineage

By Helene Shulman Lorenz

When I first became aware of This Bridge Called My Back, I understood it in the

tradition of the testimonios coming from latin America. Testimonio,s are generally thought

of as the story of a whole group of oppressed people focused through the personal account

of one. The idea is not necessarily to express personal subjectivity or uniqueness or

creativity but to give voice to what has been marginalized in the mainstream press. Often

testimonios are co-authored and sometimes they incorporate the narratives of several people.

Such stories are "prophetic" because they articulate the concerns of a whole population

that has not yet found an articulate public voice. The point is to testify or speak out-loud

what a whole group feels to be the truth about economic, political, and cultural conditions.

Testimonios can have tremendous power. Usually they emerge where there has been a

long historical silencing of certain ways of experiencing the world and an insistence on

other stories that cover-over suffering and support the status quo. The nanatives of slaves

and the narratives of masters might as well have described different universes. One

presented the plantation as a hell and a prison, the other as a relaxed, pastoral heaven. In this

gap of discourse, energies build up as in the space between stored positive and negative

electricity. When the gap is suddenly arced, it can cause a flash, an explosion, a lightning

bolt. In this moment, a public recognition and articulation of alternative visions can be a

stunning experience for both masters and slaves.

In l9{J0, when Bridge was being written, I had left the academic world where I

previously taught philosophy, and was active in the l-atin American solidarity movement,

working at a cultural center in Berkeley, California. Though I had been involved in the

women's movement since the ISTO's and in the Civil Rights Movement before that, my idea

of political work was limited by a frame of reference that focused on economic and

ideological dynamics in the dominant culture.In my view then, the solution we sought was

in political organization and oppositional movements. The goal was to replace one

organizational hierarchy representing privilege with another orgaruzational hierarchy

representing those who had been marginalized by privilege. I saw This Bridge Called Lty

Backas an organizing effort.

Twenty years later, though the book has proven that it has an enormous political potential

in mobilizing oppositional voices, I can see that it has also made a profound theoretical

contribution that is equally important. It is said that you cannot really appreciate an answer

until you have a question to go with it, There are levels of sophistication I see now in this

book that it has taken me years to grow into. I now believe that This Bridge Called My Back

embedded, performed, and began to articulate what I will call a "theory of reframing and

restoration" thatis emerging in multiple social locations and disciplines all over the world.

Just as a spotlight illuminates and frames lead actors on a stage by deepening the shadows

on the sunounding set, every discourse frames some ways of thinking and pushes others to

the margin. A theory of reframing asks how margins are created, enforced, justified, denied,

challenged, and recentered. It looks for what has been made to appear "natural" or

"normal" in every social location; how this naturalization is enacted to create a frame or

border pushing out difference; and how difference suryives with a life of its own, and can

then become a resource either to help strengthen the frame or else to question or rupture it.

A theory of reframing and restoration also looks for traces of older narratives, multiple

ways to resituate our life-stories. In fragments of oral history, received spiritual traditions,

symbols surviving from other eras, a practice of autoethnography begins to sift through

sediments to recreate in discoune the kind of lived ecological diversity that surrounds us in

our communities. This is not the creation of a master narrative or a return to an authentic

"Golden Age." It is the recreation of a kind of performance style practiced in many oral

raditions where multiple voices and tellings of the past build up a many-sided and ongoing

dialogue about provisional truth-in-perspective-for-the-moment. On a good day, sitting at a

kitchen table, cooking together for the family or community, telling stories near a fire,

dancing to well-loved music - or alone at a computer with many fragments and dialogues

trying to find a voiced conversation - a miracle is always possible. When spirit enters these

rituals of restoration, a kind of cultural alchemy can temporarily cook what is raw, unite

what is divided, give meaning to what is chaotic, and thereby enchant, refresh, and reanimate

all participants. It is this experience of negotiated cohesion through dialogue leading to a

shared feeling of grace that is sought in a theory of restoration. Knowing how to create

such rituals is the special expertise of healers, curanderas, griots. In this sense, Bridge iself

is a ritual of restoration, and it is perfecfly consistent with the theory of the curanderas who

created it that we go on talking together about it.

My new understanding of theory came out of the experience of shared personal and

political defeats. In the decade after Bridge was published, many of the oryamnng efforts

out of which it had emerged, ran into a wall. The I-atin American revolutionary and

solidarity movements I was involved in essentially collapsed. I don't want to rehearse the

ongoing dialogue about why this happened here; but it was clear that institutional change

and the finding of sustainable common ground across differences in human experience was

going to be much more difficult than any of us, in our perhaps narve optimism, had

anticipated.

During the late1980's, a kind of "midlife crisis" sent me back to the drawing board to

figure out a new way of understanding the social and political environment I was part of.

I experienced a kind of meltdown of story-line in which I suddenly could see both in my

own life and in the community around me, that the silences and absences in our stories were

sometimes more potent and alive than the known and habitual.

I was raised in a small and isolated Orthodox Jewish community in the Adirondac

Mountains reeling from trauma of the holocaust and yet almost unable to speak about it.

There were silent and unspoken borders we all colluded to keep in place as part of the

conspiracy to fit with in and be safe among our majoritarian culture neighbors. I knew and

cooperated with the rule that I was never allowed to feel or name the unspoken because it

was too dangerous. OnIy a circling of the wagons, a repression of difference, a united front

in the face of an unpredictable world, would make possible our survival. We were

Americans now.

Yet layers of other fragments are sedimented in my memory: my mother singing Yiddish

songs with her brothers, my grandmother dancing at weddings to Eastern European music,

the stories about "No dogs or Jews" signs recently removed from the lawns of nearby

tourist resorts, the pictures of the grave of my great grandmother in the Polish shtetl where

every man, woman, and child was murdered. There was the constant layer of rebellion in me

against "what girls could do" and were forbidden to do, and the knowledge that my

father's depression and my mother's "migraines", tears, furies, and evolving medical

symptoms were a silent protest against the collapse of possibilities for education and

creativity in their lives.

Despite this multiplicity of unspoken yearnings, I also learned in that environment how

to create and live in community, which I have done all my life. As a child, I experienced

being embedded in an oral culture with a rich repertory of ritual, and a practice of self-in-

community or self-in-participation with other people, the world, and what one could call the

"unknown sacred" flowing through us.

As a result of my midlife reflections, I became aware that for a long time I had been

participaing in a process where at the margins of what is officially named, symbols loaded

with shared meaning were being hidden in plain view, elaborated, and passed from hand to

hand in poetry, music, dialogue, and performance. In my last year in the solidarity

movement, 1989, I was the coordinator of the Guatemala News and Information Bureau and

I worked with the International Indian Treaty Council to coordinate the tour of Rigoberta

Menchu. At that time she was under death threat, so a group of us stayed with her all the

time sharing stories, visits to the supermarket, and impromptu meals long into every night.

For years people in the sanctuary movement in California had been quietly driving

Guatemalans and Salvadorans, escaping the U.S.-assisted genocides in their countries, from

the Mexican border to Oakland, where housing and work had been arranged for them. We

had put out the word through their networks that on a certain night Rigoberta would meet

anyone who wanted to see her in the basement of a local sanctuary church. Of course, all

indigenous Guatemalans knew that to walk around the streets of California they had to give

up whatever traje or traditional dress they had worn in their home village and assimilate to

local customs so that La. Migra could not pick them out and deport them. Yet when we

walked into the church that night there were over a hundred people in traje waiting in a sea

of color and traditional music, surrounded by the smell of flowers and village food cooking

in the church kitchen. As Rigoberta walked into the room, there was a hushed moment as

everyone took in the symbolic significance of the scene.In full bloom here, against all odds,

was a symbolic tree that had been hacked to bits in a genocide in its home place, now

suddenly transplanted and alive with meaning. Then everyone, but everyone, in the room

began to cry. The traje must have been carried across borders, in paper bags, hidden in

suitcases, for thousands of miles at huge risk, in order to appear here. As I remember the

rest of the evening, it was one of the most inspiring I have ever spent, the whole roomful of

people- indigenous and l-adino/a, gingolaand l-atino/a- in dialogue about what can survive

and what can change, what is worth fighting for and what will be lost, all the while sharing

food, music, song, and dance from two continents in what was surely a ritual of

transubstantiation and renewal.

Though my own hometown was thousands of miles away and different in every

particular, I recognized the story of having come here from a faraway place with its own life,

story, music, food, language, costume, and values, (or being different in any way from a

dominant majority,) and living in the margins of another culture where safety and survival -but survival with dignity and values intact - was the issue. And at the same time I was aware

and familiar with the fact that in the room were many contradictory points of view and

interests and a need sqmetimes to create something new and not-yet-spoken, alongside the

traditions and symbols brought over from the past.

During this time, I began to dream of a new kind of social change movement where

instead of a fixed plaform or party line, what we could create would be the acceptance of the

necessity for community rituals of dialogue, evolution, and restoration. The starting point

would not be obedience to a master narrative describing a single hierarchical and linear

process, which always leads to scapegoating those who have different and creative impulses.

Rather, I was imagining that we might start with the ideas that every formulation was

provisional and open to reframing, and that we would always need the ritual of community

dialogue and storytelling for periodic restoration of energy to our projects.

All of these fragments and new thoughts came flooding into to me in as I spontaneously

suffered a processes of disintegration, reframing, and restoration in my personal life. I

began to understand how everyone colludes to create a habitual, predictable worldview that

will defend the boundaries of the already known. Gradually,I became interested in the

question of how to host, in both personal and community life, a multiplicity of points of

view and sedimented fragments of experience in such a way that the grace of restoration

brought not only division and suffering but also compassion, dialogue, healing, and

celebration.

During these years I studied at an interdisciplinary psychoanalytic institute and began to

lead community groups in transformative dialogues.I also returned to the university to teach

psychology and philosophy. There,I rediscoveredThis Bridge Called my Back and much

of the literature the succeeded it, in an encounter of revelation and relief. By that time,

Bridge had traveled from California to the margins of Women's Studies and other

interdisciplinary programs in the academic world, where a shocking war of cultural values

was tearing apart traditional disciplines. I was in a new place and began to see Bridge with

new eyes.

Unfortunately, academic departments can be extreme in building fortresses to guard the

treasures of the past from the encroachment of newcomers. Many departments are frozen in

the frame of a modernist mythology of fixed individualist egos in existential alienation from

a mechanical and meaningless world.In my personal experience,'Women's Studies

Departments could be particularly disappointing. At the last university where I taught, the

Chair of Women's Studies decided that a course on Cuban women's literature and a

philosophy course in which Bridge was read could not be cross-listed with her offerings.

Though there were several women-of-color on the campus teaching courses on literature by

women, she made no attemptto dialogue with them. She had no time in two semesters to

meet with any of us suggesting such inclusion because she was too busy. That year, she

received an award for faculty excellence and was promoted to the position of Dean.

From an established disciplinary perspective, there is still a profound suspicion of

theories of reframing and restoration. Like all "wounded healers" who come into the world

under the myth of an orphaned divine child, there is a story of rejection of Bridge and its

ways of thinking in many academic locations: "No room at the inn." Because it broke

down older classification systems or symbolically inverted their meaning, many people did

not know how to classify this work. Is it fiction? Philosophy? Literature? Sociology? Ethnic

studies? Women's Studies? Psychology? In what department should it be read? The

theory of reframingin Bridge is a problem for all frames. It is everywhere a challenge to

conservative ways of thinking which hnd the present American landscape the best of all

possible worlds. Such people may claim that they do not understand these ideas, that they

are not theoretical enough to be considered, or that they were already raised and dismissed

by thinkers in the canon. To imagine that the older frames of race, gender, sexuality, self,

and other cut across the whole of the field of knowledge over an entire historical era, that

they are connected with colonial impulses, that they serve and reflect power, privilege, and

hierarchy, and that they are filled with arbitrary exclusions and absences which need to be

renegotiated, would indeed be a revolutionary rupture in many disciplinary conversations.

As a result, my daily life in the academic world is always a kind of agony. It seems to me

that I am often sitting in a room where I-in-community-in-multiple-perspective seems to

have disappeared, along with everyone I know well and everything I care about. (For

example, I cannot forget the moment when a Jamaican colleague asked an economist in a

seminar we attended what the effects of his economic policy would be on women in the

Caribbean. "Oh," he said without emotion, "they would be assigned to the permanent

underclass of the late capitalist economy.")

It has been a terrible struggle for me to find the words and spaces where I can begin to

address the state of shock in which I frequently find myself within academic discourse. No

other environment I have ever been in personally enforces this tendency to silence in me

with the sheer weight of its inherited exclusionary practices. This Bridge Called My Back,

and the literature that has grown up around it and as a result of it, has been a tremendous

source of strength and solace in my work. I know what it cost to wrench those stories out of

self-silencing collusion, and bring them into communities that would rather not hear them.

Today, in whatfeels like another aeon, I teach about the cultural and imaginal

construction of self and other in an interdisciplinary graduate program in psychology.

I can see from this vantage point, that when discourse becomes frozen in harsh oppositional

stances - a dynamic that was locked both in my inner and outer worlds in the 1980's - the

only point of exit is "below". Here I am imagining a bamboo plant that attempts to grow

past a barrier like a cement sidewalk or a building that is blocking its growth. When it

cannot, it will deepen its root system, sending out new growth below the surface, emerging

across the street or in a neighbor's yard. The work of Bridge is like that for me now, a

decisive moment when oppositional thinking went into new and deeper territory, and began

to theorize around the existent dualities.

Bridge began at the border between several communities, selves, and discourses in the

evolution of a symbolic frontier in-between and around the edges of living individuals and

their current frames of reference. The "no-man's-land" bordet area has been created

through the silencing of certain types of expression. Bridge named this space- a liminal

threshold where new conversations could develop- as valuable, important, even central.

Here, when distinctions between self and other, individual and community are radically

challenged because frames have been cracked by the shock of difference, unexpected

ruptures can create the dialogues, performances, and rituals that stretch identity and

identifications.

If we have no way to create liminal spaces, energies toward creative development are

thwarted. Folk medicines and indigenous psychologies, including Western psychiatric

diagnoses, are full of names for conditions of somatic distress in which the body performs a

cultural practice, a symptom, which is really disguised resistance: neurasthenia, depression,

hysteria, panic disordet, nervios, susto, crise de nervos, fraquaza. Marginalization can also

be expressed by yearning, desire, fantasy, and dream, which are felt primarily as an

uncomfortable accumulation of energy long before anything is expressed. Though these

symptoms can be painful, they may evolve into dangerous resources. They are a kind of

rupture of normalization expressed through the body, a scream of shock and non-

compliance, the beginning of a new conversation. The energy could begin to emerge in

word, song, or art and be canied from place to place. Anyone who silences messages

contributes to the buildup of resistant potentials. In this state of being one can act as a

border guard to collude in repressing what needs to be spoken; but energy also begins to

accumulate outside our control in our bodies and souls. This energy can be tapped in rituals

of restoration.

Transgressive culture can breach the policed silences of normalized hegemonic discourse

and permanently break its capacities to frame the situation. In latin America, the movements

of liberation theology aimed at producing communities which were in permanent, ongoing

dialogue about their own histories. Repeated rituals of shared reflection gave the most

oppressed people a space to imagine alternative realities. Once they owned these rituals or

were consciente,they could no longer be dominated. This critical practice of giving voice to

suffering in local environments, was called concientizacao as it first developed in the

poorest Christian base communities in Brazil. We could imagine a whole spectrum of

environments where at one end, discourse and performance are highly controlled and frames

are rigid and policed; at the other end, creativity, innovation, and spontaneous expression is

celebrated and frames are permeable and provisional. What are the costs and benefits of

living in such landscapes? Who pays? We need to understand how communities and

individuals move across the spectrum to know how resources emerge for resistance and

healing.

The "no-man's-land" Bridge named can be a tenitory for dialogical and intercultural

encounters, where particular individuals in all of their historical and cultural embeddedness

may find Others about whom they care enough to reach across unimaginable gulfs of

difference. Here, in the creation of a "Third Space" the invisible edges, frames, or frontiers

established by normalized discourse could become suddenly visible and negotiable. The

territory appears through the expression ofvery particular and local experiences because the

preceding scientific and national era focused on framing European local experience as

"universal", repeatable, replicable, statistical, non-contexfual, and ahistorical.

In the alternative paradigm, subjectivity is not primarily prophetic in the sense of

representing a whole class or caste, nor is it personal and isolated in the sense of expressing

the private interiority and reflection of an already universally constituted self-monad. Rather

subjectivity is acknowledged to have potentials of reflexivity. Reflexive subjectivity,

understood as self-in-dialogue-and-community in most oral cultures, bears the possibility of

a transgressive rupture of its own construction of self. Borders and defenses are noticed,

owned, named, dialogued with, befriended. This interpretation of subjectivity attempts to

create a dialogue among unacknowledged parts of our own personalities as well as our

communities. It is an encounter between conseryative border guards enforcing the current

version of the socially constructed self, and immigrant and exile experiences, symptoms,

visions, and dreams longing to cross borders.

This Bridge Called My Back (along with a other texts in Cultural Studies and Post-

Colonial Studies that followed it) attempted to break a hole in the fortress wall of academia,

in an effort so far only partly successful, to let new symbolic energies enter the story. In

doing so, Bridge de-centered every "inside" by asking us to consider the patrolled borders

or frames of our disciplines and communities. By allowing us to think of ourselves and our

worlds with one foot in older discourses and another at a growing, opening edge, the not-

yet-voiced could begin to create new myths - new containers for new wine - beyond the

limited already-known. This required a huge act of courage: to speak what the dominant

culture has forbidden for centuries, to find the words for marginalized experiences that

many have contrived to silence, to explore out loud the regimes that have been policed to

deny love, hunger, pain, and exclusion. It is no accident that writers who experienced

multiple marginalizations through dominant narratives on sexuality, race, nation, and/or

gender, were often the hrst to think about reframing. This body of work has surely

challenged any simple identification with what in means to be "man" or "woman," me or

you.

Once this theater of the margin has been successfully performed, it must have radical

implications. From here on in, we might all have to think of ourselves as always with a

social and personal frame that pushes aside a level of collective or personal unconscious we

have collaborated in not hearing, one step beyond our current margin of understanding.

Nothing we ever say again can be once-and-for-all. We might have to be endlessly open to

revision within and without, while owning the history and density of the multiple

descriptions that have made us what we are.

People who have a theory of reframing play by different rules. They distrust statements

of absolute idealization and identification, or clear and abstract binary opposites. They are

interested in traditions but more interested in edges, frames, or frontiers. Their border

guards become more curious, friendly, and experimental. They look for oppositions,

dualisms, and conflicts in themselves and others as sites of brittle identifications, hoping to

melt what has been frozen. They begin to resemble the tricksten of folklore and fairy tale,

conflating outside and inside, hated others with hated selves. They dare to walk to the edge

of town and explore. Gloria Anzaldua saw this clearly in her preface to the second edition:

"With This Bridge...hemos comenzado a salir de las sombras; hemos comenzado a

acarrear con orgullo latareade deshelar corazones y cambiar conciencias (we have begun to

come out of the shadows; we have begun to break with routines and oppressive customs and

to discard taboos; we have commenced to carry with pride the task of thawing hearts and

changing consciousness). Mujeres, a no dejar que el peligro del viaje y Ia immensidad del

territorio nos asuste - a mirar hacia adelante y abrir paso en el monte (Women, let's not let

the danger of the journey and the vastness of the territory scare us - let's look forward and

open paths in these woods.")

In performing a theory of reframing and restoration, This Bridge Called My Back

inevitably dug deep in the compost of traditional mythologies which had been set aside

through conquest in order to find what could nourish while separating out what poisons. In

this project of cultural archeology, we can explore our own colonization and collusion with

silencing agendas; but we also encounter older mysteries of renewal and healing.In

sediments of inherited ritual, the alchemy of the creative act may imagine a transpersonal

ground embedded in the personal and social frame: that in us and our communities which

imagines "more" in dream, image, symptom, inspiration, or desire, even before we fully

understand what we are reaching for: more understanding, more creativity, more community,

much more than life offers in the current globalized economy.

The realm of the transpersonal "more," a sense of the sacred unknown ground of life,

announces the presence of the numinous and uncanny, where we might realize that what we

have already understood in life is only a small part of our potential. An exploration of the

tenitory of spiritual renewal or symbolic healing can be expressed through traditional

transpersonal myths of redemption and community. These myths are one way to imagine

coming out of limited frameworks to build the open and sacred spaces in daily life where

new healing energies will be welcomed. Such energies, which have been named"variously in

narratives of various cultures as gods and goddesses, orishas,daimons, or spirits can give

us the vision and strength to author new scripts for ourselves, our cities, and surrounding

environments.

In the images that emerge from these rituals, we can b"grn to speak of the suffering and

healing potentials that come through us from the world. Every night, dreams of nuclear

disaster, lost children, border guards, and fleeing prisoners flood through the bodies of

people everywhere. Every day we may become poets of lost or disarticulated voices in

ourselves and our habitat, by spontaneously reaching for new words in the river of language

and image which has shaped us and continues to pour through our experience. In this space

of symbolic healing and restoration, the constructed walls of alienation between self and

other, individual and community, inside and outside, past and future, may momentarily fall.

In that instant we could get a glimpse of the living ground of symbolic imagination, the

mother of all creativity: the capacity formythmaking that we share.

In making a space for symbolic healing rituals of a new krnd,This Bridge Called My

Back could be thought of as a kind of original pilgrimage, a journey that founded a lineage,

or Sangha in Buddhist terminology.A whole new generation of men and women are

beginning to come through undergraduate and graduate schools with this book, and more

recent work by several of the original contributors, as founding texts that are returned to

again and again. No longer content to accept the "received authority" of old frames, these

students are creating a new culture where we search for absence as much as presence,

dialogue more than contradiction, multiple perspectives rather than single narrative overview.

This work has opened possibilities for many creative genres in writing and more complex

ways of being present in an academic environment. Transdisciplinary by nature, it

challenges the separations between subject matters as it reaches across borders to make

needed connections between the personal and political. As in the tradition of liberation

theology, it asks in a radical way: who is served by the research, conferences, and writing we

are involved in? The new lineage, in repeating the originary impulses, can be imagined as

similar to the great annual pilgrimages to sacred landscapes that many cultural groups still

peIfonn. These rituals have the potential to create an environment for renewal in universities,

though pilgrimages always require that we leave behind the security and comfort of our

habitual worlds at least periodically.

For many of us in the academic world suffocating in the old paradigm, this work has

created a small space to breathe in a landscape finally open enough for us to enter whole

with all our doubts and suffering, silences and not-knowing, creativity and multiplicity,

families and communities. In an educational culture that overvalues and overestimates the

naturalized Eurocentric and patriarchal past, a ritual clearing for innovation has been built by

theories of reframing and restoration.

Occasionally now, I experience a kind of sublime joy while in dialogue with others at a

critical and creative edge where we can see ourselves as both frame and rupture, fortress and

challenger. Sometimes I am a defender and sometimes I am the one who needs to break

down walls. Little by little a new kind of clearing, a psychology of liberation, can emerge

alongside the old frame of academic discourse. In that freeing space of crossroads, we can

be as personal, consciente,theotettcal, bodily, symptomatic, complicated, ethnic, queer,

straight, conflicted, multiple, interpretive, wrong, provisional, daring, or creative as we need to

be. This is healing myth for souls in protest against a conversation designed to marginalize

and pathologize them. This lineage is one in which I take refuge.