19.09.2022
Undressing colonial heritage, unweaving the Misak body
Fitting into the “mestizo” category to “improve my quality of life” as a Misak “woman” was one of the sentiments present during my childhood in the construction of my feminine identity, since building ourselves culturally out of fear due to the dispossession of human rights since the Spanish colonization erased any intention of returning to ancestral knowledge. The first mingas[1] for the recognition of ethnic diversity and human rights, carried out by the Misak people as well as other sister communities, were struggles that since 1980 and even before allowed them to challenge the centuries of colonization they had suffered. Although resistance had begun, the impact of the conquest, as well as the imposition of Western thought, had inevitably affected the Misak worldview to a great extent, modifying the view of the individual and collective body within the territories, which meant endowing the body with other experiences and judgments. That is why the journey of the Misak female body in this environment of violence, oblivion, rejection, resistance, minga, transformation, deformation, weaving and unweaving, is the starting point of so much questioning. For our Misak community, the body has a fundamental relationship with the land and nature, a relationship that is experienced within the space of the intimate and is constant from before birth, because rituality, the exercise that maintains this link, occurs within ancestral practices from gestation until death.
C. Aranda, a teacher and community member of the Guambía reservation, tells us: “It is important to keep in mind that the body cannot be separated from the spirit and that, if one is not well, the relationship with nature becomes disharmonious. Our body is our first territory.”[2] So rituals around the body also take into account each stage of its transformation, as well as the distinction about femininity and masculinity. The meaning of the body and its care are transmitted through women from generation to generation, because from a very young age, thanks to the midwife mothers who preserve the knowledge of the body’s balance inherited from nature they protect the link between these two elements with plant baths and rituals. It should be emphasized that for girls the rigorousness of ritual is necessary throughout most of their lives, beginning, for example, with their first bleeding, where a traditional doctor explains to them that their body at this moment affects the environment in a negative way and that in response they can also receive a negative effect on their body. Therefore, ritual seeks to protect them and enhance their knowledge so that they can live in harmony with nature. Now, as we have said, there is a very marked differentiation regarding rituals of the male sex, because his knowledge is about balancing the woman, guiding the work of the home and the community, and facing the cold energies that make the woman sick, since he is the one who maintains a close dialogue and reciprocity with nature. For this reason, in these cases the traditional doctor accompanies the male with plants and flowers when his voice deepens, as a reference of the change from childhood to adulthood, protecting him and providing the physical and spiritual strength for him to balance the woman.
the body has a fundamental relationship with the land and nature, a relationship that is experienced within the space of the intimate and is constant from before birth
In this sense, what we can express is that evidently the body of the Misak woman is the one that requires perseverance and rigor, because she is the generator of life, the one who gives warmth to the home, the one who transmits, the one who protects knowledge, the one who resists and carries her community.
Accordingly, we find that our ancestors, after fighting for Indigenous communities’ right to live, also achieved the possibility of having a “voice” within their own na chak,[5] since colonization was also evident in the male body with the hierarchization of the male over the female. However, continuing to grow as women with rights is a tireless struggle against violent acts within the same homes; for this reason, the first women who were forced to receive Western education were motivated by fear, and yet at that time represented the possibility of not allowing the continuity of machismo over the bodies of the following generations of women within the Misak territory—an option that became, many years later, a tool for women today to take action and question the patriarchy. Even so, this walk through contemporaneity has implied that our mothers’ form of protection, affection, and care has come from the denial of culture, language, traditions, rituals—everything that makes up a collective identity.
Today, finally, with the tools of self-recognition left to us by the struggles of 1980 and before, we can once again look at our bodies through our ancestral individuality and collectivity, also understanding the slogan passed on to us by our elders, “Recover the land to recover everything,” as our quest to recover our bodies that are irrevocably linked to the context and to each of the territories.
because the same land continues to claim us as part of it and recognizes us as bodies that are potentially influential on the territories we inhabit.
It is there that the demand to recognize the body as a means of transformation and denunciation begins by approaching, little by little and one by one, the symbolic elements that compose our traditions, in order to review and understand them through their history and the sensitivities they carry through time, so that we can now understand them and grant the body autonomy, loaded with ancestral knowledge that is in dialogue with contemporary knowledge generating transformation, where we remember that to affect the body is to affect our territory. I join the words of Vilma Almendra, quoting the women of Kurdistan: “We must continue to fight to liberate the bodies of women and men” so that in our bodies we can break the stereotypes of women inside and outside the territory.
Collaborative or collective work; the basis of Misak thinking about the development of coexistence.
C. Aranda, personal communication May 23, 2022.
Elders.
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Madrid: Capitán Swing Libros, 1987), https://enriquedussel.com/txt/Textos_200_Obras/Giro_descolonizador/Frontera- Gloria_Anzaldua.pdf
Hearth, the meeting place where Misak families talk and prepare food, and aplace for parents to educate children.
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