Borderlands

Sunday, June 15, 2008

I have been reading about borderlands, not just the arid Southwest towns that  edge against the Mexican border, dry, desert places like Tijuana and Mexicali in California, and sleepy little towns in Arizona and Texas, but the borderlands we inhabit when what we know comes against what we don't know.  Formed as we are by our socio/cultural/educational backgrounds, we experience changing, shifting identities in the borderlands of the new school, community, career.  Gloria Anzaldua wrote about those places of alienation and tension, places where we change and grow, but always with struggle to assimilate the unfamiliar to that which is known, and in so doing to find a path through the confusion of the wilderness.

Learning the multiple theories of literacy and identity, and reconciling the theories of the proliferation of composition schools of thought is a borderland for me  It takes me out of my comfort zone, from what I know to what I am struggling to grasp.  It forces me, with a sense of desperation, to extend my thinking to places I have not yet visited.    Often when I come in my thinking into these hard places, as inhospitable and alien as the great deserts of the Southwest, I find that I must stay a while and inhabit the these places.  My former wont was to hurry out of them, back to the comfort of what I already knew, but in so doing I lost the joy of entering new areas of understanding, of connecting what was known to what is new.  I must do the work, endure the discomfort, which requires the courage to stay in these places until I understand.