>> It's nine o' clock.
Those of you who need to leave, you're excused.
Thank you for coming and goodbye.
How much more time do I have?
Ok. This is a poem, not a poem.
This is a fable --
-- that I need help with.
I need you to help me with.
I'm going to read it to you and afterwards, when you see me,
tell me what you think I should work on.
Ok. A lot of times I will start with an image, or some words, or a mood and that --
Or a picture of a character, of a person, you know?
That has some feeling or some --
-- something that's important for her to say and I start out with that.
But a lot of times, especially since I've been back in graduate school,
I start out with a theoretical concept.
So there's about six or seven of these stories that start out with the concept, ok?
In this case, the concept is Nepantla, that I talked about on Monday night,
which is between all these worlds that Prietita and Prieta lives in,
the world of the writer and the imagination and fantasy.
The world of external reality, the spirit world.
And, you know, what a -- There's other worlds like the --
If you're watching television, you're in this media world.
If you're reading a book, you're in the world of the text.
Your consciousness is somehow in this other world half of the time, if not totally.
If you're reading a good mystery or romance, a horror, you know the scape is literature?
That's the best way to escape out of your head and external reality into this other reality.
So anyway, this book is about all this going from one world to the other.
And when you're in between two worlds, you're in nepantla,
you're in this kind of interface borderlands space.
So I thought, ok, I'm going to take nepantla, which is a place of transition,
a place of constant change, a place where your feet are always shifting.
And I take that and I'm going to concretize it.
I'm going to give it some images, I'm going to give it a setting, I want to put characters
in there, a little bit of a narrative, and I try to do this with this nepantla.
Not a very successful story yet, but with your help.
I arrived at the barrier bridge.
The chalk-skin perimeter guards look at my papers.
What's your name?
He asks. Prieta, I say.
He asked why I speak in a funny way.
I speak with a lisp, I tell them.
Are you human?
Yes, trying to see through my spray painted on clothes and my deep blue skin.
After long seconds, he motions me to go back through the gate.
We don't want anyone with green hair here.
They don't want anyone with green hair where I come from either, I mutter.
I must cross.
I had to leave home because the change was hard on my heels,
but the cost for crossing is high for the mordida, the bribe.
They want an eye or a leg.
So I back off and circle around the perimeter until I come
to a group nervously waiting to cross the river.
They asked me to cross with them.
I squat beside them saying each must cross by herself,
each must find her own community on the other side.
I'll need clothes when I get to the other side.
I buy clothes off a blue-skinned woman about my size.
First, she steps out of her pants and hands them to me,
while I'm stuffing them in a plastic nap bag.
She takes off her camisa.
Naked, she sprints into the foliage.
I hear the sounds of twigs snapping.
Then she emerges clutching the eucalyptus leaves
that she's plastered all over her body with clay.
The change has caught up with a leafed clothed woman.
She's from the other site.
For her, this site is the new land.
I leave the group and walk toward the sound of rushing water.
I come to the river.
I feel compelled to cross over.
Yet, I am afraid.
Once I cross over, I will never be the same.
But I want the change.
Something in me will terminate if I cross.
What?
Something else will activate.
I should say something else will come alive.
Activate is too abstract, right?
I stand by the river's edge for a long time and stare across to the other side.
It's shrouded in mist and mystery.
Mist and mystery.
I can only discern the vaguest of shapes.
I recognize nothing.
Holding the bag over my head, I walk into the shadowed part of the river.
The water is lukewarm, but I shiver and tremors course down my body.
I'm scared, I'm scared, I'm so scared.
Fear, not water, numbs my body.
Head submerged, I sink into layers, but never hit bottom.
As I walk out, the wind is cool against my wet chest and thin thighs
and I realize there is no scene between water and air.
My feet touch the other side.
Lights flash over my head and I hear dogs barking.
A faceless chalk with shiny white boots, outlined by the spotlights, leans over me.
Spotlights pin me from all directions.
Though I close my eyes against the intense light, I can sense their eyes on me.
The sprayed on clothes have dissolved in the water.
I stand there trembling, covering my nakedness with my hands, and I press my thighs together
to hide the trickle going down my legs.
They know I have wet myself.
They jerk the plastic bag out of my hand, paw me, thrust me into the wet ground.
I lie on my back, jerking like a fish, but I cannot escape their hands.
They pull off my legs and arms and gouge my eyes out.
I contract into myself, thrashing and lashing I scream and scream,
spit brown puke into their faces.
When I wake, I am nothing.
Nadie. I remember that pieces of my body are scattered nearby.
I wiggle my torso through the grass like a worm, like a worm.
Grope for my arms and using my mouth, I push them back in their sockets.
I find my hands, pick up my eyeballs, rinse them in the river, put them back in my face.
I see a new piece of myself I don't recognize, never knew or had forgotten.
I press it onto my forehead.
I feel alienated from this self that I do not recognize.
The landscape shimmers, then settles but not on the same bedrock.
The edge of the horizon wobbles, then stills.
Chicanas have problems with the is and the es, have you noticed?
Some of these sounds do not exist in my native tongue.
So -
The rocks taking a breath in unison, then subside unmoving.
Everything looks different.
I bathed in the river, then sluice the water from my hand, from my body with my hands.
Then I search for the plastic bag and find it still intact,
hanging from the branches of a tree.
I quickly slip on my camisa and pants.
In the distance, I see lights.
I lope toward them.
Just when my legs are about to crumble, I reach the outskirts of the pueblo.
I pace up and down the streets searching for something familiar.
A cup that looks like a cup is at close range, not a cup.
Only a misshapen object was reason for being, eludes me.
I'm beginning to get a glimmer of who I am.
I no longer know where I come from, nor where I am.
I am no longer the one who crossed the river, yet I am still me, only I am more me.
Yet, I cannot remember what came before the crossing.
As dusk approaches, I see lizard like creaturas with transparent,
translucent skin dragging their feet through the streets.
As they get closer, I see that they are not children
as I first thought they were, but skeletal creatures.
They gather around me speaking [? sibilant ?] chords,
which are welcoming but at the same time too shrill.
I cover my ears, shake my head.
As I back out of the circle I murmur sorry, no hablo tu lengua.
I catch a glimpse of a face in a store window,
watch its color recede and realize that it is my face.
I no longer look the same.
Light radiates from me and my body hums.
I do not look like those I left behind,
nor have I become a translucent creatura or a faceless chalk.
I don't want to be one of them.
I just want to comprehend this world, but the more I enter into it, the more it slips away.
Under my feet, the ground shifts.
An oppressive thickness hangs in the air too heavy to breathe.
I gasp and sway with fatigue.
Mal aire. I've inhaled the spirits of the wind.
Why am I here in this alien world, en nepantla, el lugar de aislamiento?
Confronted by creatures who threaten me with their strangeness.
I am afraid I will forever be alone, forever unlike others just
like I was before en el otro lugar, en nepantla, el lugar entremedio, the place in between.
The sun rises, I hear footsteps behind me on the sidewalk and hear the dogs snarl.
I turn around, nothing, no one.
Yet from that to empty terrain I had crossed earlier and the unexplored land
up ahead, I sense eyes watching me, draw closer and closer.
Should I wait and stand my ground or run toward them, head-on, try to breach their walls?
But I know I can't stay en nepantla.
Slapping my thighs hard to give me courage,
I sprint toward the eyes far, far ahead of me in the distance.
It's very difficult to read.
Is it difficult to hear?
I want to give you a little bit of background, besides the Nahuatl concept of nepantla.
There's also an anthropologist named Victor Turner who talks about the liminal space.
And before him was a man named Arnold van Gennep, who also described liminality as a zone
of what he called [? impetuous ?] transition, whatever that means.
And for me, what's important about nepantla that is a point of contact between the world
of nature and the world of the spirit, between humans and the -- I don't know what to say.
The numinous, the divine, that these other worlds, del otro mundo.
Does that make sense to you?
Have any of you been in that state?
Ha, ha, ha.