THE MESTIZA IDENTITY ROOTED ON THE BORDER IN ‘‘ROOTING’’ (THE SUN AND HER FLOWERS) BY RUPI KAUR AND ‘‘TO LIVE IN THE BORDELANDS’’ BY GLORIA ANZALDÚA
Glória Anzaldúa; Rupi Kaur; mestiza identity; Borderlands.
The idea of identity seems to have always followed and unsettled mankid. Particularly in the liquid modernity we currently live in, the influence of the digital information and communication technologies (DICT) have greatly contributed to the increase of interest upon it and its flexibilization for some new discussions about it. Because identity dialogues with many areas, it is tough to provide a closed and final definition. However, in Cultural Studies, theorists such as Stuart Hall (1992), Homi Bhabha (1994), Zygmunt Bauman (2001), among others, have contribued to the new reflections when, through the perspective of culture, study the transformations modern societies have been submitted to as well as the impact such changes have on the construction of the modern subject identity in this contexts. In this contexto, the chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa adds to the debate by introducing in her famous poem To Live in the Borderlands, the idea of a mestiza consciousness and the borderlands as its birthplace. By doing so, not only she supports Hall’s, Bhabha’s, and Bauman’s propositions that the liquid modernity contributes to the emergence of a fragmented or hybrid identity, but she also atributes great significance to the borderlands in the symbolic dimension when in the formation of the new consciousness. Similarly, in ‘‘rooting’’, a poem collection in ‘‘the sun and her flowers’’ (2017), Indian-Canadian poet Rupi Kaur explores the experience of an immigrant mestiza identity and its feeling of being a ‘‘bridge’’ between India and Canada. The theme shared between the two texts takes us to conduct a comparative analysis between texts, which allows us to observe that even though there is a common thematic ground between the poems because of its common topic and the genre choice, the time, geographical and linguistic crossroads lead each writer on a particular and individual textual path. Ultimately, even in the face of the simultaneous dialogue and distance between the texts, both Anzaldúa and Kaur succeed, through their texts, in advancing the discussion on the hybrid/mestiza indetity that is formed in this liquid and flexible modernity.