A meditation on Rosalila

To be oppressed is to experience loss as a result of the policies and cultural practices of powerful groups of people that have declared themselves to be different from other more vulnerable groups. This difference is crafted in ways that cannot be controlled, prevented, foreseen, or resisted. This means that living out our lives entails the daily process of creating our futures while enduring constant loss. For example, since September 11th, 2001, immigrant communities in the United States have been punished, watched, investigated, detained, and rejected by the U.S. government and large swaths of the American public. 

During the Obama administration, immigrant communities experienced the establishment of detention centers in every state and heightened deportation rates and accompanying enforcement strategies that have served mostly to isolate undocumented and allied immigrant communities. At the same time that the Latino community’s political power has become necessary, at least for the Democrats to win elections, we have experienced unparalleled policing, prosecution, detainment, and deportation. This community has turned out to vote in every election in increasing numbers at the same time that it has been expunged by the very same system of government it steadfastly stands for. This is an example of working from a place of loss. In this instance, the loss has been that of hope and trust in the foundations of this democracy. A place of loss is a place of paradox. 

Working from a place of loss,

with attention to that which is being forged

sometimes miraculously quickly,

most times slow. 

Each smile towards a White face

filled with angst,

an offering,

a tithe. 

Every moment spent maneuvering all the “no’s,”

a win,

a momentum building step

with an unsure ending. 

A breath  a step,

a day lived into night time,

the impossible achieved. 

One more day to endure this fight

so slow one cannot tell attack nor survival,

nor enemy combatant or friendly fire. 

To work from loss is to know that there are no rules that are forever etched in body memory, or that of mind. It is to know that that which has been discerned has nothing to do with you. One would think being an immigrant would be enough to be part of the immigrant movement, but not. Queer too, but not. Woman, not.  To work from loss is to know that all of which you are has been mined by both the oppressors and the liberators, and that nobody has asked how you might feel about that. You know that the freedom being sought, or the certainty bought, depends on your silence. That in the end, neither oppressor nor liberator really actually give a damn about what you think about your oppression or your freedom. 

We need to stop looking to the oppressors and the liberators for theirs is a fight we cannot afford. They will leave us with nothing to eat, drink, breathe, and stand in or for. We will not be able to regenerate the polar bears, or the water, or our dignity if we continue to look to them for answers, models, permission, omission, a fight, funding, validation, or a model. We simply must forge another way beyond the machineries of silence and ignorance they’ve built to keep us hostage in their dreams. There are no shortcuts here, despite the fact that they have run us out of time. Much like the road we’ve walked that has been laborious and unending and that has brought them certainty and freedom, we must build ways of our own. There are no shortcuts here but just the forging of the way through which we learn to love each other and ourselves as we have never seen, felt, or done. 

I am talking about a kind of love that is so robust that it bends along with the arc of history and steadies it. Those of us who work from loss know about this type of love because we live it, life happens from it and it ends in it. It can be found in the place where there is nothing left to lose and where people choose anyway to look after each other and each other’s children. I grew up in a place that used to be like this, before the promise of inclusion arrived through the maquileras and then Facebook. This place of love is in the actuality of exclusion, outside the gaze of the ones with certainty and freedom. This is the place many run from like goldfish trying to get out of the fish tank, fueled by the ignorance of the fragility of the ecosystem in which they live. 

Tzi-B’alam [1]

I am getting a tattoo and I have been doing some research on Altar Q in Copán, Honduras. It is a sacrificial altar that has on its four sides etched sculptures of the sixteen priest kings of the city. I am going to have Ruler 10, Moon Jaguar, etched onto my skin for a very simple reason.  He was a “consort of witches,” a man who consulted with powerful women to guide his reign. Tzi-B’alam, Moon Jaguar, leaves not much behind.  Not a recognizable stelae or grand proclamations.  Instead, he leaves behind a hidden temple within a temple called Rosalila. It is a place of worship and sacrifice that has transcended the ages and the cultural practices that would have seen it toppled, recycled and repurposed. Copán was found overtaken by the jungle.  Inside its tallest temple, another one, Rosalila, carefully embalmed by those who outlived Moon Jaguar. On Altar Q’s east side’s left hand side, Moon Jaguar’s likeness, now eroded by the weather, is a placeholder for the spirit of a man turned priest and king all at once. Moon Jaguar sought the wisdom of the women and in doing so reaches into the future and into my life with a fully conserved place through which I can imagine what worship and sacrifice meant then and mean now.

All this to say that I am like the temple of Rosalila, and also like the temple built around it, broken up by time and trees and dirt. It is the first line of defense you see. The outer shell that carries within it the precious uniqueness that cannot be simply seen. A way towards the precious and the sacred must be forged and carefully shaped through its forging. To “forge” implies a method, a process, and time spent on task. No shortcuts, just work. 

Temple within the temple [2]

No shortcuts there, or here, in the place most flee because it is uncertain and because it is where Empire feeds itself through oppression. Staying in this place means one must surrender certainty and a sense of individual freedom. Sure, I cannot, in the place where I stand, act as I wish as an individual. But honestly, who can, or should? I have an uncertain life that is filled with love, grace, generosity, and awe.

There are tunnels leading folks from the ground level to the innards of the temple encasing Rosalila. On each side of the tunnels, the rock of the belly of the broken down temple, in turn discernible mainly because its staircase stands after much work to put it back together. They didn’t know about Rosalila when they did this. It wasn’t found until much later. Later enough that when it was found they could not take it, or touch it, or claim it. It was a different day, forged by the toiling away at building indigenous criticism that told archaeologists they needed to cut it out with their Indiana Jones stunts.

Criticism always ought to emerge from love, which in practicality means:

0 1. Risking certainty and freedom to stand in our loving relationships with people, places, water, other species and the planet

0 2. Building community through ceremony, circles, shared resources, and intimacy

0 3. Making knowledge that generates hope and inspires courage

0 4. Making meaning that renders us a sovereign people

0 5. Making things that help us remember who we are along the arc of history

0 6. Creating sacredness through our words, deeds, dreams, grief, ceremonies, and relationships

This is so for many reasons but I will list only a few:

0 1. The oppressors/liberators have no time for love. They do not honor their relationships with the people they oppress/liberate. We must stop this. They refuse to accept the limitations of our condition as a species and thus seek to change our evolutionary trajectory. This cannot be. We must trust who we are. We must seek the conditions of life through which we thrive as a species. These conditions have everything to do with close knit relationships with others of our species, with place, with water and fire, with other species on the planet, and with the planet as whole.  Individuals cannot achieve these conditions as individuals. They achieve these conditions through their participation in loving relationships.  Loving relationships are mutual and are fundamentally transformative. They require each one’s participation and the sharing of each one’s gifts.

0 2. These relationships must be cultivated between two individuals and also collectively in the context of community. Engaging in the creation of ceremonial spaces cements a worldview that inspires its ongoing creation, because we do what we create and we create what we do. It is difficult to share resources and intimacy with people with whom you partake of no ceremony and for whom the order of their lives is rooted on an idea, not relationships.

0 3. Beyond the myth of discovery, of the Enlightenment era intellectual (oppressor), or that of the organic intellectual (liberator), is the collaborative intellectual that endeavors in the creation of knowledge to support communities thriving. There is no pretention of objectivity. Most definitely there is an investment in the well being of community. Does your work generate hope and therefore inspire courage? If not, then stop it. We do what we create and what we create is what we do. The value of intellectual pursuit can be about its practical application to support the well being of community. Community needs to be understood as a knowledge-making center that creates its own intellectual common wealth.

0 4. The meaning we are making and the meaning that is making us serves to create our senses of self so we can see ourselves in our true image, not through the skewed gaze of the oppressors/liberators. We can act of our own accord and in our own time. We can build our lives within these frameworks and make decisions. Marry, or not. Whatever.

0 5. What we create should withstand the passage of time. This way, as we forge our way into the future, we are constantly visited by that which we have left behind to guide us. Each of us should have our own Rosalila. We should know who our Moon Jaguars are. The Spanish burnt our books but they could not destroy that which they could not see.

0 6. My teacher John Mohawk used to laugh with abandon. He understood that the narrative of the place in which we live was an alternative reality he stepped in and out of every time he left or came back to his place among the Haudenosaunee. He could maintain this clarity because he had a daily discipline of connecting with the sacred history and current ways of living of his people. He was joyful and effortless and light. For those of us for whom the current hold of the oppressors/liberators and all their certainty and freedom date back to the late 1400s and early 1500s, this is a never-ending nightmare. We endure only because the sacred reminds us that we can learn, grieve, dream, and thrive through it all. We can transcend the narrative that tells us that Empire is eternal by experiencing in the flesh its failure to disappear us once and for all. As long as we endure, they fail. If we can remain whole, it is they who carry the burden of proof that their way is superior, not us. We must wake up from the longest nightmare in the history of the species and wake up to the reality of its insignificance.

As Black and Brown people, we must stand in the place our ancestors left for us and continue to forge our way into the future(s) they and we imagine. This is how they’ve done it, from the very hidden places left intact by the failure of imagination of the oppressors/liberators. We can do this mostly because it’s already been done for us. It is time for us to see ourselves in our true image and act.

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[1] Detail from Peabody Museum Altar Q picture, Altar Q at Copán, PM 2004.24.69. Web.

[2] Figure 6.1 from E. Wyllys Andres and William L. Fash’s Copán: The History of an Ancient Maya Kingdom.  Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research, 2005.