A identidade mestiza enraizada nas fronteiras entre ‘‘To live in the bordelands means you’’ de Gloria Anzaldúa e ‘‘Rooting’’ (the sun and her flowers) de Rupi Kaur

Abstract

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 contributed 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 these contexts. In this contemporary context in which we find ourselves, where the flexibilization of cultural thresholds displace individuals physically and symbolically, it becomes interesting to support the study of identity in the conception of the city, for example, especially when we consider it as a space for the materialization of the symbolic set of a society. In the attempt to give meaning to a complex reality of feelings that emerge from the various social identity loci, the figure of the poet emerges invested with the task of, through the poetic text, capturing and recording the cultural scenario and offering back to society the opportunity to transform not only itself, but also the panorama in which it finds itself. In this context, the chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa adds to the debate by introducing in her famous poem ‘‘To Live in the Borderlands means you’’, 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 attributes 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 identity that is formed in this liquid and flexible modernity.