IN-BETWEEN
Author: Maria Mirassol
Gypsum dunes, White Sands National Monument, New
Mexico
“According to an Apache creation story, the Giver of Life told of a
coming deluge and directed White Painted Woman to an abalone shell. She took refuge in the floating shell until
the waters receded and the shell came to rest at White Sands, where she gave
birth to two children, Son of the Sun and Child of the Water. Also known as Changing Woman, she is the
greatest cultural hero of the Apache, who have lived in this area since the
1400s. She teaches how to rid the world
of evil, and she never ages, continually renewed to a youthful appearance in
the same way that these sands are continually re-created.”
video
links:
Helen Hardin: Changing Woman
http://www.firstpeople.us/pictures/art/odd-sizes/pt/Changing-Woman-828x1100.html
Navajo Changing Woman Basket by
Elsie Holiday Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpDz9IRbBfY
Changing Woman Conference
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeJP3GS6Py0&feature=related
State of: instability,
uncertainty, imbalance, inconstancy, alternation, anxiety, changeability,
disequilibrium, fluctuation, fluidity, hesitation, impermanence, inconsistency,
mutability, oscillation, precariousness, restlessness, shakiness,
unpredictability, unreliability, unsteadiness, vacillation, variability,
volatility, vulnerability, wavering,...
“There are places in this
world that are neither here nor there, neither up nor down, neither real nor
imaginary. These are the in-between
places, difficult to find and even more challenging to sustain. Yet they are the most fruitful places of
all. For in these liminal narrows a kind
of life takes place that is out of the ordinary, creative, and once in a while
genuinely magical.”
Places of transit
(stations and airport lounges, trams, shuttle buses, and check-in areas)
“In between zones where
all ties are suspended and time stretched to a sort of continuous present. Oases of nonbelonging, spaces of detachment.
No-(wo)man’s lands.”
Homi Bhabha refers to the “in-between” spaces
as “terrain[s] for elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal –
that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and
contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself….It is in the
emergence of the interstices – the overlap and displacement of domains of
difference – that the intersubjectivity and collective experiences of nationness,
community interest, or cultural value are negotiated.”
We also know from Ortiz that the “between” is transculturación: the “collision of cultures,” and
“denotes transition, passage, process” – it’s that “liminal zone without
clearly identifiable borders, where diverse cultures converge without merging.”
“The between…refers to that space of
translation where the self or one culture encounters, and more importantly, interacts
with an “other” or another culture. It is a fertile space, and disquieting,
because, if explored fully, it proves to be a sphere (or zone) in which one
both abandons and assumes associations.”
Although, the translator may exhaust all
physical, emotional and intellectual resources during the task of translation,
or rather while performing “a balancing act” within the in-between, there is an
outcome to the anguish: a discourse is constructed. “Somewhere between sacrifice and playfulness,
prison and transgression, submission to the code and aggression, obedience and
rebellion, assimilation and expression – there, in this apparently empty space,
its temple and its clandestinity, is where…discourse is constructed.