concrete, material reality of language, Anzaldúa closely associates language with matter.

Identity formation (which involves “reading” and “writing” oneself and the world) is an alchemical process that synthesizes the dualities, contradictions, and perspectives from these different selves and worlds.

In these imaginings I process feelings, traumas, negativities resulting from gender, racial, or other oppressions, and I mourn my losses.

epistemology and ontology (knowing and being) are intimately interrelated—

ethics of interconnectivity, which she describes as the act of reaching through the wounds—

various sub-personalities inhabiting me and the various grounds they speak from.

Writing is a process of discovery and

I believe that meditation on and conscious awareness of the image’s

speaker. I “speak in tongues”—understand the languages, emotions, thoughts, fantasies of the