The World-Traveler, the New Mestiza, the Multiplicitous Self

In Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, Lugones describes world-traveling as primarily “an experience of acquired flexibility between one's experience of the life where one is constructed as an ‘outsider’ and where she is ‘more or less at home’” (Lugones Reference Lugones2003, 77). This flexibility, she asserts, is both a survival mechanism and a mechanism of resistance: on the one hand, the world-traveler's construction as an outsider requires her to move and mold in accordance with this construction and enables her to survive in different worlds. Yet it is precisely the experience of moving between worlds that can open possibilities of resistance, of loving relations. In this sense, the flexibility of world-traveling is both “required for the logic of oppression” and still opens a resistant possibility, as “it can be exercised resistantly by the outsider or by those who are at ease in the mainstream” (77). Precisely because of this duality in the experience of world-traveling, and precisely because it is not simply reducible to the logic of oppression, Lugones argues that it should be taken up, and taken up playfully.

The “worlds” that Lugones describes are worlds that are constructed through culture, language, shared history, personal history, and, at the same time, modes of oppression and modes of resistance. These worlds are related to societies; however, they do not have to be the entirety of the society, as a world can be one kind of “society given a non-dominant, a resistant construction, or it can be such a society . . . given an idiosyncratic construction” (87). In this sense, despite its construction in accordance with the lines of a society, a “world, nonetheless, is not an entire society: rather, it is closer to the modes of living and existing within that society” (87). For this reason, for example, Lugones emphasizes that not everyone who lives in the same society lives in the same world. To be at ease in a world, on the other hand, is a certain kind of a phenomenological experience.Footnote ¹ In such an experience, the “world” opens itself as possible for habitation through the normative happiness that comes into being in that world or being fluent in the norms and rules of that world. A world can present itself as inhabitable, for example, when the person shares a history with others in that world or is among the people whom she loves.

For Lugones, the world-traveler experiences becoming a different person in each world that she travels to: “those of us who are ‘world’-travelers have the distinct experience of being different in different “worlds” and of having the capacity to remember other ‘worlds’ and ourselves in them” (Lugones Reference Lugones2003, 89). Remembering oneself in different capacities and having different characteristics underlies the resistant community-building possibilities of the world-traveler. She can remember herself as being different in different worlds; thus her identity does not become ossified in the categories of one world.

However, not all worlds are inhabited with ease, and the categories that make up a world might be obscure to the world-traveler. For example, a world might be incomplete such that it does not present itself as full or inhabitable in the first place. Thus, “things in it (the world) may not be altogether constructed or some things may be constructed negatively (they are not what ‘they’ are in some other ‘world’)” (88). In this sense, a world can be incomplete because some of the fundamental logical systems of the world are not fulfilled. Thus, for example, a question such as “who counts as Hispanic?” would reveal the incompleteness of the category in the various worlds in which it is taken up, who counts as Hispanic being undecided in both Anglo contexts and Latina contexts. As a result, such worlds would continue functioning without a complete system, and continuously bending and shifting their categories in order to make sense of them. In these cases, the categories are purposefully incomplete, as they function to construe some of the inhabitants negatively, to exclude them from the category, or to be used as vague generalizations and empty signifiers, such as racist categories or ethnocentric stereotypes.

A world, however, can also be incomplete because it is filled with specters of people, imaginary people, or people who have passed on. Similarly, it can be incomplete because it is filled with unfulfilled promises, violence that was not registered, or justice not rendered. An incomplete world is filled with what Avery Gordon calls “ghosts,” ghosts that inhabit the line between what is visible and what is invisible, and continuously haunt a world, as a symptom of what is missing in that world; lives that were lost, or paths that were not taken, people who should have been there and yet are not, or inhabitants construed negatively and reduced to their empty signifiers (Gordon Reference Gordon2008, 63). These ghosts can conjure up entire worlds of their own absence. A world filled with ghosts is incomplete, because its ghosts are present and absent simultaneously: in their presence-absence, the ghosts remind us that the fundamental systems of such worlds do not quite work or make sense, and that parts of such worlds are missing. In this sense, ghosts do not complete the world inasmuch as that they mark the incompleteness of the world. A world shaped by racist or ethnocentric categories where many inhabitants are construed through these categories, for example, is a haunted world: these categories are empty beyond vague generalizations, and yet their emptiness renders the inhabitants absent, in the form of systemic violence and injustice. That is, they reduce the lives and existences of the inhabitants to racist and ethnocentric stereotypes. Traveling to such a world requires conjuring up the ghosts of this world, tracing what was lost in order to see the invisibility of what is not visible.

Indeed, many of the worlds to which the world-traveler travels may be incomplete; in many cases, the terms of the negotiation are not transparent to her. Inhabiting these worlds for the world-traveler is simultaneously a mode of dual existence and a shifting existence. Following Lugones's example, the world-traveler cohabits the world that construes her as a “stereotypical Latina” and singularly “Latina.” The complete terms of identification of the categories of “stereotypical Latina” and “Latina” are not transparent to the world-traveler, even though she simultaneously inhabits both. As such terms may not be completely transparent to the world-traveler, the person who she is in a particular world also may not be fully intelligible to the world-traveler: “there may be worlds that construct me in ways that I don't even understand. Or, it may be that I understand the construction, but do not hold it of myself” (Lugones Reference Lugones2003, 88). The attributes one takes on in different worlds can similarly change drastically between worlds: the question of being “serious” versus “playful,” for example, can present itself as an impossible question, where she might have extreme difficulty in the face of having to figure out which one she is (87). Hence, Lugones suggests that to travel between worlds can be a “schizophrenic” experience of ontological confusion, where the world-traveler enters states of profound perplexity.

What Lugones calls the “ontological confusion” here refers primarily to an experiential fact, rather than an ontic or ontological description of the identity of the world-traveler. The experience involves “going back and forth” between communities and worlds, and it makes up a fundamental aspect of world-traveling (86). Confusion thus refers to the shifts between the attributes of one's identity, but even more than that, the experience of a “shift from being one person to another person,” and primarily, having a “double-image” of oneself (89). Indeed, Lugones argues that the “ontological confusion” of the experience of traveling between worlds is “ontologically problematic,” for it brings up many questions regarding the identity of the world-traveler, her sense of being, as well as questions around the issue of noncontradiction (that is, how can she be “playful” and “not-playful,” or “herself” and “not-herself” at the same time?) (89). However, Lugones insists that her aim is to discuss the experience rather than the ontology of world-traveling. Thus, she states, “I am offering a description of experience, something that is true to experience, even if it is ontologically problematic. Though I would think that any account of identity that could not be true to this experience of outsiders to the mainstream would be faulty, even if ontologically unproblematic” (89). The problem involves the experience of shifting from being one person to being another, or even the confusion regarding having one attribute and not having it, often at the same time. Such an experience is ontologically problematic, or is experienced as ontologically confusing, because in and through these shifts, “one does not experience an underlying I” (90). In this sense, world-traveling is experienced as ontological confusion because the fundamental elements of ontology, such as an identity that would be attached to an “I” as an underlying subject, are challenged in this experience.

Such experience may have many forms: many of Lugones's examples involve remembering oneself and having a distinct memory of oneself. However, the shift itself “may not be willful or even conscious, and one may be completely unaware of being different in a different world and may not recognize that one is in a different world” (89). Especially when traveling between incomplete worlds, the world-traveler may not have a full memory of herself or of the terms by which she travels between these worlds. Lugones writes, for example, “I thought about what it is to be playful and what it is to play, and I did this thinking in a ‘world’ in which all those who know me as playful are imaginary beings” (83). The world in which she is thinking about playfulness, in this sense, is incomplete, for the categories that construe her as playful are not fully determined, and those who recognize her as playful are absent from such a world.

Traveling to and between incomplete worlds, the memories of the world-traveler make up not so much the distinct memories of herself being different, because the world-traveler may lose her memories of being different in different worlds. Indeed, as a result, she may be surprised at what she finds in her different versions of herself. Such a surprise in the face of finding just what belongs to one's own subjectivity and what does not is reminiscent of Anzaldúa's discussion of la nueva mestiza going through her backpack and taking inventory of what is hers and what she has inherited. La nueva mestiza “constantly has to shift out of habitual formations,” and therefore she has developed a tolerance for ambiguity for all of the norms, traditions, and histories that she inhabits (Anzaldúa Reference Anzaldúa1987, 102). As she “keeps her journal and address book, throws away the muni-bart metro maps, throws away the coins, finds her knife, can opener, eyebrow pencil, bones, pieces of bark, hierbas, eagle feather, snakeskin, tape recorder, the rattle and drum,” she is also simultaneously surprised by her baggage: the question of “just what did she inherit from the ancestors” is not a transparent question to la nueva mestiza, even though she did inherit them, and even though she has been carrying those worlds on her back (102). Resistance in this context involves putting “history through a sieve” in order to enact a “rupture with all oppressive traditions of all cultures and religions” (104). Similarly to experiencing the surprise that causes a rupture for la nueva mestiza, the world-traveler experiences “the shift from being one person to being a different person,” and such a shift makes up her resistant capabilities. However, just as the rupture of la nueva mestiza is both conscious and unconscious at the same time, the world-traveler may also forget how much memory she can carry between her worlds (Lugones Reference Lugones2003, 89). The rupture involved in the emergence of the new mestiza consciousness is not dependent on the memories that she carries, but rather her split from all oppressive traditions and cultures. Even though the world-traveler does the work of traveling, the complete process of this traveling may not be transparent to her, and what enables her to travel may not be remembering herself in different worlds, but refusing to be determined by the categories of such worlds.

Ortega discusses the ontological problems of the world-traveler in conjunction with the possibility and impossibility of memory. An important aspect of world-traveling is precisely the possibility of resistance that arises in the subjective formation of the world-traveler. In Lugones's account, because the world-traveler can remember herself as being a different person in a different world, she can travel resistantly and travel to the worlds where she herself constructs the terms of the world. As Ortega describes, “the self that is constructed as alien, as unwanted, as disposable in one world can travel to another world and find herself as resistant and as a constructor of new visions” (Ortega Reference Ortega2014, 92–93). However, Ortega asserts, the account of self-traveling implicit in Lugones's work undermines such a possibility of resistance. After all, if the world-traveler actually “becomes” a different person in different worlds, how much of these memories are taken up by the world-traveler? Thus, she asks, “does the self have multiple sets of memories? Does the self contain all my memories of all my experiences while traveling to different worlds? Since the self is different selves in different worlds, from what perspective does the self identify this difference” (97)? For Ortega, multiple dimensions that the self can experience in “worlds” account not so much for a “self-traveling,” but rather a multiplicitous understanding of the self, where “different attributes may be highlighted or animated in different worlds” (98). Hence, the multiplicitous self is one who can “occupy the same spatial location and yet have different senses of how they fare” (93). Even though different aspects or even contradictory aspects of oneself might be highlighted in different worlds, one can still have “continuity of experience through my temporality or mineness of a sense of how I am being and faring in a particular world” (98).

The emphasis on subjective formation and experiential continuity is especially important when thinking about resistance. The conditions under which the subject is formed, the decisions that she makes, and the agency that she has regarding the worlds she travels are questions that are deeply enmeshed with how much and what kinds of resistant capacities one might have. Ortega, in this sense, elaborates the multiplicitous self as a way of enabling agency to the world-traveler, where the “mineness” of experiences allows for the self's resistant tactics. Thus, she suggests, through having her mineness of experience, the multiplicitous self can deploy “home-tactics” to make herself comfortable in inhospitable worlds. She defines these tactics as the “everyday practices that multiplicitous selves can perform in order to have a sense of familiarity, ease, or belonging in a space” (98). These everyday practices are not only practices of traveling, but of tactical traveling, where the multiplicitous self learns to “make do” with what she has, through having the mineness of her home, even though that home is difficult to grasp or define (98).

It is, however, important to remember that, in worlds that are incomplete, the mineness of experience may be what is challenged in the experience of the world-traveler precisely because of fragmentations in memory. In worlds filled with ghosts, hospitable memories of ghosts are hard to come by, or as Gordon says, “it is no simple task to be hospitable when our home is not familiar, but is haunted and disturbed” (Gordon Reference Gordon2008, 58). Especially in the cases of travels between incomplete worlds, attaching resistant capacities to memory risks disallowing those resistances in the moments when the world-traveler does not have access to such continuity, or may have forgotten the transformations involved in such travelings. Indeed, memories of incomplete worlds disturb the distinctions between memory and forgetting, where what is remembered is simultaneously shaped by what is forgotten. To analyze the resistant capacities of world-traveling, it is necessary to interrogate what is involved in the “forgettings” of the world-traveler. When does she forget her travels? What effect does her forgetting have in her travels? To understand these questions, it is necessary to interrogate the impact of trauma and pain in the subjective formation of the world-traveler, and their impact on her resistant capacities.

Traumatic Memories, Haunted Forgettings

In Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa links the emergence of new mestiza consciousness to a “subconscious” event that brings together things that are in themselves not unifiable. La nueva mestiza, she says, is defined by tolerance for ambiguity and ambivalence. However, new mestiza consciousness is born not only from ambivalence, but also from the rupture of such ambivalence:

The experience of la mestiza is and was already shaped by a sense of ambivalence, where “she is subjected to a swamping of her psychological borders” (101). She has worked through borders and weights of different walls, and she has developed a certain “tolerance for ambiguity,” where she has a continuously “plural personality” (101). That tolerance of ambiguity, however, is not the same as new mestiza consciousness. Rather, the new mestiza consciousness is born as a “third element” out of precisely the disturbance of such tolerance, where la mestiza attempts to “work out a synthesis” by developing a new mode of coping (101). New mestiza consciousness is sourced in “intense pain,” Anzaldúa says, and yet what underlies the emergence of new mestiza consciousness is not what is carrying this pain, but rather her rupturing energy that enables her to break with all that is painful (101).

This analysis of a shock in experience that causes the emergence of a new consciousness is reminiscent of Cathy Caruth's notion of traumatic event-formation. For Caruth, trauma is shaped both by pain and its simultaneous forgetting. She suggests, “the historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all” (Caruth Reference Caruth1996, 17). The latency in coming to terms with the tactical experience of the event results from the realization of the traumatic experience as both too soon and too late at once, where the event that took place, and the pain that accompanies it, become impossible to attest to in and of itself. Thus, what is known about traumatic experience is always mixed with what is unknown or forgotten about it. La mestiza's surprise in going through her backpack and evaluating what she carries with her and “just how much she has inherited” could be a symptom of traumatic history as well as historical trauma. In this sense, the forgetting of history was already embedded in the experience of history, and there is no “retelling” that would capture and gather the entirety of that history. Colonial trauma, for example, can never be fully captured, neither in terms of the full scale of historical colonial violence (massacres, genocide, and exploitation) nor in terms of its impacts in the current lives of the colonized (in terms of systemic racism, imperial world construction, and poverty). If, as Anzaldúa states, the experience of the new consciousness involves a cultural collision or “un choque,” that shock, in Caruth's account, is the symptom of traumatic experience. Trauma, Caruth suggests, sets up profound epistemological and ontological challenges, precisely because the impossibility of the event is inscribed in the event itself.

This account of forgetting as a part of the structure of experience helps in understanding la nueva mestiza's surprise at her baggage, or the “confusion” that the world-traveler experiences. Traveling to and between incomplete worlds comes with traumatic pain that breaks the continuity of experience. However, Caruth's account suggests that there is a certain singularity to the event. In her account, the event is unique, or as Irene Visser says, similar to “a sudden, sharp piercing of a membrane, as, for instance, by a sharp object implanted in the psyche, where it remains in its original form, hidden behind the screen of consciousness, but making itself known through a series of symptoms” (Visser Reference Visser2015, 255). Such reference to a “sudden” or “singular” event that shocks the system does not account for the multiplicity of the worlds, both complete and incomplete, between which the world-traveler moves every day, nor does it account for the continuous work of such traveling. The continuity of world-traveling cannot be reduced to simple repetition, nor can it be reduced to the shock of an event that is repeated: the world-traveler moves between worlds every day, and those worlds do not replicate each other. In this sense, world-traveling does not repeat an event that is past, but rather continues its work in the present. As Michael Rothberg suggests, an event-based sense of trauma is insufficient because it presupposes “the completed past of a singular event—while colonial and postcolonial traumas persist into the present” (Rothberg Reference Rothberg2008, 230). Neither the perplexity of world-traveling to and between incomplete worlds where she may be construed as inferior or servile through racist or ethnocentric categories nor la mestiza's shock is reducible to the cut of a singular event, as they are the results of historical, cumulative experiences, of colonial violence, of loss, of uprootedness.

However, new mestiza consciousness is not reducible to colonial trauma, nor does the colonial trauma by itself and as such produce the rupturing energy of la nueva mestiza: what is at stake is an experience beyond the split among memory, forgetting, and repetition. Both the world-traveler's and la nueva mestiza's experiences suggest moments where the thin line between memory and forgetting becomes blurred, or where memory becomes forgettable and forgetting becomes memorable. When describing haunting, Gordon suggests that ghosts refer not to events past, but events that continue in the present and carry into the future; the experience of facing a ghost does not take the present to the past, but rather ruptures and punctuates the present. She writes, “to get to the ghost and the ghost's story, it is necessary to understand how the past, even if it is just the past that flickered by a moment before, can be seized in an instant, or how it might seize you first” (Gordon Reference Gordon2008, 164). The past of the haunting flashes into the present and future. For the world-traveler, this temporal structure is particularly important: the world-traveler can have visions of herself being different in different worlds. In a world where she is marginalized, for example, she can have an image of herself as being at home, or in a world where she is playful, she can see herself being serious at the same time.

Unlike the repetition of traumatic history, haunting is not a passive state; it is rather an “animated state” where the violence of history is “making itself known” (Gordon Reference Gordon2008, xvi). It does not mean only being affected by or construed by the past, but rather having a sense of the past in order to actively make known the violence of that past or the incompleteness of the world. Ghosts, Gordon asserts, carry messages. Haunting is a method of making a message known by way of bringing the past into the present in order to act on the future. Such an animation disturbs the seemingly clean-cut lines between the past and the present: unlike Caruth's traumatic temporality, the temporality of haunting is not the ruptured repetition of a time past, but rather the spiraling of the past into the present and into the future. In Gordon's words, “Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way they separate the past, the present, and the future” (xvi). As such, the experience of haunting defines a present that is infiltrated by the past and inseparable from it, a “moving present” as Gordon calls it, that moves from the past into the possibilities of the future (xvi).

Because this ordering of the present is filled with the past, the structure of memory in haunting does not work through the clear-cut distinctions between memory and forgetting, or memory and imagination. An incomplete world, a world full of ghosts, carries the message that “the gap between personal and the social, public and private, objective and subjective, is missing in the first place” (98). The experience of this message is that of ontological confusion or perplexity. For la nueva mestiza, perplexity, internal strife, and ambivalence are fundamental axes of subjective experience. Living with ghosts is always “leading you elsewhere, it is making you see things that you did not see before, it is making an impact on you; your relation to things that seemed separate or invisible is changing” (98). The world-traveler traveling to incomplete worlds, forgetting herself as different in a different world, or being haunted by the image of herself being different in different worlds, still can change the way she sees the possibilities of the current world that she inhabits. Such an experience of being haunted by her own image, in this sense, can enable the world-traveler to see what is incomplete in the world she is in, or the systems of logic that make up such incompleteness in the first place. Unlike actively remembering herself as different in a different world, the experience of haunting involves primarily the experience of discontinuity and incompleteness.

It is important to remember that animation, resistance, and activity make up the subjectivities of the world-traveler and la nueva mestiza: they are not figures of passive becoming, nor does obsolete forgetting shape them. Perplexity and forgetting, in this sense, are not markers of impossibility. As Gordon says, haunting, unlike trauma, always produces “something-to-be-done” (xvi). The acknowledgment of something-to-be-done works in line with Anzaldúa's distinction of reacting and acting: reacting, she suggests, is always locked in a duality with what it is acting against. In such a “mortal combat,” reaction becomes inseparable from, and in turn limited by, what it is reacting against (Anzaldúa Reference Anzaldúa1987, 100). New mestiza consciousness stems from the decision to “act and not react,” a mode of resistant action that does not define itself primarily through the terms of the oppressor and oppression (100).

For Lugones, the resistant work of world-traveling stems from the possibility of seeing oneself and others not only as victims or outsiders, but as “resisters” and “constructors of vision” (Lugones Reference Lugones2003, 97). For the world-traveler, just like la nueva mestiza, “rigidity means death” (Anzaldúa Reference Anzaldúa1987, 101). The work of world-traveling, therefore, is primarily to resist the rigid formations of the self. Playful world-traveling in particular presents the possibility of resisting because it enables one to understand the other and also to understand what it is to be oneself in the eyes of the other. Playfulness suggests an “openness to self-construction,” and openness that turns the activity into play, which is active and creative lack of regard for the rules of what to be and how to be (100).

In such a process of openness, memory and consciousness are dissociated. Indeed, for Lugones, much of the resistant capacity of world-traveling comes from the possibility of remembering oneself as different in different worlds, or having a vision of oneself in different worlds: playfulness, for example, suggests a resistant capacity that arises from the possibility of seeing oneself as either playful or not: the very possibility of the vision relies on a certain amount of remembrance. However, this shift does not have to be conscious: just like la nueva mestiza, the world-traveler's resistant capacity may even arise from the fact that the work is done unconsciously. She writes, “one does not pose as someone else, one does not pretend to be, for example, someone of a different personality or character or someone who uses space or language differently than the other person. Rather one is someone who has that personality or uses space or language in that particular way” (Lugones Reference Lugones2003, 99). One may not be conscious of the act of world-traveling and still might be doing it resistantly. Seeing oneself differently in different worlds, or understanding what it is to be oneself in a different world, is not necessarily reducible to a simple thought process of “if I were you and you were me.” The experience of world-traveling goes beyond posing; rather, it is an experience of becoming other: such an experience can take place in the form of haunting.

In travels to incomplete worlds, unconscious modes of travel are particularly important in thinking about one's own formation in these worlds, and the resistant possibilities that one can enact there. The image one has of being different in an incomplete world can be experienced as a kind of haunting, where the ontological confusion may entail the temporal dissociation of the present from the past. As Lugones says, there are worlds “we enter at our own risk” (101). These are worlds that are not made of singular events that cut the membrane; incomplete worlds have “agon and antagonism as key elements of their ethos,” where these are not events that happen and pass, but rather find many shapes and forms (101). Even though one enters these worlds only out of necessity, forgetting the traveling in and through these worlds does not imply the shock of trauma. Instead, the world-traveler can be haunted by what is missing in these worlds and by the vision of herself being in a particular way in these worlds. The question, however, is: how can forgetting work resistantly? Moreover, what kind of a resistant agency can be construed based on such forgetting? How can an unconscious mode of traveling or a haunted memory enact the kind of rupture that causes the emergence of a new kind of consciousness or that would enable traveling resistantly? To understand such a blurring between forgetting and memory that can work resistantly, it is necessary to think about nontransparent memory-formation, and the possibility of resistance that is not dependent on transparent memories, but rather functions through animating opacities.

The Right to Opacity: Sedimented Soil of Worlds

Both the world-traveler and la nueva mestiza mark subjective formations that are inseparable from experiences of agon and experiences of forgetting. These, however, do not refer to a kind of trauma that would consist of the experience of a singular event that takes place in the past, that shocks the system: instead, world-traveling is a continuous motion where one might have a clear vision of herself being different in a different world, or she might be haunted by such a vision as well. Similarly, la nueva mestiza's forgetting of her history is not the forgetting of a completed past that is securely placed in a linear temporal structure and that leaves it only in the mode of repetition: instead, her forgetting about how much she has inherited is due to the incompleteness of the past and the infiltration of the present by the past. However, for both the world-traveler and la mestiza, forgetting and pain imply not the limitations of their subjectivity, but rather, fundamental aspects of their resistant capacities. Haunting does not block their agency but rather enables the emergence of new ties, new travels, and a new mode of consciousness. The question thus is, what kind of forgetting is at stake in such resistant activity? In other words, how can forgetting work resistantly, and what is it about forgetting that offers resistance?

Glissant argues that to think about resistant subjectivity beyond the shapes of colonial knowledge systems, it is necessary to interrogate transparency as a constitutive element of the subject. In this sense, to think about resistant subject-formation decolonially we must interrogate the assumption that subjects have access to their memories as they travel between worlds. For Glissant, such an assumption of transparency is fundamental to colonial subjectivity, which he describes as a “root” structure: a root that takes up everything that it encounters in order to delineate colonial and dominant knowledge systems. “The root is unique, a stock taking all upon itself and killing all around it” (Glissant Reference Glissant and Wing1990, 11). The expansion of root identity is legitimized through transparency. The root expands as much as it can assume clarity, as much as it can see. Transparency, in this sense, is not only an aspect but a necessity of dominant or mainstream subjectivity. Understanding through transparency is akin to Lugones's discussion of arrogant perception: it denotes a kind of understanding that is enmeshed with servitude and hierarchy, that identifies with others through the logic of servitude, thus annexing the being of others to one's own world. Transparent understanding is a mode of “grasping” the other. This “reductive transparency” is constituted by the assumption of a transparent subject, capable of understanding and “grasping” the entirety of the earth. The “inner space” of this subject is “as indefinitely explorable as the spaces of the earth” (24).Footnote ² Transparent subjects can understand themselves, holding their memories, exploring their experiences, and more than anything, projecting their universality onto the rest of being (62). In such projection of transparency, the subject is therefore ready, as Lugones cites Frye's analysis, to “perceive that others are for oneself and to proceed to arrogate their substance onto themselves” (Lugones Reference Lugones2003, 97).

With transparency as a defining category of colonial subjectivity, Glissant turns to opacity to point to what cannot be rendered completely visible or graspable. The expansion of the root creates holes and cavities in the soil that cannot be completely illuminated; similarly, opacity works through sediments, and alluviums that build up in the motion of the root. Opacity is formed in challenges to the transparent identity by marking what is not totalizable or rendered transparent in the motion of the root. In this sense, such opacity has its basis in traumatic experience, but is not reducible to such experience. For example, Glissant suggests, the colonial traumas of crossing the Atlantic Ocean on slave ships are experiences of opacity. These are experiences born out of the “abyss” he says; they are continuously present, but cannot be grasped or made transparent. The historical trauma involved in these experiences would thus become not the repetition of the events past, but rather an opaque present. All that is made colonially transparent is opaque at its bottom, and as much as the root identity makes transparent, it leaves behind experiences that cannot be rendered transparent.

The experience of opacity, on the other hand, is very much in line with the experience of ontological confusion: when the self is not transparent, the questions of “am I a playful person or not?” or “what attributes do I have?” do not open themselves up as answerable questions. The memories that one has of oneself as being serious or playful or as marginalized or victimized in incomplete worlds underlie the opacity of one's own experiences. Hence, one may forget oneself as marginalized precisely because traveling between incomplete worlds leaves behind experiences that are not prescribed in the logical systems of dominant subjectivity.

However, rather than undoing the possibilities of resistance, opacity is sedimented experience that constitutes a creative reservoir of resistance. Glissant writes, “transparency no longer seems to be the bottom of the mirror in which Western humanity reflected the world in its own image. There is opacity now at the bottom of the mirror, a whole alluvium deposited by populations, silt that is fertile, but, in actual fact, indistinct and unexplored even today . . .” (Glissant Reference Glissant and Wing1990, 187). Just like the emergence of new mestiza consciousness as a third element from the experience of both pain and ambivalence, opaque memories do not undo the worlds of the world-traveler. Rather, opacity forms an alluvium on which relations can be built. “Experience of the abyss lies inside and outside of the abyss” (7). It is a “continuous/discontinuous thing: the panic of the new land, the haunting of the former land, finally the alliance with the imposed land, suffered and redeemed” (7). The unknown of the abyss is twofold, then: on the one hand, just as the flexibility of world-traveling is necessary for the logic of oppression, the experience of the abyss is enmeshed in the trauma of violence. However, the abyss forms the silt of opacity, silt that cannot be used or explored transparently, and thus makes metamorphoses possible and enables the world-traveler to experience being different in different worlds. “The unconscious memory of the abyss served as the alluvium for metamorphoses” (7). The experience of the abyss does not incapacitate the subject, and the possibilities of resistance do not get lost in the abyss of forgetting. Instead, the experience of the abyss leaves behind an opaque soil that haunts the subject, which can then be taken up in the possibilities of forming new worlds and relations, or traveling to the world of others. Thus, the world-traveler can be playful in worlds resistantly, for example, or build playful and loving relations, or travel to others’ worlds, because she has such an opaque silt that underlies her experiences of world-traveling.Footnote ³ Glissant writes, “For us, and without exception, and no matter how much distance we keep, the abyss is also a projection of and perspective into the unknown” (8). This is an “unknown that doesn't terrify” because it marks that not all that is unknown is shaped by and incorporated into depths of the abyss (8).

The account of historical trauma in relation to personal experience that Glissant puts forth is especially helpful as it suggests that the opacity of experience denotes neither transparent memories that belong to a singular subject nor complete erasures of the histories that the subject inherits. Opacity provides a reservoir for resistance without assuming that the agon involved in the experience is something that can simply be done away with. It is important, in this sense, not to conflate opacity with “obscurity” and thereby overlook its resistant capacity by identifying it as a pathology to be overcome. “The opaque is not the obscure, though it is possible for it to be so and be accepted as such” (Glissant Reference Glissant and Wing1990, 191). The obscure denotes a stopping point, incomprehensibility beyond experience. Opacity, however, is not obscure, because it is alive and because it haunts the subject, both in what the subject carries from the past and experiences in the present. Resistance consists of animating this opacity without aiming to bring it to light. Building resistant relations entails establishing connection without attempting to render the other transparent and understandable. Unlike the arrogant perceiver's aim to annex the world of another into one's own existence, opaque travelings entail affirming independence. Thus, Glissant writes, “We clamor for the right to opacity for everyone” (194).

We can thus return to the forgettings of the world-traveler: traveling between worlds, and especially, between incomplete worlds is bound up with the experience of ontological confusion. The world-traveler experiences such ontological confusion because she not only remembers herself as being different, but also forgets being different in incomplete worlds that are shaped by agon, or she is haunted by her own image of being different in incomplete worlds. This experience of haunting is an experience of opacity, as it enables the world traveler to see what is incomplete in a world and the impossibility of rendering a world transparent, and still travel to and from such a world and do it resistantly.

One might be haunted by an image of oneself as being “servile” or “inferior” in an incomplete world, for example, and such haunting may enable one to see the ways in which the world that she inhabits construes someone else as servile or inferior. Such world-traveling does not have to entail remembering when and how one was construed as inferior, so much as animating that forgetting to see what is incomplete in the world that she inhabits and see that others may be construed incompletely in that world as well. It is thus not the completeness and transparency of memory that gives the world-traveler her force to travel or her playfulness. Playful world-traveling consists of building relations beyond the logic of “if I were you, and if you were me.” Seeing oneself through someone else's eyes is a possibility and an impossibility at once: it is a possibility insofar as it establishes connections: it acknowledges the multiplicity of worlds. It is, on the other hand, an impossibility, for it is bound up with opacity: the world-traveler travels through multiple abysses between her worlds, and carries the sediment of the abyss with her, where she not only remembers but also forgets herself being different in incomplete worlds. Her entering the world of another, therefore, is an opaque traveling, for it acknowledges both the impossibility of herself having complete memories of her travelings and the impossibility of understanding, or “grasping” the world of another. “Those who are outsiders to the mainstream can be known only insofar as they are known in several worlds and as world-travelers” (Lugones Reference Lugones2003, 92). Traveling to incomplete worlds necessitates understanding as opaque both oneself and the others in these worlds.Footnote ⁴ One travels between worlds through silts and alluviums deposited by other world-travelers and by one's previous experiences: it shocks the system, yes, but rather than cutting the membrane, these create sediments that become the soil for traveling between worlds.

Journeying through Ghosts: Opaque Memories of World-Traveling

Such an account of opacity can thus enable us to return to the world-traveler and what it means to “forget” or face “profound confusion” in determining whether one is a playful person. The work of the world-traveler is less a mode of self-traveling than a resistant mode of animating opacity. Lugones writes, “when I travel from one world to another, I have this image, this memory of myself as playful in this other world.” Such an image-memory, however, is less a clear and transparent one than the sediment on the mirror that creates what Lugones calls a “double-image” of oneself (Lugones Reference Lugones2003, 96).

The traveling “can materialize and animate both images at the same time”: animating these images, however, is not the same thing as transparently having access to all parts of one's being (92). Moreover, the experience does not entail highlighting different attributes of oneself: the images one may animate, for example, of being construed as inferior or servile do not make up the different attributes of oneself as much as the ways in which one is construed in different worlds. She writes, “I become an ambiguous being”: the ambiguity works to help one see the “double edges” of the world that she inhabits (92). A sense of separation from the image that she has of herself in a different world thus works to take away the unity of the “I” that she lives in: “I am saying that is me in another world, not because I recognize myself in that person; rather, the first person statement is non inferential” (92). The issue at stake is not only the problem of noncontradiction (that is, how can I be I and not-I at the same time?), but rather that of seeing what possibilities can be taken up from the worlds that one inhabits by understanding the images of oneself in those worlds. In other words, taking Lugones's issue of playfulness: to have a double image of oneself as playful and not playful in different worlds means not that one has different dimensions of the same identity, but the resistant possibilities of different worlds can be animated through having access to these images. Neither of these images would refer to the “true” or “core” self that is transparent to the subject (where she would be able to understand herself as unconditionally playful or unconditionally not-playful), but rather point to the opacity of the subject's sense of self in response to traveling between these worlds that aims to render her completely transparent (transparent as unequivocally playful or transparent as unequivocally serious). In this sense, the world-traveler can be haunted by these images of herself, and these would work not as a method of undoing her, but enabling her to act and resist. Such opacity is experienced as “ontological confusion,” the perplexity of traveling between worlds.

The work of traveling between worlds can be properly understood as an opaque work of traveling through haunted memories. Indeed, among the figures of this article—the refugee of a world on fire, the world-traveler, the multiplicitous self, and la nueva mestiza—their difficulty is that they have their roots in agon, in journey, in traveling. Trauma, however, refers not to an impasse to be overcome nor to the shocks and wounds of an event that cuts through the flesh. Instead, trauma is opaque: one can neither claim nor cherish it, but one cannot dismiss its existence either. Rather, it haunts one, and the resistant subjective formations of these figures are grounded on trauma: as such, it is the sedimented soil of the worlds in and through which the world-traveler journeys. The “refugee of a world on fire” is not one who aims to sublate trauma, but one for whom trauma is an actively opaque ground of resistance.