Clelia Rodríguez A Snail’s Memory of “Borders”

Clelia O. Rodríguez

A SNAIL’S MEMORY OF “BORDERS”

“The snail he lives in his hard-round house In the orchard, under the tree: Says he, “I have but a single room; But it’s large enough for me” —Anonymous

I write consciously that, my descendants, the Lenka, the Chorti-Maya and the Nawat peoples, manifest their knowledge in ways that are very reductionist in the English language or any of their sorority’s vicinity. The metaphors passed on to us through dreams, nightmares, and land-wrecked oral stories are barely the tip of the snail and its spiraling world of meanings. This is the story of a striped snail’s quest to unveil the arrival of a box marked with a big red sign that reads “HANDLE WITH CARE.” It takes the earth many dances around the sun to witness the stripes sliding through a mysterious move that only happens once every other century. The moon gets an invitation: “hide your light tonight.” Because it is only when the moon is naked that death is secured for the snail. The angle of this notion of border is a bit slimy. That’s the only trigger warning. Snails are the carriers of misunderstood light. My grandmother used to rush to the kitchen to get tons of salt every single time she saw one. She would extend her arm to avoid getting too close pouring and pouring and pouring the white powder as she cursed and cursed through her teeth. I learned the implications of rejection and prejudice when I saw these tiny beings shrugging to maintain the velocity of patience only to face the consequence of existing as non-humans. Just existing, really. I dreaded rain because it awaken the coarseness of the very dissolvable power of salt at the service of my grandmother’s eyes and intentions. That is when they surfaced out of nowhere like brown tears of the earth. They resurrected adorning the patio like the beauty marks of the forgotten Indigenous women in the family whose pictures are still collecting nostalgic dust in the memory of aging aunts living by a dying river because of deforestation. Snails meant abundance. Their presence was a reminder that rainbows were coming. Snails shared the land with us. I thought of the patio’s house as their home. “They know the underground world,” my grandfather would tell me. His presence in the house meant the snail’s backs savoured drops of water. My grandmother’s sought-after prize to liberate her repressed oppression had to take a break because her own oppressor was not going to let her oppress the creatures that liberated me from the reigns of the crosses that hanged on the walls, the witnesses of my first border.

Deep breath and I continue shortly because removing the finger from the pause button in the mechanical sequence of narrating oppression is only going to cease until my last nerve dies. Life at the borders is a lie. The guardians, land defenders, fire keepers, seed collectors and seed gatherers concur. Everything moves in an unknown notion of time to humans across the land. Time actually does not exist. Snails slow down as they please. They are simply not perceived. On the other hand, “Borders,” as in the mechanical bull with the tendency to move always closer to the right, and to the right, is always palpating in my head living rent-free making me ill until death do us apart. Coming in. Coming out. 24-7. As in I breathe-in “borders” and I exhale “borders” sort-of-thing. To witness how snails do not slow down because the burden of the word “borders” does weigh on them is to think-feel the political meaning of the word memory. It was as if herstory was releasing from history and I had been that generation that finally got to witness once again life after more than 500 years. My grandmother would stare at the snail’s agony. I would stare at her eyes seeing agony. The snails stared all around giving us back the spectacle of violence. Sort of like a simulacrum of a made-up hyphenated never-ending cycle of ‘hunger from games’ that ends no-where. I knew otherness the first time she hit me for questioning her. I knew otherness when she interrupted sweetness with saltiness. It hurt and I connected with the land. This experience made it much easier to take-off when I went out on a date with Orientalism and borders at the university. The body language of the snails gave me unlimited lessons on geography, distance, time, and space. Unlike birds getting away from predators and hurricane-like winds, the snails seemed to cheer a kind of pace I wish it was not real. I realized that my wish for them to run was only because I wanted them to learn how to run away and hide from death. That historical index began showing up as the fine print when filling out forms to prove my existence at every institution. Geography approached me to undo who I was, baptizing me with a subscription to a linear path. Under the paradigm of preventing insecurity, I had to be otherized to forget that the snail never intended to go to a place called Geography because it simply did not exist. I had to belong within the realm of ‘security.’ How else would the snails recoil from their first known refuge known to them upon birth? Their shells shadowed notions of knowledge my grandmother did not know because her father ripped apart her refuge imposing upon her crosses she carried until the walls of her house bounced back with relief. My grandmother referred to snails as INVASORES. My heart learned identity like that. The snails appeared in her memory when she went to the supermarket: ‘Do not forget to get the salt for the INVASORES.’ Her mind knew how to sanitize space. Her intentions marked the winter with a need to get rid of them no matter how much salt it took. The remains of

the salt even began accumulating in greyish tones plunging in our eyesight for an unnamed cemetery, a repository of her father’s, -’s, -’s, and sweaty -’s. IN-VASORES were at fault to be, to slide through, to emerge, to exist. The burden of the “-” is just it. That is the border. That which cannot be named followed by the word “father” just above. The “-” is the opposite to the snail’s silhouette. The linguistic innocence of the hyphen joining simply two words without any cultural repercussion is what the snail did not cross. My grandmother was not taught to be in community with snails because someone in a faraway Geography penned down on the surface of a myth that her hymen was in the historical position to embody border itself. The ‘it’ attached to the ‘self’ until death do us apart sort-of-thing. So long as the presence of flesh exists, borders exist. En el nombre del Padre, de la Iglesia y la Patria is the form where the “-” is contained. The trio sanctified the circular violence pronouncing who and what deserve not just to live but also to exist. The snails lived a little more when my grandfather was around. It was a temporary illusion to me. Just enough time to prolong the game of waiting for borrowed time. Like the pieces of paper known, as permits and visas. She knew of their existence because her own experience with violence reminded her that even if they were living things, she must make them suffer with semantics as the excuse. Snails taught me the noise borders leave behind because they shared the land with their siblings, including us. They touched the roots and the smell of the seeds before seedlings happened. They knew the nutrient that one morning, one afternoon, or one night was going to ignite life in our bodies through a life they had already met. They knew each of the faults, cracks, gaps of the space where roots stretched in all directions; they knew it all. Identity to them came from a Kingdom of pesticides from the North. That identity was Geography. The border came to the snails promising growth. That is how I learned time. Now I know that borders move and are not something that are stuck in a physical place. Snails taught me that borders live in us; they do not exist when reciprocity is present. When we move, they move. When we sleep, they rest too. Borders leech onto a system that moves one fragment of a second behind our usual heartbeat. They catch up with us in the actual act of being chased, of running away from them, of getting really close, the thrill of facing anything but the “-.” My grandmother had to get rid of the INVASORES because doing it allowed her never to forget how the border broke her. As a child, she had been robbed to exist in reciprocity with relatives like the snails. Cries and screams sanitized her body and the bodies of others that came afterward, generations left hanging in the void of a strange place that led no-where because the border itself is noise. Nowhere because borders mark nothing and everything within the logic of— ‘what is mine is not yours’—mentality. The greatest show on earth that spread like an invasion was individualism: individualism as the key— not just a key to get to the other

side— but to make money from making keys, from repairing of doors, from maintaining the structure and renovating it accordingly to one’s own interest. The no-where in the house, the patio, was a subliminal place because the father left in my grandmother’s body the sign that she was the border itself when the moon was not new. No matter how innocent, inoffensive, or cute the snails were, to her, they were meant to be eliminated, as if doing it so, would pause shortly where the border moved. It was only in this pause where she found the space to free up repression. That was the notion of freedom she knew. Each grain of salt was an escape, her own way to escape. When the pause ended, the border returned manifesting aloud that INVASORES were the unwanted thing. The span of patience was small and the window to kill the border dragging her along was endemic in the palm of her hands. Their diameter, to animate the border, extended and stretched as far away as the naked eye could see. No matter how the snails showed up, cruelty ultimately trapped them. Their retracted dried bodies ended up by the coconut tree where I began carving and destroying the walls surrounding me. Naming them lighten up the green leaves. One particular snail taught me how to wander through life without a care for a particular arrival point. It lived where it landed. It rested wisely. It was present in its own refuge, unbothered and connected to space. I told my grandfather about this particular snail because it reminded me of a jute, the kind he would bring to my grandmother for a special lunch. He told me to pay close attention because even though they looked similar they were different. Think of them as distant cousins, he would say, because if they have never met before, when and if they do, they would recognize each other knowing they came from the same river. That is how I knew that no matter where I was physically on planet earth I would find myself in front of relatives. At the border, the existence of this relationship is considered the invasion, what needs to be eliminated. My impatience to rush the snail was what was invasive. I was the invasive one. I was la INVASORA in the snail’s world. The border, as the living parasite sucking the soul out of our blood and our relatives, feeds of what they have taught us to fear: stillness, balance, wholeness and fluidity. Borders conceptualize because we depart wishing to live just to arrive. This is not dynamic. It is fixed because leaving point A is condemned to depend on point B. To undo it conceptually and embark on a path of our own, one that is anti-whatever-fill-in-the-blank-sort-of-newcutting-edge-terminology, deserves the pending story that cannot be written nor told. One single one that exists at the center of anonymity. One that is not escaping, or escalating anything, or elevating an ounce of air or one pound of salt, or showing up to signatures regulated by scanned fingerprints, or one that needs to prove anything under an x-ray machine.

The path of the snails showed me lessons that barely come out to play from the tips of my fingers. From the me, the I, the me-snail, the snail-

me, my experience with the snail, of the snail, on the snail, by the snail and about the snail in relation to its path, I am able to discern that in order for borders to disappear, our very own existence has to be acknowledged, claimed and recognized within us. Borders exist because we also build them. They are built in the back of our lack of compassion for our own communities when we are not even given the chance to heal. When healing descends to where the tears of the earth come from, the place of still silence – the silence we run away from because we love the addiction to noise - the snail shows us where creativity hangs out with love. It is a space where places are not a thing because a place depends on a map for coordination. It is where hands hear, and hearing touches, because everything swallows in one gulp every chain layered on top of the made-men border. You know, the one in the name of El Padre, La Iglesia y la Patria. The border that stops living things from experiencing thirst and hunger. The wall that begs for cries claiming it cannot hear you because the aid supply ran out of batteries shipped by the Federal Reserve thanks to the Crusaders whose glorious mission made it to the walls of my childhood house. Where the starring from top to bottom crossed the tiny border that got heavier once I bled the first time. The type of bleeding that snails, as our relatives, smell when the steps of living borders begin approaching them… more fatherly steps… The bleeding dried up the invention of natural borders. The Book of Existence has many of these Geographical notes making the natural divisions sound crispier and weigh less in the heaviness of language. Desertification, nonetheless. Death without a ceremony is a life that is not lived. Nothing that my grandmother did stopped me from leaving the sorrow of the constant breakup with life I witnessed unattended. The end of the snail’s path turned into the nothingness in the existence I had to claim as my body remembered a forgotten wound. I would record in the coconut tree the death of each snail, acknowledging life without understanding it. It was a yearly mourning when it rained. I call it ceremony now because in the oneway street connection to men-made borders I do not claim any death. It is their crime. Because as my grandfather and aunties have taught me, prior to the creation of geographical dimensions of whatever division that pops up in the quadrant of another tiny machine, there is, there was and there will be, underneath, the presence of untamed visions where liberation sheds the tears of the earth.

Clelia O. Rodríguez is a global scholar, author, mom and auntie, born and raised in the ancestral lands of the Nawat, the Chorti-Maya and the Lenka Peoples, what is presently El Salvador. She earned her MA and PhD from the University of Toronto. Before holding a Human Rights Traveling Study Abroad Professorship across three continents, United States, Nepal, Jordan, and Chile, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Ghana. Prior to teaching at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto about Decolonization in Education, Settler Colonialism, Pedagogies of Liberation, Popular Education, Social Action and Anti-Discriminatory based curricula, she was a Gender Academic University Advisor in Bolivia, as part of a partnership between CECI and Global Affairs Canada. Recently, she has collaborated with the University of Fort Hare teaching postgraduate workshops. She is currently developing a gender-based training program in Kenya working along-side the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology and Eco Green. She is the founder of SEEDS for Change, an educational transnational collective bringing together Black, Indigenous and people from the Global Majority to co-create pedagogies of liberation. She is committed to ancestral sustainable pedagogies, decolonizing approaches to learning and teaching beyond the binary, critical race and cultural theories, anti-oppressive transnational cooperation and learning in community. Her work has been published in the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, in the Journal of Popular Education, Critical Pedagogy and Militant Research in Chile, the Black Youth Project, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South, Radical Teacher: A Socialist, Feminist, and Anti-Racist Journal on the Theory and Practice of Teaching, Postcolonial Studies, Revista Iberoamericana, Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education and the Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. She recently received the 2022 ACPA Latinx Network Community Advancement Service Award for her support and encouragement towards the needs of Latinx students and professionals in higher education.