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Each of Us is Made of Diverse and Broken Pieces
You can call it ch’ixi, if that‘s one of your pieces
How much can we be at one time? Ch’ixi means we are more than one thing simultaneously. We are made of pieces.
In reading Un mundo ch’ixi es posible: Ensayos desde un presente en crisis, I thought about gender, ethnicity and language, and learning.
Gender
How much do we really want gender? We’re conflicted about that. Often, as the author Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui observes, women don’t want to be excluded from men’s groups, yet sometimes they don’t want to include men in women’s groups. In other words, sometimes it seems as though the very notion of gender itself is oppressive, and other times we do want to play those roles. It might depend on your perspective. It might depend on what you want, when you want it. It’s a double bind [“disyuntiva asfixiante”] for which we need “alguna forma de tejido intermedio” [some kind of intermediate tapestry].
Ch’ixi is the Aymara word for nonduality, simultaneously being and not-being a particular thing. It also refers to a mosaic style of art that includes colored spots in disequilibrium. It’s self-contradictory, yet it reveals what is possible. With ch’ixi, you can have a
“taypi o ‘zona de contacto’ (Pratt…
