sister outsider
sister outsider (1984) by audre lorde via 115 pg kindle version from anarchist library [https://usa.anarchistlibraries.net/library/audre-lorde-sister-outsider-essays-and-speeches]
notes/quotes:
4
intro
But what about the “conflict” between poetry and theory, between their separate and seemingly incompatible spheres? We have been told that poetry expresses what we feel, and theory states what we know; that the poet creates out of the heat of the moment, while the theorist’s mode is, of necessity, cool and reasoned; that one is art and therefore experienced “subjectively,” and the other is scholarship, held accountable in the “objective” world of ideas. We have been told that poetry has a soul and theory has a mind and that we have to choose between them.
The white western patriarchal ordering of things requires that we believe there is an inherent conflict between what we feel and what we think—between poetry and theory. We are easier to control when one part of our selves is split from another, fragmented, off balance...t There are other configurations, however, other ways of experiencing the world, though they are often difficult to name. We can sense them and seek their articulation. Because it is the work of feminism to make connections, to heal unnecessary divisions, Sister Outsider is a reason for hope.
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Audre Lorde’s writing is an impulse toward wholeness. What she says and how she says it engages us both emotionally and intellectually. She writes from the particulars of who she is: Black woman, lesbian, feminist, mother of two children, daughter of Grenadian immigrants, educator, cancer survivor, activist. She creates material from the dailiness of her life that we can use to help shape ours. Out of her desire for wholeness, her need to encompass and address all the parts of herself, she teaches us about the significance of difference—“that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.
A white Jewish lesbian mother, I first read “Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist’s Response” several years ago as I was struggling to accept the inevitability of my prepubescent son’s eventual manhood. Not only would this boy of mine become a man physically, but he might act like one. This awareness turned into a major crisis for me at a time and place when virtually all the lesbian mothers I knew (who I realized, with hindsight, were also white) either insisted that their “androgynous” male children would stay that way, would not grow up to be sexist/misogynist men, or were pressured to choose between a separatist vision of community and their sons. I felt trapped by a narrow range of options.
Lorde, however, had wider vision. She started with the reality of her child’s approaching manhood (“Our sons will not grown into women”) and then asked what kind of man he would become. She saw clearly that she could both love her son fiercely and let him go. In fact, for their mutual survival, she had no choice but to let him go, to teach him that she “did not exist to do his feeling for him.”
Lorde and I are both lesbian mothers who have had to teach our boys to do their own emotional work. But her son Jonathan is Black and my son Joshua is white and that is not a trivial difference in a racist society, despite their common manhood. As Lorde has written elsewhere:
Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying.
I read “Man Child,” and it was one of those occasions when I can remember something major shifting inside me.
I came to understand it was not merely that Lorde knew more about raising sons than I did, although I had been given expert advice. I realized how directly Lorde’s knowledge was tied to her difference—those realities of Blackness and lesbianism that placed her outside the dominant society. She had information that I, a white woman who had lived most of my life in a middle-class heterosexual world, did not have, information I could use, information I needed.
For in order to survive, those of us for whom oppression is as american as apple pie have always had to be watchers
not if we let go enough to try/see life over survival ness
6
I was ashamed by my arrogance, frightened that my ignorance would be exposed, and ultimately excited by the possibilities becoming available to me. I made a promise to my future to try and listen to those voices, in others and in myself, that knew what they knew precisely because they were different. I wanted to hear what they had to tell me.
Of course, the reverberations continue.
When I read “Man Child” again several years later, having done a lot of work reclaiming my Jewish identity in the interim, I thought about the complexities of my son being a white Jewish man in a white Christian society. I had not seen this as an issue the first time around; it is hard now to reconstruct my shortsightedness.
When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I’m not excluding you from the joining—I’m broadening the joining.
perhaps.. but spending energies on irrelevant s.. marsh label law et al
There is a further reduction of the distance between feeling and thinking as we become aware of Lorde’s internal process. We watch her move from “the chaos of knowledge … that dark and true depth within each of us that nurtures vision” to “the heretical actions that our dreams imply.” Understanding—the figuring out and piecing together, the moving from one place to the next, provides the connections.
What understanding begins to do is to make knowledge available for use, and that’s the urgency, that’s the push, that’s the drive.
rather.. that’s the cancerous distraction
Movement is intentional and life-sustaining.
Nowhere is this intentionality more evident than in “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” Here Lorde grapples with a possible diagnosis of cancer. “I had the feeling, probably a body sense, that life was never going to be the same….” She deals in public, at an academic gathering, in front of 700 women. She tells us that she is afraid but that silence is not a protection.
And it [speaking] is never without fear; of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now, that if I were to have been born mute, and had maintained an oath of silence my whole life for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective.
Lorde’s commitment to confront the worst so that she is freed to experience the best is unshakeable. Although Sister Outsider spans almost a decade of her work, nine of the fifteen pieces in this book were written in the two years following Lorde’s discovery that she might have/did have cancer. In the process of her growth, her coming to terms and using what she has learned, she shows us things we can take with us in our struggles for survival, no matter what our particular “worst” may be.
What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?
7
Audre Lorde asks no more of us than she does of herself: that we pay attention to those voices we have been taught to distrust, that we articulate what they teach us, that we act upon what we know. Just as she develops themes, reworking and building on them over time to create theory, so, too, can we integrate the material of our lives.
I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself.
—NANCY K. BEREANO
December 19838
Notes from a Trip to Russia
15
She offered me the hospitality of her house, and even though we did not speak the same language, I felt that she was a woman like myself, wishing that all of our children could live in peace upon their own earth, somehow make fruitful the power of their own hands.
16
The peoples of the Soviet Union, in many respects, impress me as people who can not yet afford to be honest. When they can be they will either blossom into a marvel or sink into decay. What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope. I think that in America there are certain kinds of problems and in Russia there are certain kinds of problems, but basically, when you find people who start from a position where human beings are at the core, as opposed to a position where profit is at the core, the solutions can be very different. I wonder how similar human problems will be solved. But I am not always convinced that human beings are at the core here, either, although there is more lip service done to that idea than in the U.S.
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He pondered that a little while and then he asked, do Black people have to pay for their doctors, too? Because that’s what TV programs had said. I smiled a little at this and told him it’s not only Black people who have to pay for doctors and medical care; all people in America have to. Ah, he said. And suppose you don’t have the money to pay? Well, I said, if you don’t have the money to pay, sometimes you died. And there was no mistaking my gesture, even though he had to wait for the translator to translate it. We left him looking absolutely nonplussed, standing in the middle of the square with his mouth open and his hand under his chin staring after me, as in utter amazement that human beings could die from lack of medical care. It’s things like that that keep me dreaming about Russia long after I’ve returned.
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Poetry Is Not a Luxury
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The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action
26
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
27
Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving
skim
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An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich
59
By then I’d learned how to talk. Things weren’t all concise or refined, but enough of it got through to them; their own processes would start. I came to realize that in one term that is the most you can do. There are people who can give chunks of information, perhaps, but that was not what I was about. The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot. And then, just possibly, hopefully, it goes home, or on.
60
Audre: But I do think that we have been taught to think, to codify information in certain old ways, to learn, to understand in certain ways. The possible shapes of what has not been before exist only in that back place, where we keep those unnamed, untamed longings for something different and beyond what is now called possible, and to which our understanding can only build roads, But we have been taught to deny those fruitful areas of ourselves. I personally believe that the Black mother exists more in women; yet she is the name for a humanity that men are not without. But they have taken a position against that piece of themselves, and it is a world position, a position throughout time. And I’ve said this to you before, Adrienne, I feel that we’re evolving. In terms of a species …
black science of people/whales law et al
62
Adrienne: Yes, but it’s not a wipeout of your modus. Because I don’t think my modus in unintuitive, right? And one of the crosses I’ve borne all my life is being told that I’m rational, logical, cool — I am not cool, and I’m not rational and logical in that icy sense. But there’s a way in which, trying to translate from your experience to mine, I do need to hear chapter and verse from time to time. I’m afraid of it all slipping away into: “Ah, yes, I understand you.” You remember, that telephone conversation was in connection with the essay I was writing on feminism and racism. I was trying to say to you, don’t let’s let this evolve into “You don’t understand me” or “I can’t understand you” or “Yes, of course we understand each other because we love each other.” That’s bullshit. So if I ask for documentation, it’s because I take seriously the spaces between us that difference has created, that racism has created. There are times when I simply cannot assume that I know what you know, unless you show me what you mean.
lanier beyond words law et al
Audre: But I’m used to associating a request for documentation as a questioning of my perceptions, an attempt to devalue what I’m in the process of discovering.
Adrienne: It’s not. Help me to perceive what you perceive. That’s what I’m trying to say to you.
Audre: But documentation does not help one perceive. At best it only analyzes the perception. At worst, it provides a screen by which to avoid concentrating on the core revelation, following it down to how it feels. Again, knowledge and understanding. They can function in concert, but they don’t replace each other. But I’m not rejecting your need for documentation.
63
So at certain stages that request for documentation is a blinder, a questioning of my perceptions. Someone once said to me that I hadn’t documented the goddess in Africa, the woman bond that moves throughout The Black Unicorn. I had to laugh. I’m a poet, not a historian. I’ve shared my knowledge, I hope. Now you go document it, if you wish.
I don’t know about you, Adrienne, but I have a difficult enough time making my perceptions verbal, tapping that deep place, forming that handle, and documentation at that point is often useless. Perceptions precede analysis just as visions precede action or accomplishments. It’s like getting a poem …
That’s the only thing I’ve had to fight with, my whole life, preserving my perceptions of how things are, and later, learning how to accept and correct at the same time. Doing this in the face of tremendous opposition and cruel judgment. And I spent a long time questioning my perceptions and my interior knowledge, not dealing with them, being tripped by them.
need: tech w/o judgment
Adrienne: Well, I think that there’s another element in all this between us. Certainly in that particular conversation on the telephone where I said you have to tell me chapter and verse. I’ve had great resistance to some of your perceptions. They can be very painful to me. Perceptions about what goes on between us, what goes on between Black and white people, what goes on between Black and white women. So, it’s not that I can just accept your perceptions unblinkingly. Some of them are very hard for me. But I don’t want to deny them. I know I can’t afford to. I may have to take a long hard look and say, “Is this something I can use? What do I do with this?” I have to try to stand back and not become immersed in what you so forcefully are pronouncing. So there’s a piece of me that wants to resist wholly, and a piece that wants to accept wholly, and there’s some place in between where I have to find my own ground. What I can’t afford is either to wipe out your perceptions or to pretend I understand you when I don’t. And then, if it’s a question of racism — and I don’t mean just the overt violence out there but also all the differences in our ways of seeing — there’s always the question: “How do I use this? What do I do about it?”
Audre: “How much of this truth can I bear to see/ and still live/ unblinded?/ How much of this pain/ can I use?” What holds us all back is being unable to ask that crucial question, that essential step deflected. You know the piece I wrote for The Black Scholar? The piece was useful, but limited, because I didn’t ask some essential question. And not having asked myself that question, not having realized that it was a question, I was deflecting a lot of energy in that piece. I kept reading it over, thinking, this isn’t quite what it should be. I thought at the time I was holding back because it would be totally unacceptable in The Black Scholar. That wasn’t it, really. I was holding back because I had not asked myself the question: “Why is women loving women so threatening to Black men unless they want to assume the white male position?” It was a question of how much I could bear, and of not realizing I could bear more than I thought I could at the time. It was also a question of how could I use that perception other than just in rage or destruction.
66
The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
notes/quotes here: master’s tools will never dismantle master’s house
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Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference
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Unacknowledged class differences rob women of each others’ energy and creative insight. Recently a women’s magazine collective made the decision for one issue to print only prose, saying poetry was a less “rigorous” or “serious” art form. Yet even the form our creativity takes is often a class issue. Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper..t Over the last few years, writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one’s own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time. The actual requirements to produce the visual arts also help determine, along class lines, whose art is whose. In this day of inflated prices for material, who are our sculptors, our painters, our photographers? When we speak of a broadly based women’s culture, we need to be aware of the effect of class and economic differences on the supplies available for producing art.
80
I am a lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly because I work in a university. If their full bellies make me fail to recognize my commonality with a woman of Color whose children do not eat because she cannot find work, or who has no children because her insides are rotted from home abortions and sterilization; if I fail to recognize the lesbian who chooses not to have children, the woman who remains closeted because her homophobic community is her only life support, the woman who chooses silence instead of another death, the woman who is terrified lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or for further separation. I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you.
but goes deeper than ‘any woman unfree’.. or ‘any person of color chained’.. has to be none of us are free (aka: all of us) for the dance to dance
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Learning from the 60s
82
As Black people, if there is one thing we can learn from the 60s, it is how infinitely complex any move for liberation must be. For we must move against not only those forces which dehumanize us from the outside, but also against those oppressive values which we have been forced to take into ourselves. Through examining the combination of our triumphs and errors, we can examine the **dangers of an incomplete vision. Not to condemn that vision but to alter it, construct templates for possible futures, and ***focus our rage for change upon our enemies rather than upon each other. In the 1960s, the awakened anger of the Black community was often expressed, not vertically against the corruption of power and true sources of control over our lives, but horizontally toward those closest to us who mirrored our own impotence.
*need global detox leap
***if still enemiess ness.. not none of us are free ness.. (back to pg 80).. it’s all or none..
The 60s were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions. They were vital years of awakening, of pride, and of error. The civil rights and Black power movements rekindled possibilities for disenfranchised groups within this nation. *Even though we fought common enemies, at times the lure of individual solutions made us careless of each other. Sometimes we could not bear the face of each other’s differences because of what we feared those differences might say about ourselves. As if everybody can’t eventually be too Black, too white, too man, too woman. **But any future vision which can encompass all of us, by definition, must be complex and expanding, not easy to achieve. The answer to cold is heat, the answer to hunger is food. But there is no simple monolithic solution to racism, to sexism, to homophobia. There is only the conscious focusing within each of my days to move ***against them, wherever I come up against these particular manifestations of the same disease. By seeing who the we is, ****we learn to use our energies with greater precision against our enemies rather than against ourselves.
*having enemies is being careless of each other
**perhaps until now.. but now.. takes a lot of work ness is a red flag we’re doing it wrong.. there’s a nother way and we’re missing it.. for (blank)’s sake
***any form of re ness.. as cancerous distraction
****again.. if enemy ness.. already disturbing/unsettling/scrambling/against-ing
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But we must face with clarity and insight the lessons to be learned from the oversimplification of any struggle for self-awareness and liberation, or we will not rally the force we need to face the multidimensional threats to our survival in the 80s.
self awareness and lib is simple.. we keep disturbing that simplicity by not trusting the dance.. we’ve go to let go of perpetuating survival triage
There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives
actually there is if we go/listen deep enough.. ie: missing pieces; problem deep enough; et al
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We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about — survival and growth.
this is and ie of whalespeak.. we need to try life over survival ness
Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them go hungry to bed at night. Recently, it was suggested that senior citizens be hired to work in atomic plants because they are close to the end of their lives anyway.
Can any one of us here still afford to believe that efforts to reclaim the future can be private or individual? Can any one here still afford to believe that the pursuit of liberation can be the sole and particular province of any one particular race, or sex, or age, or religion, or sexuality, or class?
96
If we can learn to give ourselves the recognition and acceptance that we have come to expect only from our mommas, Black women will be able to see each other much more clearly and deal with each other much more directly.
all people.. pearson unconditional law.. and the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
102
And the road to anger is paved with our unexpressed fear of each other’s judgment.
lewis anger law et al
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Suffering, on the other hand (comparing suffering to pain), is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain. When I live through pain without recognizing it, self-consciously, I rob myself of the power that can come from using that pain, the power to fuel some movement beyond it. I condemn myself to reliving that pain over and over and over whenever something close triggers it. And that is suffering, a seemingly inescapable cycle.
The revulsion on the woman’s face in the subway as she moves her coat away and I think she is seeing a roach. But I see the hatred in her eyes because she wants me to see the hatred in her eyes, because she wants me to know in only the way a child can know that I don’t belong alive in her world. If I’d been grown, I’d probably have laughed or snarled or been hurt, seen it for what it was. But I am five years old. I see it, I record it, I do not name it, so the experience is incomplete. It is not pain; it becomes suffering.
107
Grenada Revisited: An Interim Report
112
In addition to being a demonstration to the Caribbean community of what will happen to any country that dares to assume responsibility for its own destiny, the invasion of Grenada also serves as a naked warning to thirty million African-americans. Watch your step. We did it to them down there and we will not hesitate to do it to you. Internment camps. Interrogation booths. Isolation cells hastily built by U.S. occupation forces. Blindfolded stripped prisoners. House-to-house searches for phantom Cubans. Neighbors pressured to inform against each other. No strange gods before us. U.S. soldiers at roadblocks and airports, assisted by former members of Gairy’s infamous Mongoose Gang, carrying notebooks with lists of Bishop and PRG sympathizers. The tactics for quelling a conquered people. No courts, no charges, no legal process. Welfare, but no reparation for damaged businesses, destroyed homes and lives. Street passes. Imprisonment of “trouble-makers.” The new radio station blaring The Beach Boys rock group music hour after hour.
if ever want to add pg on grenada.. grab this last ch..
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be you. 