Oh my, so much time has passed since I began to reread Audre Lorde’s essays: those early musings on her birthday, followed by “Notes from a Trip to Russia”, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”, and “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action“.
But, since then, I’ve found references to her work in two other current reads—Matthew Salesses’ Craft in the Real World (2021)—thanks to Rebecca U for this recommendation—as well as Rehearsals for Living, a collection of letters by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2022). There’s also an entry to mark the day of Lorde’s death in Alice Walker’s edited journals, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire, so I’ve felt her presence even while reading in other directions.
This essay opens with concise definitions of ‘Racism’, ‘Sexism’, ‘Heterosexism’, and ‘Homophobia.” The body of the essay begins: “The above forms of human blindness stem from the same root—an inability to recognize the notion of difference as a dynamic human force, one which is enriching rather than threatening to the defined self, when there are shared goals.”
Here is one of the elements of Lorde’s philosophy that speaks most strongly and reassuringly to me. It’s a concept that I struggled to articulate for many years, what she calls a “blindness”—something that I intuitively felt surrounding me, unseen and insidious, something I could not articulate, when I was growing up in very small, homogeneous Ontario villages, towns, and small cities. Difference was something to avoid there—to resist, even, or to alienate or to attack. When I was a girl, different and isolated, I believed that my survival depended on remaining apart from any other children I recognised as different and isolated; I loved the stories I found later, of people who recognised themselves as different bonding with others who recognised themselves as different too—but that wasn’t my experience.
“The tactic of encouraging horizontal hostility to becloud more pressing issues of oppression is by no means new, nor limited to relations between women. The same tactic is used to encourage separation between Black women and Black men.”
This reminds me of comments I’ve read about how Toni Morrison was queried (challenged, even) about her male characters, figures every bit as complex and diverse as her female characters; sometimes they perpetrated violence, sometimes violence was perpetrated upon them. Morrison was willing to explore the ways that decisions made to exploit can emerge from within communities, too, not merely between communities.
I thought about Hilton Als’ conversation with her in The New Yorker in 2015, when Morrison comments on the historical knowledge that inspired her novel Paradise, the founding of a town that was supposed to be all about inclusion:
“They were poor. They were very black . . . what they call eight-rock. And so they were rejected by a certain group of other colored men. And so they went on and founded their own town. Unfortunately, they became as discriminatory and authoritarian as the people who had thrown them out or wouldn’t let them in.”
And, more directly akin to Audre Lorde’s statements, Morrison in her “final” interview with Donald M. Suggs Jr in 1986 (edited by Nikki Giovanni and published by Melville House in 2020) has this to say:
“The idea of ideological slaughter of the other is chewing up everybody’s intelligence. People are making the most unbelievable statements about the other based on that kind of insistence that the person who disagrees with you fundamentally can’t exist. These are political statements as well as biological and everything else. The hierarchy being established is what’s problematic.”
The importance of broadening the conversation while simultaneously working to rebalance learned hierarchies is just as challenging today, but the work continues. Consider this excerpt from an interview by Alexis Cheung with Hanya Yanagihara in the Oct/Nov 2017 issue of The Believer:
“…many writers write across difference of one kind or another. Sometimes the difference is large and recognizable: gender, or race, or religion, or sexuality. And sometimes the differences are smaller. Just as a writer endows every character with something of herself, so, too, should those characters be in some way distinctly different from herself. Where authors get into trouble is in trying to make those different characters stand in for whole groups of people, or for creating characters only to fetishize or explore their supposed otherness. Your character can be visibly different from you, as long as he’s written with respect and, moreover, specificity. His difference – and again, were talking about his difference to you, his creator – cannot be the only thing you know about him, or the only thing that makes him interesting to you.”
As readers, every decision that we make about what book to read is simultaneously a decision to not read another book. As the years pass in a reading life, the idea that there are going to be many books left unread takes on a fresh importance, urgency even. Increasingly, I want to choose the writers who are more concerned with storytelling than quarrelling, as Lorde describes it here:
“So instead of joining together to fight for more, we quarrel between ourselves for a larger slice of the one pie. Black women fight between ourselves over men, instead of pursuing and using who we are and our strengths for lasting change; Black women and men fight between ourselves over who has more of a right to freedom, instead of seeing each other’s struggles as part of our own and vital to our common goals; Black and white women fight between ourselves over who is the more pressed, instead of seeing those areas in which our causes are the same. (Of course, this last separation is worsened by the intransigent racism that white women too often fail to, or cannot, address in themselves.)”
Which brings me to another quotation, this time from Leon Forrest (Conversations with Leon Forrest):
“I want to look at the work. I don’t care if its white or black. I don’t agree that ‘If you’re white, you can’t write’. I want to see what they can do. I also don’t believe that because I am a man, I can’t write about women. I had better quit writing, if I can’t write about women. Why can’t women write about men? It’s talent that’s important.”
The current conversations about who has the right to tell stories are not current concerns but enduring concerns. And, just as Lorde’s essay underscores, flipping to the author photo on a book’s dust jacket isn’t a short-cut to determining whether a work is more about the telling or the quarreling.
This is what came to the fore, when I ruminated on the ideas in this short essay, but my thoughts could have coalesced around issues of gender and sex and the specific barriers for which Lorde’s essay is named.
Originally quotations from Adrienne Rich and Gerda Lerner anchored that intention, when I first began to write this post, but that’s one of the reasons that I love rereading these essays. They are preoccupied with core ideas that make you think and rethink.
Isn’t that the mark of a transformative read? When you finish Lorde’s essay, you fully comprehend the barriers she is discussing. When you continue to think about her essay, you recognise how it reverberates in your everyday life and your ever-evolving understanding of the world.
So much to think about here…. Things I often find myself thinking about as I read or write about a book. And I find that I still don’t know where I stand on some if it. I want to rely on “experts” to tell me how to think, but even they don’t agree. So I will have to think for myself, I guess.
It’s hard to accept that, somewhere along the line, we’ve gotten old enough that there aren’t always other older and wiser people to rely on for all the heavy thinking now, eh? Heheh
Yes!!
I agree with so much here, especially the ending re: transformative reads. You’ve come away anew, learning new things, but also seeing the world differently. There are only a few books that I can say have truly done that for me, and I still think of them from time to time.
Lorde’s writing sounds incredibly thoughtful, yet enduring. So much of what she’s talking about here has been re-hashed in Canlit lately (as you know) so I’m grateful to you for bringing this to our collective attention again, we can’t forget about these authors who touched upon these subjects decades ago!
I think of them, too, but I rarely take the time to spend more time of them. I feel as though I am too easily distracted by the new and shiny, too susceptible to overlooking those who came before.
Everywhere, I think, but yes, there are specific examples in CanLit that were running through my mind too. One situation here that I find relevant is having heard of some Indigenous nation members speaking out to endorse another writer’s perspective on their community and, simultaneously, some other members of the same community denouncing that writer’s perspective: good reminders that membership in any “community” isn’t monolithic, and that it’s no wonder people from outside that community have divided opinions on whether or not it was realistically/accurately represented on the page, given the variation in members’ perspectives. Complicated!
Fascinating post. I didn’t know of the existence of that Leon Forrest book. While I haven’t entirely warmed up to his novels, he interests me as someone who is a very Chicago writer.
IIRC there’s an interesting collection of interviews or essays or something in TPL.
What a thoughtful post, Marcie!
Makes me want to reread Lorde as well. I will try to get my own copy rather than library copy so I can take my time.
Difference as a “dynamic… enriching force”… what a concept! Hard to put into action when one is a young person, desperate to fit in – so sad that we learn these hierarchies so young in school and society, if not in our own families. It takes some undoing and the wisdom that age hopefully brings. Even for someone like me, with my half-Iranian heritage and my class issues (as a poor scholarship kid at a wealthy private school.)
She’s definitely worth rereading: I’ve been thinking about getting one of the newer editions for the thoughtful introductions I’ve heard about online.
When I was eight, we moved from a small city to a village where nearly everyone else was born into, and there began my experience of being on the outside. In hindsight, I remember two children who also transferred in, during the years I was there, who didn’t fit in either, and I wish I’d thought to befriend one of them, but it never occurred to me that they felt as out-of-place and isolated as I did. I can see where your situation would have left you feeling similarly fish-out-of-water-ish.
I’ve not read a lot of Toni Morrison, but I’ve just today finished Paradise (and before that Recatif) and I certainly have the impression that Morrison writes better/fuller women than men.
I don’t agree with Leon Forrest, but that is an argument for another day.
I grew up middle class, white and male in a society that was then almost totally white Anglo (when the other was Irish Catholics). Immigration from Italy and Greece in my late adolescence was my first introduction to people who were different, and they, within a generation were as middle class as the rest of us. I understand difference (I hope!) but it is an understanding that is learned rather than lived.
Even though I recall Paradise being poorly received at the time, it’s one of my favourites. That could be simply that I spent a lot more time with it, just reading a bit every few days. Curious to read your post when you get to it. The criticism she faced was more about the fact that she afforded her male characters the same qualities and complexities that she afforded her female characters, so they weren’t, for instance, “all bad” and perpetrators; some readers felt that a story commenting on misogyny and violence should draw unwavering lines between predator and prey.
Does that mean you also disagree with Hanya Yanagihara?
Is it possible, to have just learned it but not lived it? I made a conscious choice to leave homogeneity behind, literally; without living among people who embraced rather than feared difference, I’m not sure I could have developed the same understanding. Just thinking out loud here.
Isn’t it lovely when you find resonances with a book or author in other works. You remind me I should get back to Lorde…
Let’s face it, you just wanted to read the first essay, cuz it was right up your street! Hee hee