First impressions review: Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde

 

This was my first encounter with Audre Lorde’s work. If she had not mentioned that she considers herself primarily a poet and finds writing prose difficult I never would have guessed – because these essays, letters, and speeches contain some really powerful stuff! That poetic sensibility is certainly there, of course, as the words have a rhythm to them that pure prose authors rarely capture. I kept wanting to underline things every other paragraph, and for that reason I’m sure this is a collection I will come back to.

 

One of the things that particularly struck me was Lorde’s approach to inclusivity in social movements:

"The above forms of human blindness [racism, sexism, heterosexism, homophobia] 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." 

She, of course, was unfortunately in the position to hear a lot of white feminists dismissing her because she was black, and black people dismissing her because she was a feminist or a lesbian, and so on – and to see how destructive such attitudes are when it comes toward reaching what should be shared goals. While trans people don’t come up in this volume, given the recent prominence of TERF discourse I couldn’t help but think how the idea that differences between women and their experiences are important and good could be helpful*:

"If I participate, knowingly or otherwise, in my sister's oppression and she calls me on it, to answer her anger with my own...wastes energy. And yes, it is very difficult to stand still and listen to another woman's voice delineate an agony I do not share, or one to which I myself have contributed."

Or:

"Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women...know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with others identified as outside the structures…how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

 

(*Because no: Trans women and cis women are not exactly the same. But we experience overlapping kinds of oppressions - much as white and Black women, or straight and Sapphic women, or Black women and Black men, do - and would likewise be better off as allies than enemies!)

 

Notes from a trip to Russia

This is sort of a stream-of-consciousness reflection on a trip to the Soviet Union. The idea of dreaming about free healthcare after her return, and being struck by white people looking at her without learned animosity, was powerful. But also:

"The peoples of the Soviet Union...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."

 

Poetry is not a luxury

Now, a later section makes it obvious that the sentiment expressed by the title comes from Lorde’s own experience of being able to express herself more easily in poetry than in prose. But I would certainly agree to art (in general) not being a luxury, in that it can help to express the otherwise inexpressible and to imagine a different way of doing things.

“For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men…if what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core – the fountain – of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt…”

 

The transformation of silence into language and action

"that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners...and will still be no less afraid."

 

Scratching the surface: Some notes on barriers to women and loving

This essay focuses on the (artificial) conflict between Black men, Black straight women, and Black lesbians:

“The distortion of relationship which says ‘I disagree with you, so I must destroy you’ leaves us as Black people with basically uncreative victories…This kind of action is a prevalent error among oppressed peoples. It is based upon the false notion that there is only a limited and particular amount of freedom that must be divided between us.”

 

Uses of the erotic: The erotic as power

“The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women…For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it…emphasizes sensation without feeling.”

By “the erotic” Lorde instead means a conjunction of the sensual with what I guess you could call “life force”. As such, it is something that can be – but doesn’t HAVE to be – directly sexual.

 

Sexism: An American disease in blackface

This is a response to an article by Robert Staples, who charged that feminism was weakening the Black community and that Black feminism was merely white feminism in blackface. Which, as you might expect, gets a scathing retort:

“No reasonable Black man can possibly condone the rape and slaughter of Black women by Black men as a fitting response to capitalist oppression…Since it is Black women who are being abused…it is for Black women to decide whether or not sexism in the Black community is pathological. And we do not approach that discussion theoretically.”

 

An open letter to Mary Daly

This was in response to a book called ‘Gyn/Ecology’ that, despite starting off in a really promising way, excluded noneuropean women except as victims.  

“So the question arises in my mind, Mary, do you ever really read the work of Black women? Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea…? This is not a rhetorical question.”

 

Man child: A Black lesbian feminist’s response

This is a reflection on being the lesbian mother of a son, in which she muses on the future:
“And our sons must become men – such men as we hope our daughters, born and unborn, will be pleased to live among.”

Jonathan certainly sounds like a nice boy, as bright and thoughtful a young man as you might expect to come from such a mother.

“I work for a time when women with women, women with men, men with men, all share the work of a world that does not barter bread or self for obedience, nor beauty, nor love. And in that world we will raise our children free to choose how best to fulfill themselves.”

 

An interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich

A wide-ranging interview, covering topics including Lorde’s relationship with her mother, her difficulty in expressing herself in words before she discovered poetry, getting into teaching, and more.

“There had been a very uneasy dialogue between me and the Harlem Writer’s Guild where I felt I was tolerated but never really accepted – that I was both crazy and queer but would grow out of it all…It reduplicated my family, you see. In my family it was: ‘You’re a Lorde, so that makes you special…But you’re not our kind of Lorde…’”

 

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house

Ah, the most famous quote! In this case it is used as the title of an address to the academic feminists on the systematic exclusion of poor women and women of color, and the damage that does to a proper understanding of the change that is needed in the world. 

“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism…Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening.”

 

Age, race, class, and sex: Women redefining difference

Continuing the theme of the previous piece, Lorde addresses the “mythical norm” that serves to divide people who naturally differ in a myriad of ways.

“Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all…we speak not of human difference, but of human deviance.”

Regarding poetry, dismissed by a women’s magazine as a less serious art form, she makes a good point that I had not considered: that poetry is the art of the poor because it can be though up and scribbled down on spare scraps of paper when you have a spare moment.

 

The uses of anger: Women responding to racism

“My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger…for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing.”

Because anger, unlike hatred, can be proper fuel for action and change.

“Everything can be used / except what is wasteful / (you will need / to remember this when you are accused of destruction)”

 

Learning from the 60s

Here Lorde reflects on Malcolm X, the expansion of his vision in the last year of his life, and what can be learned looking back from the ‘80s on the movements of the ‘60s.

"Any future vision which can encompass all of us, by definition, must be complex and expanding...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."

 

Eye to eye: Black women, hatred, and anger

This is a very personal one, in which Lorde reflects on how much hatred Black women have had to “metabolize”, and how that influences their tendency to view each other with suspicion. Because if the whole world has been trying to teach you to hate yourself, how can you not be tempted to turn on someone who most reminds you of that self, especially if they are “doing it wrong”? And yet there is simultaneously a yearning for connection.

“I know the anger that lies inside me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be angry than to be hurt…Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other.”

 

Grenada revisited

Speaking of anger…in this essay, Lorde visits her mother’s home island of Grenada not long after the US invaded, undoing any progress the People’s Revolutionary Government had made in combatting unemployment, improving local food production, etc.

“I also came for reassurance, to see if Grenada had survived the onslaught of the most powerful nation on earth. She has. Grenada is bruised but very much alive… ‘Forward ever, backward never’ is more than a mere whistle in the present dark.”