To Be Here, part 1

part 1. lorde
What does Lorde teach us about how we can lovingly and critically inhabit a struggle that we are IN?

i read Audre Lorde's "Scratching the Surface" in transit to a workshop that I was about to facilitate about multi-issue organizing. At the end of the workshop, I had used at least three quotes directly from the piece to help me articulate my point.

Two themes resonated with me most strongly in this piece: 1) the idea of naming a different enemy and what that means for multi-issue organizing and 2) the idea of (and complications in) critically inhabiting a struggle you are in.

sometimes i feel like i talk a lot about multi-issue organizing and what it means and why its necessary for liberation and i get a lot of blank stares. many times i'm not sure exactly what i am talking about myself. i had the opportunity this year to start a workshop series that uses the life experiences and identities of members of the community i work in Queens to explore the ways that oppressions intersect in really concrete terms as a way to de-mystify, de-academicize, and breakdown this big bulky ambiguous term and get on to doing it, instead of just philosophizing about it. its called stay ALERT (activism, leadership, and education for a radical takeover) and im generally really proud of it (have i mentioned it before? sorry.) the series has met 10 times so far and has had great workshops and not so good workshops. we usually have a small number of really engaged participants who come as a favor to me but don't really know what the fuck i'm talking about before the sessions begin. by the end, we've usually all moved somewhere together and that is really fabulous. although this little workshop series is the most meaningful part of my job, i often dread planning the workshops. i think i figured out why. i have to constantly remind myself what i am talking about. forcing myself to do that in real terms can be really hard.

so when i happened to read this piece by Lorde on my way to the next workshop, i was in a particularly ripe place to appreciate and be in awe of the way the words worked together on the page. i was also ready for affirmation and encouragement. with these quotes (and applying them broadly) i had a deep sense of "ah-ha! i knew i was trying to say something legitimate.":

"Black women and Black men who recognize that the development of their particular strengths and interests does not diminish the other do not need to diffuse their energies fighting for control over each other." (pg. 46)

"The tactic of encouraging horizontal hostility to becloud more pressing issues of oppression is by new means new, nor limited to relations between women." (pg. 48)

"It is the structure at the top which desires changelessness and which profits from these apparently endless kitchen wars." (pg. 48)

i have added these to my "this is what i mean" toolbox that also includes the following quotes:
"If you let them red-bait, they'll race-bait; if you let them race-bait, they'll queen-bait. That's why we have to stick together." Allan Berube

"Because we no longer want others to impose their forms of being and thinking on us. We want to be free. And the only way to be free is to be so together. Because lack of freedom makes us the same." Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, 1997

"Don't you get it? They're trying to make us fight each other to keep us from uniting to win real change." Unknown, 2007

This article also helped me understand what I think Prof/Lex means by "to critically inhabit a struggle that we are IN." The way I interpret it is to be an active part of a movement and still be visibly/audibly critical of it without letting that criticism prevent you from engaging in the struggle. I wonder if that could extend to something like holding people accountable but loving/trusting/believing in them enough to want to call them out and hold them accountable and still work with them and work towards deeper understandings of oppression, instead of just writing people off or disengaging because the movement isn't perfect or because someone's analysis is deeply flawed. am i getting off-track here?

Lorde's constant attention to "keeping our attentions focused upon our real needs" and the importance she places on rising above distracting horizontal splintering helped me understand what it means to critically inhabit one's own struggle. yet, in one moment she says, "and within the homes of our Black communities today, it is not the Black lesbian who is battering and raping our underage girl-children out of displaced and sickening frustration." in this quote i think she does her piece a disservice. i suspect that she is at least partially responding to lesbophobic assertions that lesbians are perverse or are child molesters (help me out here). however, saying "i'm not the problem; you are." seems to go against what she is encouraging throughout her article. additionally, since domestic violence and abuse is a problem within lesbian families and communities (one that we rarely talk about) i wonder what this statement does to lesbian survivors of lesbian rape/abuse/violence. i wonder what it does to how we address LGBT domestic violence in LGBT spaces. i wonder how it works against Lorde's own critical inhabitation of the movement.