I was particularly affected by Pat’s words on p. 11:

What terror embroidered my face
onto your hatred
what ancient unchallenged enemy
took on my sweet brown flesh
within your eyes
came armed against you
with only my laugther my hopeful art
my hair catching the late sunlight
my small son eager to see his mama work?
…

I need you. For what?
Was there no better place
to dig for your manhood except in my woman’s bone?

On the same page Bobbie says: “We have a grave need for each other / but your eyes are thirsty / for vengeance / dressed in the easiest blood / and I am closest.”

These verses speak back to those perpetrators of sexual violence who refuse to take responsibility for their actions. Men must be confronted with the bruised, battered, bloodied flesh that is the outcome of their sexual aggression. In a sense, they must “own” that aggression by bearing witness to its horrible consequences.

At the same time, Pat and Bobbie acknowledge the psychic wounds that fuel the illogic of sexual violence against black women. The idea of “misplaced hatred” (12) resonates throughout Lorde’s poem. An “ancient…enemy” is projected onto the black woman’s body, and violence is done to that body out of fear, anxiety, self-loathing, and “terror.”

Who or what is that ancient enemy? It’s not just racism Lorde is speaking of here: it’s a radical dehumanization, through racism but also through heteronormative patriarchy and capitalism (which breeds male insecurity and compensatory measures to escape “lack”), of the social and psychic life of black people. This is a problem of black people’s oppression tout court as it’s tragically played out in the sexual dehumanization of the black female body.

There’s a “grave,” or urgent, need for black men to realize this problem and to join their sisters in resisting racist-sexist structures of capitalist domination. But that collaboration recedes from the horizon when intergender need is literally taken to the grave — when black women aren’t fellow strugglers and insurgents but are the objects of putatively male needs: sexual gratification, domestic control, and violent, phallic sublimation.

Lorde’s troping on the idea of “need” is tragic and visionary. It captures a powerful social dynamic — a problem of racial, gender, and class politics as they inhere in rape-murder — and provokes us to ask other questions. What happens when we say — to lovers, friends, comrades, companions — “I need you”? Do we really mean it? In what ways do we mean it? On what, or whose, terms?

Or do you say

…you need me you need me you need me
a broken drum
calling me Black goddess Black hope Black
strength Black mother
yet you touch me
and I die in the alleys of Boston…

I think Lorde is doing what you suggest she is doing…trying to develop a way of critically belonging, revising a struggle from within.

Also…to provide some context for the statement about lesbians not being the ones committing violence against women in this essay…I think it may not live up to the ideals she is setting forth…but I a also see it as an attempt to create accountability. Lorde is not just talking about the pervasive domestic abuse that occurs within communities and movements routinely (though she is talking about that), she is specifically addressing a wave of murders of black women during this time period. The murder of 12 women in Boston is sometimes seen as the culmination of this moment but as Lorde mentions at the end of the essay she is also responding to murders of Detroit and New York that were going on during this time period. The language she uses here in “Scratching the Surface” leads into the language she will develop in “Need”, which we read earlier. I think she is trying to point out that lesbian-baiting is part of a broader devaluation of women, is part of what it means to transpose the received hatred of racism onto the bodies of women. I didn’t assign this…but a couple years after this essay was written James Baldwin and Audre Lorde have a conversation at Essence Magazine where she is specifically asking black men who are committed to black freedom to prioritize the task of teaching younger men approaches to masculinity that are not violent towards women. Baldwin has trouble with this. He seems to believe that the racism black men experience is so pervasive that their actions are completely determined by it…making this form of accountability impossible. Again, Balwdin’s analysis is sharpest when address what happens “between” (intra) separate communities. He is eloquent on the subject of how white people can be accountable to black people. But when it comes to this question of men’s accountability to women within the black community he goes to a surprisingly heteronormative and defensive place…trying to explain that black men are frustrated because of how it feels to have “my woman and my child” taken away from “me”.

Lorde is trying to counter the argument that black lesbians, simply be “being” or identifying as lesbians are killing the black community by refusing the normative family, by pointing out how the violence of patriarchalism, the violence of ENFORCING family upon women and girls can be much more deadly.

The other essay that this one folds into is “Eye to Eye:Black Women Hatred and Anger” where she explicitly talks about the ways that women enact the hatred they have experienced on each other. She is calling for accountability here as well. In each instance (abusive action from black men towards black women and black women towards black women) she is insisting that the hatred we experience through racism does not have to result in rage and violence towards each/other.

Anyway, I hope we can hear more about your series of workshops and how it is going. What is the range? There have been 10 workshops so far…how many will there be…or it ongoing indefinitely. How can those of us in the class support your work..learn more about it.
Thanks again for all of the thought that went into the post.
Blessings,
Prof/Lex

second one about Baldwin is coming soon!

At first Fanon uses the word to describe the ontological security of intraracial fraternity: “As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others” (109). Here Fanon sets up his profound analysis of interracial angst (the black man’s being as defined through the white other) by suggesting that intraracial fraternity doesn’t produce the visual torsion or traction that’s required of the “racial epidermal schema,” a kind of degree-zero Difference in social relations.

A little later Fanon will extend the logic of this insight by making the somewhat remarkable claim that the Nazi extermination of millions of European Jews was but an instance of “little family quarrels” (115). Again, intraracial relations — even an event as disastrous as the Holocaust — doesn’t quite get at the Difference Fanon is illustrating here.

Toward the end of the essay, when Fanon launches a brilliant critique of Sartre’s prefatory remarks to Black Orpheus, the term “minor” is brought up once more. But its usage here is distinct from its previous usage: “[I]n the paroxysm of my being and my fury, [Sartre] was reminding me that my blackness was only a minor term… Without a Negro past, without a Negro future, it was impossible for me to live my Negrohood. Not yet white, no longer wholly black, I was damned” (138).

Fanon is of course objecting to Sartre’s subordination of lived, embodied blackness, or negritude, to the abstract idea(l) of the proletariat (132-33); he rejects Sartre’s dialectic of White and Black (anti)theses resolving themselves “in the night of the absolute,” or the Marxian notion of class struggle (133). White and Black are NOT coeval theses, Fanon suggests, and racial-epidermal Difference is irreducible to Hegelian-Marxian dialectics. He notes acidly, “Jean-Paul Sartre had forgotten that the Negro suffers in his body quite differently from the white man” (138).

Fanon’s critique of Sartre is astute, I think; indeed his tormented, autobiographical essay might be read as an example of precisely how embodied blackness anxiously exists (vis-a-vis the gaze of the other) in a conflictual state of self-objectification. “Consciousness of the [black] body,” Fanon writes, “is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness” (110). It’s difficult to argue against the idea that Whites suffered such extreme psychic abjection under colonial regimes of power.

And yet, to return to Fanon’s first usage of the term “minor,” I wonder if the concept of intraracial fraternity might not be productively critiqued. What’s obscured by referring to intraracial conflict as “little family quarrels”? Is it possible to theorize Difference intraracially?

Fanon himself would provide one answer to these questions in his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth. There he devotes many pages deconstructing the social position of those “natives”-turned-state administrators in postcolonial African countries. This professional class of Africans — the national(ist) bourgeoisie — effectively prolongs colonial domination by securing wealth for their caste and exploiting the labor of the black masses. Reading “The Fact of Blackness” in light of this later, more explicitly “revolutionary” work, one wonders whether intraracial difference might not produce a “racial epidermal schema” of its own based on postcolonial variations in caste, color, literacy, and education.

Black feminist literary and cultural critic Hortense Spillers provides another answer to these questions with her idea of the “intramural” in black diasporic cultures. In any number of her essays, especially “Black, White, and in Color, or Learning How to Paint: Toward an Intramural Protocol of Reading,” Spillers shows how sexual difference interjects an irruptive “cut” in the black cultural imaginary. Indeed Spillers’s analytic allows us to see how race itself is differentially embodied across genders. Intraracial fraternity is thus a social fiction that papers over the very real ways in which Woman is relegated to a “minor” position within that discourse.

*****

Thank you, Alexis, for giving us the tools with which to engage critically with Fanon. My rereading of “The Fact of Blackness” is inspired by the animating spirit you display in responding to our posts.

First of all, the first documented case of HIV were found in four gay
white males. So the idea that the disease began in Africa is largely
founded on circumstantial, at best, evidence, unless of course Black
people have been infected with HIV in small numbers but no one ever
diagnosed it until it infiltrated the white community and, in doing
so, became a problem worth diagnosing. Both of these scenarios point
to issues within our racialized health system. Those issues being that
blackness has been linked with pathology in western allopathic
medicine throughout America’s history and that the research, funding,
and investigation of diseases is directly linked to who is contracting
those diseases. For example, cystic fibrosis is a condition of the
lungs and digestive system that is prominent in Northern Europe. it is
a genetic condition and as such, presents itself in people with
European ancestry. Sickle cell anemia is a condition affecting the red
blood cells and is prominent in western Africa and sub tropical areas.
It is also a genetic condition that affects primarily Black men in
this country. While cystic fibrosis affects a smaller percentage of
people than does sickle cell, much more research has been devoted to
the study of this disease. It is not coincidence that sickle cell
anemia has received much less funding and can only affect white
Americans if black men (generally) are having children with white
women. Then again, historically those children would be considered
Black anyway so white people are pretty much safe from Sickle cell.
Getting back to AIDS from my health disparities rant, I am also
disappointed, but not surprised, to hear that (generally) middle and
upper middle class Blacks have put their faith in white “human rights”
activists to help their brothers and sisters. I feel that the adage of
“ looking back and pulling up your brother or sister” has some
inherent issues that manifest in this type of behavior from Our Kinds
of People. For a comparison, I offer the suggestion “look to your
sides and pull your brothers and sisters next to you.” The whole idea
that Middle and Upper-middle class Blacks have to look behind them, to
reach beneath them, to find their brothers and sisters sets up a class
conflict within the race. If blackness, and poverty, is associated
with a backward subject position, then the accumulation of wealth or
the resources that accompany it (including proximity to white folks)
must be defined as forward movement. As such, many of “our” ‘forward”
thinkers, if they self-identify as black, cannot self-identify with
poverty, or the disenfranchised if they want to claim forward motion.
However, these people, with proximity to white folks and wealth are
necessary. The link between white folks with power and money to Upper
middle class black folks to middle class black folks to the
disenfranchised black folks must be utilized to effectively address
HIV as a Black issue. Those links occur within education and within
Christian organizations.

Notes and Ideas:
∑ Teachers and ministers are on the frontline- they associate with the
disenfranchised .
∑ We need a best practices module-ie. prison outreach and Aids
outreach in Black Christian churches, sex ed in California schools
(the only places without abstinences only funding), strategies for
promoting green living (look at the 30yr time frame, major sources of
funding, making it ‘hip’ to be green)
∑ Unfortunately, teachers and ministers are politically tied. Both by
abstinence only funding, a faith-based initiative.
∑ Black people aren’t voting so its white ppl that are voting for this
abstinence only teaching that is killing black people.
∑ Change the discourse—this is where we can use black leaders. ie
Darfur and Don Cheadle and Hotel Rwanda
∑ capitalism depends on having people at the bottom- they need to be
dumbed down. “The idea of life unworthy of life”- Sylvia Winter: we
are competing against that
∑ Still, the worse thing you can do to your enemy is make them fear
you (Mandela). Fear results in hostility and they have bigger guns
than we do.