(breath)

Hi, I like the feel of jutte under my feet. Hello, I can’t see your face. Oh my, you are beautiful.

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!