Sister Outsider Page 10
By that time the battle over the Black Studies Department had started at John Jay. And again I saw the use and abuse of women, of Black people, saw how Black studies was being used by the university in a really cynical fashion. A year later, I returned to the English Department. I had made a number of enemies. One of the attempts to discredit me among Black students was to say I was a lesbian. Now by this time I would have considered myself uncloseted, but I had never discussed my own poetry at John Jay, nor my sexuality. I knew, as I had always known, that the only way you can head people off from using who you are against you is to be honest and open first, to talk about yourself before they talk about you. It wasn’t even courage. Speaking up was a protective mechanism for myself – like publishing ‘Love Poem’ in Ms. magazine in 1971 and bringing it in and putting it up on the wall of the English Department.
Adrienne: I remember hearing you read ‘Love Poem’ on the Upper West Side, a coffeehouse at 72nd Street. It was the first time I’d heard you read it. And I think it was about that time, the early seventies. You read it. It was incredible. Like defiance. It was glorious.
Audre: That’s how I was feeling, back against the wall, because as bad as it is now, the idea of open lesbianism in the Black community was – I mean, we’ve moved miles in a very short time – totally horrible. My publisher called and literally said he didn’t understand the words of ‘Love Poem.’ He said, ‘Now what is this all about? Are you supposed to be a man?’ And he was a poet! And I said, ‘No, I’m a loving woman.’
Adrienne: Well, don’t tell me that your publisher had never heard of lesbians.
Audre: I’m sure he had, but the idea that I’d write a poem …
Adrienne: … That one of his poets in the Broadside Series …
Audre: That’s right. And he was a sensitive man. He was a poet.
Adrienne: But he did print your work.
Audre: Yes, he did. But he didn’t print that poem, the first time around. ‘Love Poem’ was supposed to have been in From a Land Where Other People Live.
Adrienne: And it wasn’t published in that book? You took it out?
Audre: Yes. But when you heard me read ‘Love Poem,’ I had already made up my mind that I wasn’t going to be worrying any more over who knows and who doesn’t know that I have always loved women. One thing has always kept me going – and it’s not really courage or bravery, unless that’s what courage or bravery is made of – is a sense that there are so many ways in which I’m vulnerable and cannot help but be vulnerable, I’m not going to be more vulnerable by putting weapons of silence in my enemies’ hands. Being an open lesbian in the Black community is not easy, although being closeted is even harder.
When a people share a common oppression, certain kinds of skills and joint defenses are developed. And if you survive you survive because those skills and defenses have worked. When you come into conflict over other existing differences, there is a vulnerability to each other which is desperate and very deep. And that is what happens between Black men and women because we have certain weapons we have perfected together that white women and men have not shared. I said this to someone, and she said, very rightly, the same thing exists within the Jewish community between Jewish men and Jewish women. I think the oppression is different, but the same mechanism of vulnerability exists. When you share a common oppression you have certain additional weapons against each other because you’ve forged them in secret together against a common enemy. It’s a fear that I’m still not free of and that I remember all the time when I deal with other Black women: the fear of the ex-comrade.
Adrienne: In ‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury,’ you wrote: ‘The white fathers told us, “I think, therefore I am,” and the Black mother within each of us – the poet – whispers in our dreams, “I feel, therefore I can be free.”’ I’ve heard it remarked that here you are simply restating the old stereotype of the rational white male and the emotional dark female. I believe you were saying something very different, but could you talk a little about that?
Audre: I have heard that accusation, that I’m contributing to the stereotype, that I’m saying the province of intelligence and rationality belongs to the white male. But if you’re traveling a road that begins nowhere and ends nowhere, the ownership of that road is meaningless. If you have no land out of which the road comes, no place that road goes to, geographically, no goal, then the existence of that road is totally meaningless. Leaving rationality to the white man is like leaving him a piece of that road that begins nowhere and ends nowhere. When I talk about the Black mother in each of us, the poet, I don’t mean the Black mothers in each of us who are called poets, I mean the Black mother …
Adrienne: Who is the poet?
Audre: The Black mother who is the poet exists in every one of us. Now when males or patriarchal thinkers (whether male or female) reject that combination, then we’re truncated. Rationality is not unnecessary. It serves the chaos of knowledge. It serves feeling. It serves to get from this place to that place. But if you don’t honor those places, then the road is meaningless. Too often, that’s what happens with the worship of rationality and that circular, academic, analytic thinking. But ultimately, I don’t see feel/think as a dichotomy. I see them as a choice of ways and combinations.
Adrienne: Which we are constantly making. We don’t make it once and for all. We constantly have to be making it, depending on where we are, over and over.
Audre: But I do think that we have been taught to think, to codify information in certain old ways, to learn, to understand in certain ways. The possible shapes of what has not been before exist only in that back place, where we keep those unnamed, untamed longings for something different and beyond what is now called possible, and to which our understanding can only build roads, But we have been taught to deny those fruitful areas of ourselves. I personally believe that the Black mother exists more in women; yet she is the name for a humanity that men are not without. But they have taken a position against that piece of themselves, and it is a world position, a position throughout time. And I’ve said this to you before, Adrienne, I feel that we’re evolving. In terms of a species …
Adrienne: That women are evolving …
Audre: That the human race is evolving through women. That it’s not by accident that there are more and more women – this sounds crazy, doesn’t it – women being born, women surviving … and we’ve got to take that promise of new power seriously, or we’ll make the same mistakes all over again. Unless we learn the lessons of the Black mother in each of us, whether we are Black or not … I believe this power exists in men also but they choose not to deal with it; which is, as I learned, their right. Hopefully this choice can be affected, but I don’t know. I don’t believe this shift from conquering problems to experiencing life is a one-generational shot or a single investment. I believe it’s a whole signature which you try to set in motion and have some input into. But I’m not saying that women don’t think or analyze. Or that white does not feel. I’m saying that we must never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is …
Adrienne: Sinister …
Audre: Sinister, smelly, erotic, confused, upsetting …
Adrienne: I think we have to keep using and affirming a vocabulary that has been used negatively and pejoratively. And I assume that’s the statement you’re making in that sentence, that you make over and over in your poetry. And it’s nothing as simplistic as saying ‘Black is beautiful,’ either.
Audre: There’s nothing beautiful about a black machine. You know, Adrienne, when I was in high school, the editor of the school magazine said to me, softening her rejection of a poem, ‘After all, Audre, you don’t want to be a sensualist poet.’
Adrienne: I was told, as a poet, you’re not supposed to be angry, you’re not supposed to be personal.
Audre: After I published ‘Uses of the Erotic,’ a number of women who read it sa
id that this is antifeminist, that the use of the erotic as a guide is …
Adrienne: Antifeminist?
Audre: Is reducing us once again to the unseen, the unusable. That in writing it I am returning us to a place of total intuition without insight.
Adrienne: And yet, in that essay you’re talking about work and power, about two of the most political things that exist.
Audre: Yes, but what they see is … and I address this at the very beginning: I try to say that the erotic has been used against us, even the word itself, so often, that we have been taught to suspect what is deepest in ourselves, and that is the way we learn to testify against ourselves, against our feelings. When we talk in terms of our lives and our survival as women, we can use our knowledge of the erotic creatively. The way you get people to testify against themselves is not to have police tactics and oppressive techniques. What you do is to build it in so people learn to distrust everything in themselves that has not been sanctioned, to reject what is most creative in themselves to begin with, so you don’t even need to stamp it out. A Black woman devaluating another Black woman’s work. The Black women buying that hot comb and putting it in my locker at the library. It wasn’t even Black men; it was Black women testifying against ourselves. This turning away from the erotic on the part of some of our best minds, our most creative and analytic women, is disturbing and destructive. Because we cannot fight old power in old power terms only. The only way we can do it is by creating another whole structure that touches every aspect of our existence, at the same time as we are resisting.
Adrienne: And as you were saying about courses, Black studies, women’s studies: this is not just a question of being ‘allowed’ to have our history or literature or theory in the old power framework. It is every minute of our lives, from our dreams to getting up and brushing our teeth to when we go to teach …
Audre: There are different choices facing Black and white women in life, certain specifically different pitfalls surrounding us because of our experiences, our color. Not only are some of the problems that face us dissimilar, but some of the entrapments and the weapons used to neutralize us are not the same.
Adrienne: I wish we could explore this more, about you and me, but also in general. I think it needs to be talked about, written about: the differences in alternatives or choices we are offered as Black and white women. There is a danger of seeing it in an all-or-nothing way. I think it is a very complex thing. White women are constantly offered choices or the appearance of choices. But also real choices that are undeniable. We don’t always perceive the difference between the two.
Audre: Adrienne, in my journals I have a lot of pieces of conversations that I’m having with you in my head. I’ll be having a conversation with you and I’ll put it in my journal because stereotypically or symbolically these conversations occur in a space of Black woman/white woman where it’s beyond Adrienne and Audre, almost as if we’re two voices.
Adrienne: You mean the conversations you have in your head and your journal, or the conversations we’re having on this earth?
Audre: The conversations that exist in my head that I put in the journal. This piece, I think, is one of them – about the different pitfalls. I’ve never forgotten the impatience in your voice that time on the telephone, when you said, ‘It’s not enough to say to me that you intuit it.’ Do you remember? I will never forget that. Even at the same time that I understood what you meant, I felt a total wipeout of my modus, my way of perceiving and formulating.
Adrienne: Yes, but it’s not a wipeout of your modus. Because I don’t think my modus in unintuitive, right? And one of the crosses I’ve borne all my life is being told that I’m rational, logical, cool – I am not cool, and I’m not rational and logical in that icy sense. But there’s a way in which, trying to translate from your experience to mine, I do need to hear chapter and verse from time to time. I’m afraid of it all slipping away into: ‘Ah, yes, I understand you.’ You remember, that telephone conversation was in connection with the essay I was writing on feminism and racism. I was trying to say to you, don’t let’s let this evolve into ‘You don’t understand me’ or ‘I can’t understand you’ or ‘Yes, of course we understand each other because we love each other.’ That’s bullshit. So if I ask for documentation, it’s because I take seriously the spaces between us that difference has created, that racism has created. There are times when I simply cannot assume that I know what you know, unless you show me what you mean.
Audre: But I’m used to associating a request for documentation as a questioning of my perceptions, an attempt to devalue what I’m in the process of discovering.
Adrienne: It’s not. Help me to perceive what you perceive. That’s what I’m trying to say to you.
Audre: But documentation does not help one perceive. At best it only analyzes the perception. At worst, it provides a screen by which to avoid concentrating on the core revelation, following it down to how it feels. Again, knowledge and understanding. They can function in concert, but they don’t replace each other. But I’m not rejecting your need for documentation.
Adrienne: And in fact, I feel you’ve been giving it to me, in your poems always, and most recently in the long prose piece you’ve been writing,fn8 and in talks we’ve been having. I don’t feel the absence of it now.
Audre: Don’t forget I’m a librarian. I became a librarian because I really believed I would gain tools for ordering and analyzing information. I couldn’t know everything in the world, but I would gain tools for learning it. But that was of limited value. I can document the road to Abomey for you, and true, you might not get there without that information. I can respect what you’re saying. But once you get there, only you know why, what you came for, as you search for it and perhaps find it.
So at certain stages that request for documentation is a blinder, a questioning of my perceptions. Someone once said to me that I hadn’t documented the goddess in Africa, the woman bond that moves throughout The Black Unicorn.fn9 I had to laugh. I’m a poet, not a historian. I’ve shared my knowledge, I hope. Now you go document it, if you wish.
I don’t know about you, Adrienne, but I have a difficult enough time making my perceptions verbal, tapping that deep place, forming that handle, and documentation at that point is often useless. Perceptions precede analysis just as visions precede action or accomplishments. It’s like getting a poem …
That’s the only thing I’ve had to fight with, my whole life, preserving my perceptions of how things are, and later, learning how to accept and correct at the same time. Doing this in the face of tremendous opposition and cruel judgment. And I spent a long time questioning my perceptions and my interior knowledge, not dealing with them, being tripped by them.
Adrienne: Well, I think that there’s another element in all this between us. Certainly in that particular conversation on the telephone where I said you have to tell me chapter and verse. I’ve had great resistance to some of your perceptions. They can be very painful to me. Perceptions about what goes on between us, what goes on between Black and white people, what goes on between Black and white women. So, it’s not that I can just accept your perceptions unblinkingly. Some of them are very hard for me. But I don’t want to deny them. I know I can’t afford to. I may have to take a long hard look and say, ‘Is this something I can use? What do I do with this?’ I have to try to stand back and not become immersed in what you so forcefully are pronouncing. So there’s a piece of me that wants to resist wholly, and a piece that wants to accept wholly, and there’s some place in between where I have to find my own ground. What I can’t afford is either to wipe out your perceptions or to pretend I understand you when I don’t. And then, if it’s a question of racism – and I don’t mean just the overt violence out there but also all the differences in our ways of seeing – there’s always the question: ‘How do I use this? What do I do about it?’
Audre: ‘How much of this truth can I bear to see/ and still live/ unblinded?/ How much of
this pain/ can I use?’fn10 What holds us all back is being unable to ask that crucial question, that essential step deflected. You know the piece I wrote for The Black Scholar?fn11 The piece was useful, but limited, because I didn’t ask some essential question. And not having asked myself that question, not having realized that it was a question, I was deflecting a lot of energy in that piece. I kept reading it over, thinking, this isn’t quite what it should be. I thought at the time I was holding back because it would be totally unacceptable in The Black Scholar. That wasn’t it, really. I was holding back because I had not asked myself the question: ‘Why is women loving women so threatening to Black men unless they want to assume the white male position?’ It was a question of how much I could bear, and of not realizing I could bear more than I thought I could at the time. It was also a question of how could I use that perception other than just in rage or destruction.
Adrienne: Speaking of rage and destruction, what do you really mean by the first five lines of ‘Power’?fn12
Audre: ‘The difference between poetry/ and rhetoric/ is being/ ready to kill yourself/ instead of your children.’ What was I feeling? I was very involved in a case …
Adrienne: The white policeman who shot the Black child and was acquitted. We had lunch around the time you were writing that poem and you were full of it.
Audre: I was driving in the car and heard the news on the radio that the cop had been acquitted. I was really sickened with fury, and I decided to pull over and just jot some things down in my notebook to enable me to cross town without an accident because I felt so sick and so enraged. And I wrote those lines down – I was just writing, and that poem came out without craft. That’s probably why I was talking to you about it because I didn’t feel it was really a poem. I was thinking that the killer had been a student at John Jay and that I might have seen him in the hall, that I might see him again. What was retribution? What could have been done? There was one Black woman on the jury. It could have been me. Now I am here teaching in John Jay College. Do I kill him? What is my effective role? Would I kill her in the same way – the Black woman on the jury. What kind of strength did she, would I, have at the point of deciding to take a position …