Sister Outsider Read online

  There is a distinction I am beginning to make in my living between pain and suffering. Pain is an event, an experience that must be recognized, named, and then used in some way in order for the experience to change, to be transformed into something else, strength or knowledge or action.

  Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain. When I live through pain without recognizing it, self-consciously, I rob myself of the power that can come from using that pain, the power to fuel some movement beyond it. I condemn myself to reliving that pain over and over and over whenever something close triggers it. And that is suffering, a seemingly inescapable cycle.

  And true, experiencing old pain sometimes feels like hurling myself full force against a concrete wall. But I remind myself that I HAVE LIVED THROUGH IT ALL ALREADY, AND SURVIVED.

  Sometimes the anger that lies between Black women is not examined because we spend so much of our substance having to examine others constantly in the name of self-protection and survival, and we cannot reserve enough energy to scrutinize ourselves. Sometimes we don’t do it because the anger’s been there so long we don’t know what it is, or we think it’s natural to suffer rather than to experience pain. Sometimes, because we are afraid of what we will find. Sometimes, because we don’t think we deserve it.

  The revulsion on the woman’s face in the subway as she moves her coat away and I think she is seeing a roach. But I see the hatred in her eyes because she wants me to see the hatred in her eyes, because she wants me to know in only the way a child can know that I don’t belong alive in her world. If I’d been grown, I’d probably have laughed or snarled or been hurt, seen it for what it was. But I am five years old. I see it, I record it, I do not name it, so the experience is incomplete. It is not pain; it becomes suffering.

  And how can I tell you I don’t like the way you cut your eyes at me if I know that I am going to release all the unnamed angers within you spawned by the hatred you have suffered and never felt?

  So we are drawn to each other but wary, demanding the instant perfection we would never expect from our enemies. But it is possible to break through this inherited agony, to refuse acquiescence in this bitter charade of isolation and anger and pain.

  I read this question many times in the letters of Black women, ‘Why do I feel myself to be such an anathema, so isolated?’ I hear it spoken over and over again, in endless covert ways. But we can change that scenario. We can learn to mother ourselves.

  What does that mean for Black women? It means we must establish authority over our own definition, provide an attentive concern and expectation of growth which is the beginning of that acceptance we came to expect only from our mothers. It means that I affirm my own worth by committing myself to my own survival, in my own self and in the self of other Black women. On the other hand, it means that as I learn my worth and genuine possibility, I refuse to settle for anything less than a rigorous pursuit of the possible in myself, at the same time making a distinction between what is possible and what the outside world drives me to do in order to prove I am human. It means being able to recognize my successes, and to be tender with myself, even when I fail.

  We will begin to see each other as we dare to begin to see ourselves; we will begin to see ourselves as we begin to see each other, without aggrandizement or dismissal or recriminations, but with patience and understanding for when we do not quite make it, and recognition and appreciation for when we do. Mothering ourselves means learning to love what we have given birth to by giving definition to, learning how to be both kind and demanding in the teeth of failure as well as in the face of success, and not misnaming either.

  When you come to respect the character of the time you will not have to cover emptiness with pretense.fn11

  We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.

  As we fear each other less and value each other more, we will come to value recognition within each other’s eyes as well as within our own, and seek a balance between these visions. Mothering. Claiming some power over who we choose to be, and knowing that such power is relative within the realities of our lives. Yet knowing that only through the use of that power can we effectively change those realities. Mothering means the laying to rest of what is weak, timid, and damaged – without despisal – the protection and support of what is useful for survival and change, and our joint explorations of the difference.

  I recall a beautiful and intricate sculpture from the court of the Queen Mother of Benin, entitled ‘The Power Of The Hand.’ It depicts the Queen Mother, her court women, and her warriors in a circular celebration of the human power to achieve success in practical and material ventures, the ability to make something out of anything. In Dahomey, that power is female.

  VII

  Theorizing about self-worth is ineffective. So is pretending. Women can die in agony who have lived with blank and beautiful faces. I can afford to look at myself directly, risk the pain of experiencing who I am not, and learn to savor the sweetness of who I am. I can make friends with all the different pieces of me, liked and disliked. Admit that I am kinder to my neighbor’s silly husband most days than I am to myself. I can look into the mirror and learn to love the stormy little Black girl who once longed to be white or anything other than who she was, since all she was ever allowed to be was the sum of the color of her skin and the textures of her hair, the shade of her knees and elbows, and those things were clearly not acceptable as human.

  Learning to love ourselves as Black women goes beyond a simplistic insistence that ‘Black is beautiful.’ It goes beyond and deeper than a surface appreciation of Black beauty, although that is certainly a good beginning. But if the quest to reclaim ourselves and each other remains there, then we risk another superficial measurement of self, one superimposed upon the old one and almost as damaging, since it pauses at the superficial. Certainly it is no more empowering. And it is empowerment – our strengthening in the service of ourselves and each other, in the service of our work and future – that will be the result of this pursuit.

  I have to learn to love myself before I can love you or accept your loving. You have to learn to love yourself before you can love me or accept my loving. Know we are worthy of touch before we can reach out for each other. Not cover that sense of worthlessness with ‘I don’t want you’ or ‘it doesn’t matter’ or ‘white folks feel, Black folks DO.’ And these are enormously difficult to accomplish in an environment that consistently encourages nonlove and cover-up, an environment that warns us to be quiet about our need of each other, by defining our dissatisfactions as unanswerable and our necessities as unobtainable.

  Until now, there has been little that taught us how to be kind to each other. To the rest of the world, yes, but not to ourselves. There have been few external examples of how to treat another Black woman with kindness, deference, tenderness or an appreciative smile in passing, just because she IS; an understanding of each other’s shortcomings because we have been somewhere close to that, ourselves. When last did you compliment another sister, give recognition to her specialness? We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other. But we can practice being gentle with ourselves by being gentle with each other. We can practice being gentle with each other by being gentle with that piece of ourselves that is hardest to hold, by giving more to the brave bruised girlchild within each of us, by expecting a little less from her gargantuan efforts to excel. We can love her in the light as well as in the darkness, quiet her frenzy toward perfection and encourage her attentions toward fulfillment. Maybe then we will come to appreciate more how much she has taught us, and how much she is doing to keep this world revolving toward some livable future.

  It would be ridiculous to believe that this process is not lengthy and difficult. It is suicidal to believe it is not possibl
e. As we arm ourselves with ourselves and each other, we can stand toe to toe inside that rigorous loving and begin to speak the impossible – or what has always seemed like the impossible – to one another. The first step toward genuine change. Eventually, if we speak the truth to each other, it will become unavoidable to ourselves.

  Grenada Revisited: An Interim Reportfn1

  The first time I came to Grenada I came seeking ‘home,’ for this was my mother’s birthplace and she had always defined it so for me. Vivid images remained of what I saw there and of what I knew it could become.

  Grand Anse Beach was a busy thoroughfare in the early, direct morning. Children in proper school uniforms carrying shoes, trying to decide between the lure of a coco palm adventure to one side and the delicious morning sea on the other, while they are bound straightforward to well-worn chalky desks.

  The mended hem of the print dress the skinny old woman wore, swinging along down the beach, cutlass in hand. Oversized, high rubber boots never once interfering with her determined step. Her soft shapeless hat. Underneath, sharp, unhurried eyes snapped out from chocolate skin dusted grey with age.

  Another woman, younger, switch held between elbow and waist, driving seven sheep that look like goats except goats carry their tails up and sheep down.

  The Fat-Woman-Who-Fries-Fish-In-The-Market actually did, and it was delicious, served on the counterboards with her fragrant chocolate-tea in mugs fashioned from Campbell’s Pork ’n Beans cans with metal handles attached.

  The full moon turning the night beach flash green.

  I came to Grenada for the first time eleven months before the March 13, 1979 bloodless coup of the New Jewel Movement which ushered in the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) of Grenada under Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. This brought an end to twenty-nine years of Sir Eric Gairy’s regime – wasteful, corrupt, and United States sanctioned.

  The road from tiny Pearl’s Airport in Grenville, up over Grand Etang mountain through Beauregard and Birch Grove, a rainbow of children calling after us down the one narrow road through these hamlets cut into the hills. Tree ferns straight up like shingles along the mountainside. In 1978 there was only one paved road in Grenada. During the People’s Revolutionary Government, all roads were widened and reworked, and a functioning bus service was established that did more than ferry tourists back and forth to the cruise ships lying at anchor in the careenage. Wild banana fronds, baligey, in clumps below the road’s slope. Stands of particular trees within the bush – red cocoa fruit, golden apple, mango, breadfruit, peach-ripe nutmeg, banana. Girls on the road to Annandale, baskets of laundry balanced on their heads, hands on hips, swaying, reminiscent of 100 roads through Africa.

  Grenada, tiny spice island, is the second largest producer of nutmeg in the world. Its cocoa has a 45 percent fat content and sells for premium prices on the world market. But Grenadians pay eight times more than that price if they wish to drink processed hot chocolate, all of which is imported.

  The second time I came to Grenada I came in mourning and fear that this land which I was learning had been savaged, invaded, its people maneuvered into saying thank you to their invaders. I knew the lies and distortions of secrecy surrounding the invasion of Grenada by the United States on October 25, 1983; the rationalizations which collapse under the weight of facts; the facts that are readily available, even now, from the back pages of the New York Times.

  That the St. Georges Medical School students were in danger. Officials of the school deny this.fn2 Students deny this.fn3 The U.S. government had received assurances from General Hudson Austin of the Revolutionary Military Council guaranteeing the students’ safety. These assurances were ignored.fn4

  That the U.S. was invited to intervene by the signers of an Organization of Eastern Caribbean States Treaty. This would only have been internationally legal had Grenada invaded another island.fn5 The decision to invade was made by four of the seven signatories. The invitation itself was actually drafted by the U.S. State Department and sent down to the Eastern Caribbean nations.fn6

  That Grenada threatened U.S. security because of the construction of a military airport and the stockpiling of an arsenal of modern weapons. Grenada’s new airport is a civilian airport built to accommodate tourists. It has been in planning for over twenty-five years, half financed by several western european countries and Canada. According to Plessey, the British firm who underwrote the project, the airport was being built to civil, not military, standards.fn7 All U.S. reports on Grenada now stress the necessity of this airport for a Grenadian tourist industry.fn8 The ‘stockpile’ of weapons was less than two warehouses. Of 6,300 rifles, about 400 were fairly modern; the rest were very old, and some antique.fn9

  As even Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. observed, ‘Now we launch a sneak attack on a pathetic island of 110,000 people with no army, no navy or air force, and claim a glorious victory.’fn10

  A group of men and women mend the road ahead of us with hoes and rock hammers, wheelbarrows, and other hand tools. They step to one side as we pass by. One woman wipes her face with the end of her headcloth, leaning upon the handle of her scythe. Another woman is barefooted, young, but when she smiles I see all of her front teeth are missing. The PRG brought free medical care to Grenada, and no more school fees. Most estate workers and peasants in the small villages saw a dentist for the first time in their lives. Literacy was raised by teacher education and a planned each-one-teach-one program through the countryside.

  Revolution. A nation decides for itself what it needs. How best to get it. Food. Dentists. Doctors. Roads. When I first visited Grenada in 1978, one-third of the farmable land in the country lay idle, owned by absentee landlords who did not work it. The PRG required that plans be filed either for farming that land, turning it over to those who would, or deeding it to the state. Small banana collectives started. Fishing cooperatives. Beginning agro-industry. The World Bank notes the health of the Grenadian economy, surpassing all other Caribbean economies in the rate of its growth and stability despite the opposition of the U.S. Unemployment dips from 40 percent to 14 percent. Now there is no work again.

  Four years ago, the U.S. acted through the International Monetary Fund to assure that there would be no western money available for the Grenadian economy, much less for protecting her shores from an invasion threatened by Gairy operating out of San Diego, California, where he had sought asylum. When the PRG sought economic aid from the U.S. in 1979 to help rebuild the infrastructure of a country fallen into despair during the twenty-nine years of Gairy’s regime, the U.S. response was to offer the insult of $5000 from an ambassador’s discretionary fund! Now it is 1983, post-invasion, and the conquerors are promising Grenadians welfare, their second main exportable drug. Three million dollars thus far, administered under U.S. guns, so long as the heads that take it are bowed.

  Had the amount this invasion cost each one of us in taxes been lent to the PRG when it requested economic aid from the U.S. five years ago, the gratitude of Grenadians would have been real, and hundreds of lives could have been saved. But then Grenada would have been self-defined, independent; and, of course, that could not be allowed. What a bad example, a dangerous precedent, an independent Grenada would be for the peoples of Color in the Caribbean, in Central America, for those of us here in the United States.

  The ready acceptance by the majority of americans of the Grenadian invasion and of the shady U.S. involvement in the events leading up to the assassination of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop both happen in an america whose moral and ethical fiber is weakened by racism as thoroughly as wood is weakened by dry rot. White america has been well-schooled in the dehumanization of Black people. A Black island nation? Why, don’t be ridiculous! If they weren’t all so uppity, we’d have enough jobs and no recession. The lynching of Black youth and shooting down of Black women, 60 percent of Black teenagers unemployed and rapidly becoming unemployable, the presidential dismantling of the Civil Rights Commission, and more Black families bel
ow the poverty line than twenty years ago – if these facts of american life and racism can be passed over as unremarkable, then why not the rape and annexation of tiny Black Grenada?

  The Pentagon has been spoiling for a fight it could win for a long time; the last one was the battle for Inchon in the 1950s. How better to wipe out the bitter memories of Vietnam defeats by Yellow people than with a restoration of power in the eyes of the american public – the image of american marines splashing through a little Black blood? ‘… to keep our honor clean’ the marine anthem says. So the american public was diverted from recession, unemployment, the debacle in Beirut, from nuclear madness and dying oceans and a growing national depression and despair, by the bombing of a mental hospital where fifty people were killed. Even that piece of proud news was withheld for over a week while various cosmetic stories were constructed. Bread and circuses.

  If the United States is even remotely interested in seeing democracy flourish in the Caribbean, why does it continue to support Haiti and the Dominican Republic, two of the most corrupt and repressive governments in the Americas? The racism that coats the U.S. government lies about Grenada is the same racism that blinded american eyes to the Black faces of 131 Haitians washed up on shore in Miami, drowned fleeing the Duvalier regime. It is the same racism that keeps american eyes turned aside from the corrosive apartheid eating like acid into the face of White South Africa and the Reagan government which shares her bed under the guise of ‘constructive engagement.’ White South Africa has the highest standard of living of any nation in the world, and 50 percent of Black South Africa’s children die before they are five. A statistic. The infant mortality rate for Black americans is almost twice that of white americans – in the most highly industrialized country in the world. White america has been well-schooled in the acceptance of Black destruction. So what is Black Grenada and its 110,000 Black lives?