“I TEACH MYSELF IN OUTLINE,” NOTES, JOURNALS, SYLLABI & AN EXCERPT FROM DEOTHA s AUDRE LORDE “I TEACH MYSELF IN OUTLINE,” NOTES, JOURNALS, SYLLABI & AN EXCERPT FROM DEOTHA s AUDRE LORDE “I TEACH MYSELF IN OUTLINE,” NOTES, JOURNALS, SYLLABI & AN EXCERPT FROM DEOTHA s AUDRE LORDE Miriam Atkin, Iemanjá Brown, Editors SERIES 7, NUMBER 1, FALL 2017 GENERAL EDITOR Ammiel Alcalay TEXTUAL CONSULTANT EMERITUS David Greetham CONSULTING EDITOR Kate Tarlow Morgan MANAGING EDITOR Stephon Lawrence PUBLISHER Kendra Sullivan PUBLICITY COORDINATOR Sampson Starkweather DESIGN Megan Mangum (wordsthatwork.net) All materials listed below are from the Audre Lorde Papers; Spelman College Archives: “Classrooms,” Series 2.4 Box 24 Folder 13; “Race and the Urban Situation,” Series 2.5 Box 46; “Journals; History/lit 210,” Series 2.5 Box 46; “Journals; Hist/lit suggested readings,” Series 10 Box 82 Folder 25; “Racist Society,” Series 2.5 Box 46; “Journals” (All materials with month and day but no year), Series 2.5 Box 46; “Journals” (“In your daily life, etc.”), Series 10 Box 83 Folder 26; “Course Proposals,” Series 10 Box 82 Folder 5; “The other woman,” Series 10 Box 82 Folder 49; “Proposal for faculty seminar,” Series 2.1 Box 18 Folder 135; “Dream,” Series 2.5 Box 45; “Journals number 13,” “Deotha,” Series 2.1 Box 17 Folder 88. Copyright © by the Estate of Audre Lorde (2017); used herewith by permission of the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency, Inc. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Leslie Scalapino–O Books Fund, Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, The Provost’s Office at the Graduate Center,CUNY , Early Research Initiative, the Sylvia Klatzkin Steinig Fund, André Spears, Margo & Anthony Viscusi, and Engaging the Senses Foundation. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 A NOTE ON THE TEXTS 15 THE CLASSROOMS 17 SYLLABI, TEACHING JOURNALS, NOTES, AND COURSE PROPOSALS FROM JOHN JAY COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE Race & the Urban Situation [Undated] 18 History/Literature 210, (1971) 20 Teaching Journals, Notes, and Course Proposals 25 SYLLABI, OUTLINES, AND TEACHING NOTES FROM HUNTER COLLEGE The Other Woman: Lesbian Voices in 20th Century 35 American Literature (1985) Proposal for Faculty Seminar at Hunter on Race [Undated] 40 Dream Journal (1975) 42 EXCERPT FROM DEOTHA: “BATH/SCHOOL/PIA” 43 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 66 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 69 LOST & FOUND 72 INTRODUCTION I. IN 1968, AUDRE LORDE served as writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College, a historically Black liberal arts institution founded in 1869 outside of Jackson, Mississippi. Situated on a campus continually besieged by organized racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizen’s Council, the students were politically active in the face of this violence. The experience proved transformative: “I came to realize that teaching and writing were inextricably combined, and it was there that I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”1 Upon returning to New York City, Lorde was invited to join a cadre of poet-teachers—including Toni Cade Bambara, Barbara Christian, Addison Gayle, David Henderson, June Jordan and Adrienne Rich—who were working in the SEEK program at City College in Harlem. SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) promoted the matriculation of racially, economically and educationally marginalized high school graduates at CUNY colleges. In her second semester with SEEK, she saw the rise of student movements for equality and access, culminating in the 1969 Open Admissions strike, and demands that CUNY incorporate Ethnic Studies departments as well as open its doors to all New York City high school graduates. Lorde was one of a number of instructors who supported the strike. For the duration of the uprising, she held class offsite at a nearby middle school, re-named “Harlem University” by student activists.2 1 Audre Lorde, “My Words Will Be There” in I am Your Sister, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 161. 2 For a more in-depth account of the events leading up to the Open Admissions strike at CUNY, see Conor Tomás Reed’s essay, “‘Treasures that Prevail’: Adrienne Rich, The SEEK Program, and Social Movements at the City College of New York, 1968-1972” in “What We are Part Of”: Teaching at CUNY: 1968-1974 from Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative Series IV (Fall 2013). 1 In the fall of 1969, Lorde began working in the Lehman College Education Department as an instructor of new teachers in the New York City public high school system. She taught a course called “Race and Education” to mostly white female students learning to teach the predominantly Black population of the local public schools. Though Lorde designed the course to help each student excavate her own internal prejudices, her work at Lehman was severely limited and she yearned to be teaching in a different environment. She pitched a course to the dean of another CUNY school, John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, leading to her employment as the first Black member of the English Department. Under pressure from student movements, John Jay had recently redefined itself as not only a college for police science, but also a broadly inclusive liberal arts school. Energized by the tension in her classrooms comprised of white, Black and Puerto Rican humanities majors alongside police officers and officers-in-training, Lorde dove into the struggle to establish a Black and Puerto Rican Studies Department at John Jay. II. The teaching materials published here document Lorde’s daily engagement with the “mechanics of oppression” in the context of an institution established to train police officers. Endemic police corruption made headlines in this period, while whistleblowers like Frank Serpico risked being killed by going public. At the same time, a number of Black radical activists armed themselves against both drug dealers and the NYPD. In this climate, she wrote the poem “Power” which responds to the 1973 murder of a ten-year-old Black child named Clifford Glover at the hands of a white police officer, who was acquitted of his crime. The officer, Thomas J. Shea, was a John Jay College student during Lorde’s time there. In an interview 2 with friend and colleague Adrienne Rich, Lorde described her fury at knowing she might have seen Shea—or perhaps someone just like him—in the hallways or even in her classroom. In “Apartheid USA,” Lorde asks, in relation to the countless deaths at the hands of the police, “How does a system bent upon our ultimate destruction make the unacceptable gradually tolerable?”3 Lorde continues to ask herself, and others, about how to effectively stand up to oppressive structures. In the classroom, she teaches students how structural inequality over-determines the life of the individual. She helps them first explore their emotional lives and then work toward understanding themselves within those larger structures. By devoting significant attention to her students’ emotional lives, Lorde makes learning a process of individuation, which can build deep self-knowledge and understanding. She writes in her class notes that “if each of us is to survive, [we each need] acute self-awareness—definition—who am I?” She continues to carve out these opportunities by dismantling “myths that divide,” prompting students to consider the ways in which pervasive constructions like “the American dream” are divisive. As Lorde moves through the internalization of structures and stereotypes in her course outline, she asks, “who d’ya think you are?” and “who am I so who are you?” These questions do not prompt the kind of individualism that serves “the interest of a capitalist profit system”4 but rather bring people closer to collective liberation. Lorde’s insistence upon the importance of the “I” was felt in her relationship to her students. In summer 2017, we interviewed 3 Audre Lorde, “Apartheid USA,” in I am Your Sister, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 32. 4 Audre Lorde, “Sadomasochism: Not about Condemnation,” in A Burst of Light, (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1988), 114. 3 some of Lorde’s Hunter students. Anthropologist and Hunter College professor Jacqueline Brown participated in a poetry course that Lorde taught in 1986 specifically for women of color. She recalls Lorde being “open to us expressing the full, complicated gamut of our experience. She was receptive to whatever we brought to the table, including erotica and our joys as women of color forming community with each other.” That class was featured in the documentary, Litany for Survival, where Lorde is seen teaching to enraptured students. Brown emphasized that Lorde wore comfortably the aura of power with which she is often associated, but was also such a present listener and teacher that “she made you feel, when you were talking to her, that there was no place she’d rather be.” The queer novelist, essayist and activist Sarah Schulman recalls a similar generosity in Lorde’s teaching, even as it unrelentingly pushed students to go deeper in their explorations. Schulman remembers Lorde organizing her packed class into one large circle and standing in the center to teach. By the second class, she had learned all the students’ names and as she taught, she would make eye contact with specific students, referencing an idea from their papers or from a previous class discussion. Though Lorde foregrounded individuality, her attention to structural racism undercuts a pervasive sociological tendency to diagnose all social, economic, and psychological issues as individual, personal, and familial failures. What we see in Lorde’s assigned and recommended readings of, for example, Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, R.D.