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The Prophetic Visions of Our Lorde

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The Prophetic Visions of Our Lorde Smith ScholarWorks Africana Studies: Faculty Publications Africana Studies Fall 2019 “blessed within my selves”: The Prophetic Visions of Our Lorde Flávia Santos de Araújo Smith College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.smith.edu/afr_facpubs Part of the Africana Studies Commons Recommended Citation Flávia Santos de Araújo. ““blessed within my selves”: The Prophetic Visions of Our Lorde.” Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies, Fall 2019, vol. 20, pp. 8-31 This Article has been accepted for inclusion in Africana Studies: Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Smith ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected] 8 | Flávia Santos de Araújo “blessed within my selves”: The Prophetic Visions of Our Lorde Flávia Santos de Araújo Smith College CONTacT: Flávia Santos de Araújo, Smith College, Northampton, MA. [email protected] To cite this article: [Flávia Santos de Araújo. ““blessed within my selves”: The Prophetic Visions of Our Lorde.” Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies, Fall 2019, vol. 20, pp. 8-31] ABSTRACT This essay discusses the intellectual and poetic work of Audre Lorde and its significance for contemporary global movements for liberation. My discus- sion considers Lorde’s theorizing of difference and power, as well as her po- etic work, as prophetic interventions within the context of the 1960s to the early 1990s. I argue that Lorde’s intellectual and literary work is the result of a black woman’s embodied experiences within the intersections of many struggles—notably, the ones against racism, sexism, and homophobia. This strategic positionality becomes, as I discuss, the centrality of Lorde’s pro- phetic vision of collective and inclusive liberation: one that permeates past and current movements for freedom across the Americas, influencing con- temporary practices of international solidarity and the formation of black feminist thought. Finally, as a framework, this essay shows that Lorde’s pro- phetic vision—one that is born within a larger context of black diasporic feminist imaginary—teaches us crucial lessons on the decolonial practices and methods embedded in black women’s intellectual and artistic work. Keywords: Audre Lorde, black diasporic feminist thought, poetry. © Wagadu (2019) ISSN : 1545-6196 “blessed within my selves”: | 9 I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you. - Audre Lorde In the evening of March 14, 2018, as I worked in my home office in New England, Facebook notified me of a live streaming event. It was Rio de Janeiro’s council member and human rights activist, Marielle Franco, leading a panel discussion titled “Jovens Negras Movendo as Estruturas” (“Young Black Women Changing Power Structures”). As an elected politician with a radical democratic and feminist agen- da, Marielle Franco represented for many (including me) a voice of hope; a voice of denunciation of the atrocities committed by state-sanctioned forces against black and poor people in the favelas. I was gladly distracted from my writing into watching that amazing panel. Toward the end of the discussion, Franco chose to conclude by reading the quote in the epigraph from Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” (2007e, p.132). I turned off my computer, knowing Lorde’s prophetic words, reverberating through Franco’s lips, announced new days for Brasil—a renewed leadership of black women in the political scenario and their ances- tral desire for justice. The next day, I woke up to the news that Mari- elle Franco had been brutally assassinated later that night in her car, as she was being taken home by her driver Anderson Gomes, also murdered, in what appears to be a planned attack in the streets of Rio (Araújo, 2018, p. 207-11). For the next several days, I grieved and angered for the injus- tice of Franco’s assassination, with thousands of people in Brazil © Wagadu (2019) ISSN : 1545-6196 10 | Flávia Santos de Araújo and all over the world (Caldwell et al., 2018). I also dove into a deep reflection upon the significance of that event for the struggle for liberation, as well as the connections between Franco’s political trajectory and Lorde’s radicalism. Without a doubt, Franco was a threat to many powerful, violent, and corrupt factions. Her investi- gations of human rights violations perpetrated in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro resulted in strong indications of the involvement of sec- tors of the state and federal political leadership and corporative in- terests with criminal affairs. It is now revealed that the threats to her safety were mounting. But Franco was not afraid. Lorde’s words, re-signified by Franco in what would be her last public ap- pearance, signaled the force of a liberatory message across national boundaries, contexts, and realities. This essay follows the impulse of my reflections on the legacy of the radical work of black women activists, intellectuals, and artists for the global movement for hu- man rights. I also write this essay during the days that followed the controversial decision of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute to rescind its decision to honor Angela Davis with the Fred Shut- tlesworth Human Rights Award, reportedly due to her activism for Palestinian rights. The Institute rescinded the award days after the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center sent a letter urging the board to reconsider honoring Davis due to her support of the Boy- cott, Divestment and Sanctions. The Institute’s decision has sparked an open and public conversation about the global solidari- ty movements for human rights, and the notion of the “indivisibil- ity of justice,” as Davis herself highlighted in her response to the Institute’s decision (Davis, 2019). In this essay, I want to offer an analysis of Lorde’s prophetic intervention and transnational legacy. I establish that Lorde’s intel- lectual and literary work is the result of a black woman’s embodied experiences within the intersections of many struggles—notably, the ones against racism, sexism, and homophobia. As such, the ma- © Wagadu (2019) ISSN : 1545-6196 “blessed within my selves”: | 11 teriality of that embodiment allowed Lorde to navigate across geo- political spaces as a “sister outsider,” embracing the contradictions, vulnerability, and strength of a multi-faceted self. This strategic po- sitionality becomes, I argue, the centrality of Lorde’s prophetic vi- sion of collective and inclusive liberation: one that permeates past and current movements, influencing and shaping the work of those who, like Marielle Franco, desire and fight for the right of being their whole selves in the world. Much has been already said about Lorde’s legacy in shaping black feminist theoretical frameworks, particularly in regard to her conceptualization of difference in her essays, speeches, and activist work. However, Lorde’s poetry con- tinues to be regarded as a matter for literary analysis only, and rare- ly as an integral part of her theoretical/intellectual framework. I want to highlight Lorde’s use of language—both in her literary and non-fictional work—as an exercise of the erotic force, as she de- fined it: in its capacity to allow for an exploration of deepest sourc- es of knowledge within the self. In that exercise, Lorde has created a philosophical understanding of wholeness which centers the ex- periences of black women and women of color—one that embrac- es the very complexities these experiences highlight. It is precisely this philosophical understanding, I argue, that made it possible for Lorde’s framework to become so powerful across different dias- poric formations. At the Crossroads: Audre Lorde and the Notion of Intersectionality In 1977, Audre Lorde addressed a captivated audience at the Mod- ern Language Association’s “Lesbian and Literature” panel in Chica- go, Illinois. The address was later published as one of the essays in Sister Outsider, titled “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” and it highlighted Lorde’s examination of what it means © Wagadu (2019) ISSN : 1545-6196 12 | Flávia Santos de Araújo to have a commitment to the powerful use of language to break the silences that immobilize us. In that address, Lorde positioned her- self in all her multiplicity: Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am black, be- cause I am myself, a black woman warrior poet doing my work, come to ask you, are you doing yours? (2007b, p. 41) The fact that Lorde consistently self-defined as a “black woman warrior poet”—sometimes adding the words “lesbian,” “mother,” “teacher” to the sequence—is a personal stance of articulating the many parts of her identity, linking all of them to a broader African diasporic foreground. It is also a political stance to affirm that these many layers are inseparable from her sense of wholeness, her poli- tics, and her poetics. In several of Lorde’s interviews, speeches, and essays, she emphasized her multi-faceted self as a double-strategic move: it placed her own “self” in a dialogic relationship with those located in different positions of power; and, it freed an ostracized, stigmatized, silenced, multiple “self” from the margins to the center of her intellectual and artistic work. This way of positioning oneself in the world is, for instance, what the black feminists who wrote the Combahee River Collective statement in 1977 called “identity poli- tics” (1979, p. 7). In regard to Lorde’s vision, the recognition of her own right to be in her fully embodied “self” corresponds to the type of radical politics the Combahee River Collective had crafted in the 1970s—one that would forever leave its mark in contemporary fem- inist theory.
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