IMPORTANT: DIGITAL COMMONPLACE DIRECTIONS FOR UNIT 3
Rather than posting quotations and asking a question (as we did in the first unit), or gathering quotations and making a claim (as we did in the last unit) for the Digital Commonplaces in "Writing the Self: Biographical Approaches," you'll be asked to reflect on how each author’s writing choices interact with your own interpretive processes as audience members.
Please do the following:
1) Post at least two quotations (or in the case of Satrapi, you may want to describe the visual rhetoric on specific panels). If applicable, one quotation should be from the book itself and one should be from the secondary literature assigned with it. Please note the page numbers in your edition/from the article.
2) Then, using the following questions to help guide you, step back and reflect: o How has this autobiographical text--and these particular passages-- enhanced your own understanding of women's roles in society? o Does this author's choice to write about these personal experiences challenge any preconceived notions you had as a reader? o How does the author’s writing choices—or, in the case of Satrapi, her visual rhetoric—help forward the feminist notion that the personal is political?
The waitress was white, and the counter was white, and the ice-cream I never ate in Washington, D.C. that summer I left childhood was white, and the white heat and the white pavement and the white stone monuments of my first Washington summer made me sick to my stomach for the whole rest of that trip and it wasn’t much of a graduation present at all (71). From Lorde’s Zami
“Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the masters concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of color to educate white women – in the face of tremendous resistance – as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought” From Lorde’s The Masters Tools Cannot Dismantle The Masters House
I think these two quotes correlate to each other because the former quote depicts Lorde realizing that she lives in a world that is predominantly white and that she is “othered” because she is a black. The latter quote shows that she is “othered” not only because she is a person of color, but also because she is also a woman. I like the reflective tone of the novel: she is looking back and trying to understand how her intersectional identity fits into the world and she gives us a lot of insight on what it was like, for her, to grow up during that time period. Like Satrapi, Lorde forwards the notion that the personal is political because she is able to connect her experience with political and social attitudes of that era and by doing that, she challenges the single story.
Good connections, Tramel. I also think the last quote points to the way that patriarchal systems play women off of each other so that they don't have the energy to fight against the racist/sexist system.
"My mother was a very powerful women. This was so in a time when the word-combination of women and powerful was almost unexpressable in the white america common tongue, except or unless it was accompanied by some aberrant explaining adjective like blind, or hunchback, or crazy, or Black. There for when I was growing up powerful women equaled something else quite different from ordinary women" 15.
To grow up in a time like this when it was hard to be a woman but also a powerful black woman must have been more then hard. No one should have to grow up in a world where they feel unjustified by whom they are or how much confidence they have. To remember her mother as something that others didn't see her as must have made her wonder about herself and what she was going to grow up to be like because at small ages most girls want to grow up to be like their mother.
“I lost my sister, Gennie, to my silence and her pain and despair, to both our angers and to a world’s cruelty that destroys its own young in passing - not even as a rebel gesture or sacrifice or hope for another living of the spirit, but out of not noticing or caring about the destruction. I have never been able to blind myself to that cruelty, which according to one popular definition of mental health, makes me mentally unhealthy.” From Lorde's Zami.
"For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological, but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection which is so feared by a patriarchal world. Only within a patriarchal struture is maternity the only social power open to women. Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is a difference between the passive be and the active being." (111) From Lorde's Sister Outsider.
Like Cat said, it must have been so difficult for a woman to grow up in a world like this. Being a woman was hard enough, but being a woman from any minority race, not just black, must have been even more excruciatingly difficult. The jealousy going on not only from African Americans to the 'more privileged' whites, but between Audre and her sisters, mostly because of privileges. I'm wondering how much more we are going to get out of the whole mother theme that I am sensing. I am sensing that not only will Audre's own mother play a huge role throughout the novel, but any other mother figure Audre has.
"All our storybooks were about people who were very different from us. They were blond and white and lived in houses with trees around and had dogs named Spot. I didn't know people like that any more than I knew people like Cinderella who lived in castles. Nobody wrote stories about us, but still people always asked my mother for directions in a crowd" (18).
"I did not like that tail of the Y hanging down below the line in Audrey, and would always forget to put it on, which used to disturb my mother greatly. I used to love the evenness of AUDRELORDE at four years of age, but I remembered to put on the Y because it pleased my mother, and because, as she always insisted to me, that was the way it had to be because that was the way it was" (24).
Already the novel is presenting a deep value on an individual voice, as the title indicates as well. Hybrid identities are prevalent in Audre's culture, as she is born of immigrant parents, as well as being black growing up in early 1900's America. The "single-story" mentality of her society is displayed in the books she is exposed to, which silences the voices of American minorities. So when Audre drops the Y from her name, she takes control of her own voice and identity, even if she is too young to realize it.
"She had divided up the class into two groups, the Fairies and the Brownies. In this day of heightened sensitivity to racism and color usage, I don't have to tell you which were the good students and which were the baddies. I always wound up in the Brownies, because either I talked too much, or I broke my glasses, or I perpetrated some other awful infraction of the endless rules of good behavior" (Lorde - Zami, 27-28).
"We must recognize differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each others' difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles" (Lorde - Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference, 122).
Throughout both of these essays, Lorde talks about how we need to stop viewing difference as opposition. In her first grade classroom that she describes in Zami, difference is literally presented and physically manifested as inferiority. The Brownies are the inferior group, and the name of this group is charged with racial aggression. Audrey is growing up in this environment, and as she writes and reflects on her story, Lorde seems to focus on the idea of coming-of-age. As a young woman, Audrey is taught to "other" herself early on, to view difference as opposition. She sees the injustice in all this, but is encouraged by her parents and by the society around her to remain silent. Now, as Lorde encourages us to use our difference as inspiration, her reflections on her childhood carry out this idea and demonstrate, through real-world experiences, why it is so important.
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audra Lorde “But four years before, I had had to find out if I was going to become pregnant, because a boy from school much bigger than me had invited me up to the roof on my way home from the library and then threatened to break my glasses if I didn’t let him stick his “thing” in-between my legs.” (75)
"Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference" Audra Lorde “Rape is on the increase, reported and unreported, and rape is not aggressive sexuality, it is sexualized aggression … ‘As long as male domination exists, rape will exist.’” (120)
Lorde speaks somewhat nonchalantly about her encounter with the boy, as if it were not surprising to her or because of the fact that he had threatened to break her glasses if she did not let him “fuck” her (I say “fuck” in reference to “The Handmaid’s Tale”, as this act was also not sex between two consenting people). Here Lorde is introducing us to the male dominated culture that she is living in, and I think that her tone in this passage is referring to how oppressed women were from aggressive men, much like Lorde’s quote in “Sister Outsider” explains.
15. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name A Biomythography by Audre Lorde & “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” & “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” by Audre Lorde - Quote from Zami: “. . . elegantly strong triad of grandmother mother daughter, with the ‘I’ moving back and forth flowing in either or both directions as needed. . . . Woman forever. My body, a living representation of other life older longer wiser” (Lorde 7). - Quote from “The Master’s Tools . . .” : “Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic” (Lorde 111). Here, I took two quotes that are not directly related, but they are the ones that stuck out to me. The first speaks about connections, familial relations and the bond between women. The second speaks of women’s differences to each other, despite all being women. I find it interesting that Lorde sees both of these perspectives and I believe both are important: the ying and yang, two sides of the same coin, both of Janus’ faces – of society. To go off that, Janus looks to the past and the future, and in a way, Lorde seems to do that too: she draws the ideas that differences should not just be tolerated – that has been shown in the past for centuries. But she also says our differences need to be addressed. And, simultaneously, unites women by using the concept of “I” which she highlights in a family dynamic. It’s the give and take, the ebb and flow, the past and future that I find intriguing and enlightening.
I love your connection of this symbiotic "I" and the difference as dialectic moment in Lorde's essay. Within the "I" there are many, and it's through acknowledging intersectionality that creativity happens.
"Since my parents shared all making of policy and decision, in my child's eye, my mother must have been other than woman. Again, she was certainly not man. (The three of us children would not have tolerated that deprivation of womanliness for long at all; we'd have probably packed up our kra and gone back before the eighth day -- an option open to all African child-souls who bumble into the wrong milieu.)
My mother was different from other women, and sometimes it gave me a sense of pleasure and specialness that was a positive aspect of feeling set apart. But sometimes it gave me pain and I fancied it the reason for so many of my childhood sorrows. If my mother were like everybody else's maybe they would like me better. But most often, her difference was like the season or a cold day or a steamy night in June. It just was, with no explanation or evocation necessary." (Zami p. 16)
"For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is discovered. It is this real connection which is so feared by a patriarchal world. Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women.
Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is a difference between the passive be and the active being.
Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarites between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic." (Sister Outsider p.111)
Lorde recognizes that her mother isn't like most mothers or most women, because she shares decision and policy-making with Lorde's father. Because of this, and because of the roles women traditionally occupied and because of their typical passive nature and compliance with their husbands, Lorde saw her mother as something other than woman, but also not as man. She was enthralled by the power she experienced in her mother and wished that more mothers were like her own. In "Sister Outsider," Lorde says, "Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women." However, Lorde sees her mother as having gone above and beyond this social power of maternity; she is equal to her husband in his eyes and in the eyes of their children. Lorde emphasizes that women can occupy the "active being" through their interdependence, and it seems true in "Zami" that her mother is doing just that.
“But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation.” (115) From Lorde's Sister Outsider.
“My mother was a very powerful woman. This was so in a time when that word-combination of woman and powerful was almost unexpressable in the white American common tongue…Therefore when I was growing up, powerful woman equaled something else quite different from ordinary woman, from simply ‘woman.’ It certainly did not on the other hand, equal ‘man.’ What then? What was the third designation?” (15).
The idea of women being powerful in this novel is focused on a lot as Zami describes the way that her mother was. Her mother took on a big role in their family as being an equal to her father in the decision making for rules in the household or for punishments for the children. Zami’s mother is shown as a very strong figure and she calls her a “powerful woman” which according to Zami was usually not uttered or used as a description for a woman. This quote makes a distinction between the differences between a man and woman and the white race but makes a point in posing the question of what the third designation is for the powerful woman.
“What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where where racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable.” (110)
“In America, this norm is usually defined as thin, white, male, young, heterosexual, and financially stable. It is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society. Those of us who stand outside that power often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that to be the primary cause of all oppression, forgetting other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be practicing.” (116)
“But Black women and out children know the fabric of our lives if stitched with violence and hatred, that there is no rest. We do not deal with it only on the picket lines, or in dark midnight alleys, or in the places where we dare verbalize our resistance. For us, increasingly, violence weaves through the daily tissues of our living – in the supermarket, in the classroom, in the elevator, in the clinic and the schoolyard, from the plumber, the baker, the saleswoman, the bus driver, the back teller, the waitress who does not serve us. Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged fro a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying.” (119)
“But our future survival is predicated upon our ability to relate without equality. As women, we must root out internalized patterns of oppression within ourselves if we are to move beyond the most superficial aspects of social change.” Now we must recognize differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each others’ difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles.” (122)
Lorde- Zami, A New Spelling of My Name “What does Colored mean?” I asked. To my amazement, neither of my sister was quite sure. “Well,” Phyllis said. “The nuns are white, and the Short-Nek Store-Man is white, and Father Mulvoy is white and we’re Colored.” “And what’s Mommy? Is she white or Colored?” … That was the first and only time my sisters and I discussed race as a reality in my as, or at any rate as it applied to ourselves. (58-59)
I had to struggle with myself to not just quote several large portions of this essay (which I sort of did anyway). The essays hit me in the gut, repeatedly, and the quote I chose from Zami, I chose because it reminded me of a conversation I had with my own mother. The beginning of “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” is a very good example of Lorde helping the feininst notion that the personal is political. Lorde deconstructs and reconstructs the ways in which being female or Black or gay, or all three, present obstacles. However, she does not simply say that these three things make life difficult. She explains the effect that Blackness can have on being a woman, the effect that being a lesbian can have on being black women. This discussion of overlapping identity is one that I’ve hardly seen elsewhere—Typically there are discussions on being a black woman, or being a lesbian. Not only are these essays important for the topics the cover, but for the time periods they discuss. Given the fact that Zami is set in the 1950s, a time when homosexuality was still considered to be a mental illness, and the country is well on its way to the Civil Rights movement.
Lorde – Sister Outsider “Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the masters concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of color to educate white women – in the face of tremendous resistance – as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought” (113).
Lorde – Zami “My mother was a very powerful woman. This was so in a time when that word-combination of woman and powerful was almost unexpressable in the white american common tongue, except or unless it was accompanied by some aberrant explaining adjective like blind, or hunchback, or crazy, or Black. Therefore when I was growing up, powerful woman equaled something else quite different from ordinary woman, from simply "woman." It certainly did not, on the other hand, equal "man." What then? What was the third designation?” (15).
One thing that Lorde does well is explain intersectionality through her work. She really communicates how all oppression is connected, and how even though white women still face oppression, they do not view oppression in the same way as black women. It shows how even in situations where women can join together against the oppression of men, they continue to be divided against each other. It also reminds me of a poet, Staceyann Chin and her poem: “All Oppression is Connected.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XfvZPG32-g)
"In America, this norm is usually defined as thin, white, male, young, heterosexual, and financially stable. It is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society" (116) Lorde's Sister Outsider
"'Lady, please help me oh please take me to the hospital, lady...' Her voice was a mixture of overripe peaches and doorchimes; she was the age of my daughter, running along the woody curves of Van Duzer Street. I stopped the car quickly, and leaned over to open the door. It was high summer. 'Yes, yes, I'll try to help you,' I said. 'Get in.' And when she saw my face in the streetlamp her own collapsed into terror. 'Oh no!' she wailed. 'Not you!' then whirled around and started to run again." (5) Lorde's Zami
Lorde does an excellent job of highlighting societal norms and establishing the patriarchy and the ways in which the patriarchy can turn women against each other, particularly in her haunting description of the young girl who was being attacked and was caught by her attacker rather than stepping into Lorde's car because she's black. It put a lot into perspective for me, because I never grew up in a place where that kind of hatred or fear was present, at least visibly, but this made me realize that racism is an institutionalized system perpetuated by the patriarchy, and one way in which the patriarchy controls strong women by turning us against one another.
"All our storybooks were about people who were very different from us. They were blond and white and lived in houses with trees around and had dogs named Spot. I didn't know people like that anymore than I knew people like Cinderella who lived in castles. Nobody wrote stories about us" (18). - Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
"Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist" (112). - Lorde, Sister Outsider
Lorde reads a single story. She is unable to read stories that connect to her and relate to her life. Having nobody write stories about characters with similarities to her made her want to become like those characters that she read. The second quote I use is about women, but it can also be about literature and people in general. We should celebrate our differences and know that we are all humans. We all have a voice, and a story. A single story reading experience not only gets boring, but is harmful in offering only one cutout that everyone tries to fit through, losing what makes them special and unique in the process.
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde "The waitress was white, and the counter was white, and the ice-cream I never ate in Washington, D.C. that summer I left childhood was white, and the white heat and the white pavement and the white stone monuments of my first Washington summer made me sick to my stomach for the whole rest of that trip and it wasn’t much of a graduation present at all" (71).
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde "As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist" (112).
I particularly admired Lorde's "Sister Outsider" in which she called out the feminist conference for not including women of all kinds. Today, this is seen as white feminism which includes the ignorance to ignore people who do not fit who is considered the "acceptable woman." Lorde calls upon women of Color to educate white women that their acceptance and recognition of differences are necessary for survival (113). By educating white women, just as women educate men about feminist theories, understanding is formed between all. This doesn't mean pretending there aren't differences, it's starting a conversation. It's unacceptable that only certain women are allowed to bring their opinions, just as Lorde was the only one invited to the conference. Although she was invited, Lorde does a wonderful job of looking out for other women who were not granted the same opportunities.
Lorde (Zami) "I reached up under the welter of dress and petticoats and took hold of the waistband of her knickers. Was her bottom going to be real and warm or turn out to be hard rubber, molded into a little crease like the ultimately disappointing Coca-Cola doll?" (40).
Lorde ("Sister Outsider") “Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill...For the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house...They will never allow us to bring about genuine change” (112).
We hear on the news all the time of black men shot, white women raped, but the stories of black women are commonly silenced. It is always a new and terrifying revelation to read about the lives and abuses of those who are often ignored or passed over. (Also, in reality, it is terrifying to read about anyone's experience who has faced terrible things, so each story is eye-opening and a learning experience.) I don't know if we're far enough in for me to truly grasp Lorde's story, but already as a reader I am forced to face a culture I know nothing about, because this is not my life or my story. And learning about oppression is always scary. But it is necessary.
IMPORTANT: DIGITAL COMMONPLACE DIRECTIONS FOR UNIT 3
ReplyDeleteRather than posting quotations and asking a question (as we did in the first unit), or gathering quotations and making a claim (as we did in the last unit) for the Digital Commonplaces in "Writing the Self: Biographical Approaches," you'll be asked to reflect on how each author’s writing choices interact with your own interpretive processes as audience members.
Please do the following:
1) Post at least two quotations (or in the case of Satrapi, you may want to describe the visual rhetoric on specific panels). If applicable, one quotation should be from the book itself and one should be from the secondary literature assigned with it. Please note the page numbers in your edition/from the article.
2) Then, using the following questions to help guide you, step back and reflect:
o How has this autobiographical text--and these particular passages-- enhanced
your own understanding of women's roles in society?
o Does this author's choice to write about these personal experiences challenge any
preconceived notions you had as a reader?
o How does the author’s writing choices—or, in the case of Satrapi, her visual
rhetoric—help forward the feminist notion that the personal is political?
The waitress was white, and the counter was white, and the ice-cream I never ate in Washington, D.C. that summer I left childhood was white, and the white heat and the white pavement and the white stone monuments of my first Washington summer made me sick to my stomach for the whole rest of that trip and it wasn’t much of a graduation present at all (71). From Lorde’s Zami
ReplyDelete“Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the masters concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of color to educate white women – in the face of tremendous resistance – as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought” From Lorde’s The Masters Tools Cannot Dismantle The Masters House
I think these two quotes correlate to each other because the former quote depicts Lorde realizing that she lives in a world that is predominantly white and that she is “othered” because she is a black. The latter quote shows that she is “othered” not only because she is a person of color, but also because she is also a woman. I like the reflective tone of the novel: she is looking back and trying to understand how her intersectional identity fits into the world and she gives us a lot of insight on what it was like, for her, to grow up during that time period. Like Satrapi, Lorde forwards the notion that the personal is political because she is able to connect her experience with political and social attitudes of that era and by doing that, she challenges the single story.
Good connections, Tramel. I also think the last quote points to the way that patriarchal systems play women off of each other so that they don't have the energy to fight against the racist/sexist system.
Delete"My mother was a very powerful women. This was so in a time when the word-combination of women and powerful was almost unexpressable in the white america common tongue, except or unless it was accompanied by some aberrant explaining adjective like blind, or hunchback, or crazy, or Black. There for when I was growing up powerful women equaled something else quite different from ordinary women" 15.
ReplyDeleteTo grow up in a time like this when it was hard to be a woman but also a powerful black woman must have been more then hard. No one should have to grow up in a world where they feel unjustified by whom they are or how much confidence they have. To remember her mother as something that others didn't see her as must have made her wonder about herself and what she was going to grow up to be like because at small ages most girls want to grow up to be like their mother.
And to grow up with a strong, powerful mother who rejects you must be even more difficult!
Delete“I lost my sister, Gennie, to my silence and her pain and despair, to both our angers and to a world’s cruelty that destroys its own young in passing - not even as a rebel gesture or sacrifice or hope for another living of the spirit, but out of not noticing or caring about the destruction. I have never been able to blind myself to that cruelty, which according to one popular definition of mental health, makes me mentally unhealthy.” From Lorde's Zami.
ReplyDelete"For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological, but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection which is so feared by a patriarchal world. Only within a patriarchal struture is maternity the only social power open to women. Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is a difference between the passive be and the active being." (111) From Lorde's Sister Outsider.
Like Cat said, it must have been so difficult for a woman to grow up in a world like this. Being a woman was hard enough, but being a woman from any minority race, not just black, must have been even more excruciatingly difficult. The jealousy going on not only from African Americans to the 'more privileged' whites, but between Audre and her sisters, mostly because of privileges. I'm wondering how much more we are going to get out of the whole mother theme that I am sensing. I am sensing that not only will Audre's own mother play a huge role throughout the novel, but any other mother figure Audre has.
Mothers and women-bonded women do play a huge role in the book. Good connections.
Delete"All our storybooks were about people who were very different from us. They were blond and white and lived in houses with trees around and had dogs named Spot. I didn't know people like that any more than I knew people like Cinderella who lived in castles. Nobody wrote stories about us, but still people always asked my mother for directions in a crowd" (18).
ReplyDelete"I did not like that tail of the Y hanging down below the line in Audrey, and would always forget to put it on, which used to disturb my mother greatly. I used to love the evenness of AUDRELORDE at four years of age, but I remembered to put on the Y because it pleased my mother, and because, as she always insisted to me, that was the way it had to be because that was the way it was" (24).
Already the novel is presenting a deep value on an individual voice, as the title indicates as well. Hybrid identities are prevalent in Audre's culture, as she is born of immigrant parents, as well as being black growing up in early 1900's America. The "single-story" mentality of her society is displayed in the books she is exposed to, which silences the voices of American minorities. So when Audre drops the Y from her name, she takes control of her own voice and identity, even if she is too young to realize it.
Excellent analysis. The naming of identity and the voicing the silences is a major theme in this autobiography.
Delete"She had divided up the class into two groups, the Fairies and the Brownies. In this day of heightened sensitivity to racism and color usage, I don't have to tell you which were the good students and which were the baddies. I always wound up in the Brownies, because either I talked too much, or I broke my glasses, or I perpetrated some other awful infraction of the endless rules of good behavior" (Lorde - Zami, 27-28).
ReplyDelete"We must recognize differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each others' difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles" (Lorde - Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference, 122).
Throughout both of these essays, Lorde talks about how we need to stop viewing difference as opposition. In her first grade classroom that she describes in Zami, difference is literally presented and physically manifested as inferiority. The Brownies are the inferior group, and the name of this group is charged with racial aggression. Audrey is growing up in this environment, and as she writes and reflects on her story, Lorde seems to focus on the idea of coming-of-age. As a young woman, Audrey is taught to "other" herself early on, to view difference as opposition. She sees the injustice in all this, but is encouraged by her parents and by the society around her to remain silent. Now, as Lorde encourages us to use our difference as inspiration, her reflections on her childhood carry out this idea and demonstrate, through real-world experiences, why it is so important.
Great analysis; I like how you step back and reflect on how the book itself fills the silences.
DeleteZami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audra Lorde
ReplyDelete“But four years before, I had had to find out if I was going to become pregnant, because a boy from school much bigger than me had invited me up to the roof on my way home from the library and then threatened to break my glasses if I didn’t let him stick his “thing” in-between my legs.” (75)
"Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference" Audra Lorde
“Rape is on the increase, reported and unreported, and rape is not aggressive sexuality, it is sexualized aggression … ‘As long as male domination exists, rape will exist.’” (120)
Lorde speaks somewhat nonchalantly about her encounter with the boy, as if it were not surprising to her or because of the fact that he had threatened to break her glasses if she did not let him “fuck” her (I say “fuck” in reference to “The Handmaid’s Tale”, as this act was also not sex between two consenting people). Here Lorde is introducing us to the male dominated culture that she is living in, and I think that her tone in this passage is referring to how oppressed women were from aggressive men, much like Lorde’s quote in “Sister Outsider” explains.
Good connections, Nicolette. You'll see that other sexual aggression is also mentioned in the same off-hand way. We should discuss why in class.
Delete15. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name A Biomythography by Audre Lorde & “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” & “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” by Audre Lorde
ReplyDelete- Quote from Zami: “. . . elegantly strong triad of grandmother mother daughter, with the ‘I’ moving back and forth flowing in either or both directions as needed. . . . Woman forever. My body, a living representation of other life older longer wiser” (Lorde 7).
- Quote from “The Master’s Tools . . .” : “Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic” (Lorde 111).
Here, I took two quotes that are not directly related, but they are the ones that stuck out to me. The first speaks about connections, familial relations and the bond between women. The second speaks of women’s differences to each other, despite all being women. I find it interesting that Lorde sees both of these perspectives and I believe both are important: the ying and yang, two sides of the same coin, both of Janus’ faces – of society. To go off that, Janus looks to the past and the future, and in a way, Lorde seems to do that too: she draws the ideas that differences should not just be tolerated – that has been shown in the past for centuries. But she also says our differences need to be addressed. And, simultaneously, unites women by using the concept of “I” which she highlights in a family dynamic. It’s the give and take, the ebb and flow, the past and future that I find intriguing and enlightening.
I love your connection of this symbiotic "I" and the difference as dialectic moment in Lorde's essay. Within the "I" there are many, and it's through acknowledging intersectionality that creativity happens.
Delete"Since my parents shared all making of policy and decision, in my child's eye, my mother must have been other than woman. Again, she was certainly not man. (The three of us children would not have tolerated that deprivation of womanliness for long at all; we'd have probably packed up our kra and gone back before the eighth day -- an option open to all African child-souls who bumble into the wrong milieu.)
ReplyDeleteMy mother was different from other women, and sometimes it gave me a sense of pleasure and specialness that was a positive aspect of feeling set apart. But sometimes it gave me pain and I fancied it the reason for so many of my childhood sorrows. If my mother were like everybody else's maybe they would like me better. But most often, her difference was like the season or a cold day or a steamy night in June. It just was, with no explanation or evocation necessary." (Zami p. 16)
"For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is discovered. It is this real connection which is so feared by a patriarchal world. Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women.
Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is a difference between the passive be and the active being.
Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarites between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic." (Sister Outsider p.111)
Lorde recognizes that her mother isn't like most mothers or most women, because she shares decision and policy-making with Lorde's father. Because of this, and because of the roles women traditionally occupied and because of their typical passive nature and compliance with their husbands, Lorde saw her mother as something other than woman, but also not as man. She was enthralled by the power she experienced in her mother and wished that more mothers were like her own. In "Sister Outsider," Lorde says, "Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women." However, Lorde sees her mother as having gone above and beyond this social power of maternity; she is equal to her husband in his eyes and in the eyes of their children. Lorde emphasizes that women can occupy the "active being" through their interdependence, and it seems true in "Zami" that her mother is doing just that.
Excellent connections, Emily.
Delete“But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation.” (115) From Lorde's Sister Outsider.
ReplyDelete“My mother was a very powerful woman. This was so in a time when that word-combination of woman and powerful was almost unexpressable in the white American common tongue…Therefore when I was growing up, powerful woman equaled something else quite different from ordinary woman, from simply ‘woman.’ It certainly did not on the other hand, equal ‘man.’ What then? What was the third designation?” (15).
The idea of women being powerful in this novel is focused on a lot as Zami describes the way that her mother was. Her mother took on a big role in their family as being an equal to her father in the decision making for rules in the household or for punishments for the children. Zami’s mother is shown as a very strong figure and she calls her a “powerful woman” which according to Zami was usually not uttered or used as a description for a woman. This quote makes a distinction between the differences between a man and woman and the white race but makes a point in posing the question of what the third designation is for the powerful woman.
I like that you're focusing on getting outside the man/woman binary here, Harmony and that you're thinking about it in relation to intersectionality.
DeleteLorde- Sister Outsider
ReplyDelete“What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where where racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable.” (110)
“In America, this norm is usually defined as thin, white, male, young, heterosexual, and financially stable. It is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society. Those of us who stand outside that power often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that to be the primary cause of all oppression, forgetting other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be practicing.” (116)
“But Black women and out children know the fabric of our lives if stitched with violence and hatred, that there is no rest. We do not deal with it only on the picket lines, or in dark midnight alleys, or in the places where we dare verbalize our resistance. For us, increasingly, violence weaves through the daily tissues of our living – in the supermarket, in the classroom, in the elevator, in the clinic and the schoolyard, from the plumber, the baker, the saleswoman, the bus driver, the back teller, the waitress who does not serve us.
Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged fro a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying.” (119)
“But our future survival is predicated upon our ability to relate without equality. As women, we must root out internalized patterns of oppression within ourselves if we are to move beyond the most superficial aspects of social change.” Now we must recognize differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each others’ difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles.” (122)
Lorde- Zami, A New Spelling of My Name
“What does Colored mean?” I asked. To my amazement, neither of my sister was quite sure.
“Well,” Phyllis said. “The nuns are white, and the Short-Nek Store-Man is white, and Father Mulvoy is white and we’re Colored.”
“And what’s Mommy? Is she white or Colored?” … That was the first and only time my sisters and I discussed race as a reality in my as, or at any rate as it applied to ourselves. (58-59)
I had to struggle with myself to not just quote several large portions of this essay (which I sort of did anyway). The essays hit me in the gut, repeatedly, and the quote I chose from Zami, I chose because it reminded me of a conversation I had with my own mother. The beginning of “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” is a very good example of Lorde helping the feininst notion that the personal is political. Lorde deconstructs and reconstructs the ways in which being female or Black or gay, or all three, present obstacles.
However, she does not simply say that these three things make life difficult. She explains the effect that Blackness can have on being a woman, the effect that being a lesbian can have on being black women. This discussion of overlapping identity is one that I’ve hardly seen elsewhere—Typically there are discussions on being a black woman, or being a lesbian. Not only are these essays important for the topics the cover, but for the time periods they discuss. Given the fact that Zami is set in the 1950s, a time when homosexuality was still considered to be a mental illness, and the country is well on its way to the Civil Rights movement.
Lorde – Sister Outsider
ReplyDelete“Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the masters concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of color to educate white women – in the face of tremendous resistance – as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought” (113).
Lorde – Zami
“My mother was a very powerful woman. This was so in a time when that word-combination of woman and powerful was almost unexpressable in the white american common tongue, except or unless it was accompanied by some aberrant explaining adjective like blind, or hunchback, or crazy, or Black. Therefore when I was growing up, powerful woman equaled something else quite different from ordinary woman, from simply "woman." It certainly did not, on the other hand, equal "man." What then? What was the third designation?” (15).
One thing that Lorde does well is explain intersectionality through her work. She really communicates how all oppression is connected, and how even though white women still face oppression, they do not view oppression in the same way as black women. It shows how even in situations where women can join together against the oppression of men, they continue to be divided against each other. It also reminds me of a poet, Staceyann Chin and her poem: “All Oppression is Connected.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XfvZPG32-g)
"In America, this norm is usually defined as thin, white, male, young, heterosexual, and financially stable. It is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society" (116)
ReplyDeleteLorde's Sister Outsider
"'Lady, please help me oh please take me to the hospital, lady...' Her voice was a mixture of overripe peaches and doorchimes; she was the age of my daughter, running along the woody curves of Van Duzer Street. I stopped the car quickly, and leaned over to open the door. It was high summer. 'Yes, yes, I'll try to help you,' I said. 'Get in.' And when she saw my face in the streetlamp her own collapsed into terror. 'Oh no!' she wailed. 'Not you!' then whirled around and started to run again." (5)
Lorde's Zami
Lorde does an excellent job of highlighting societal norms and establishing the patriarchy and the ways in which the patriarchy can turn women against each other, particularly in her haunting description of the young girl who was being attacked and was caught by her attacker rather than stepping into Lorde's car because she's black. It put a lot into perspective for me, because I never grew up in a place where that kind of hatred or fear was present, at least visibly, but this made me realize that racism is an institutionalized system perpetuated by the patriarchy, and one way in which the patriarchy controls strong women by turning us against one another.
"All our storybooks were about people who were very different from us. They were blond and white and lived in houses with trees around and had dogs named Spot. I didn't know people like that anymore than I knew people like Cinderella who lived in castles. Nobody wrote stories about us" (18).
ReplyDelete- Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
"Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist" (112).
- Lorde, Sister Outsider
Lorde reads a single story. She is unable to read stories that connect to her and relate to her life. Having nobody write stories about characters with similarities to her made her want to become like those characters that she read. The second quote I use is about women, but it can also be about literature and people in general. We should celebrate our differences and know that we are all humans. We all have a voice, and a story. A single story reading experience not only gets boring, but is harmful in offering only one cutout that everyone tries to fit through, losing what makes them special and unique in the process.
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
ReplyDelete"The waitress was white, and the counter was white, and the ice-cream I never ate in Washington, D.C. that summer I left childhood was white, and the white heat and the white pavement and the white stone monuments of my first Washington summer made me sick to my stomach for the whole rest of that trip and it wasn’t much of a graduation present at all" (71).
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
"As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist" (112).
I particularly admired Lorde's "Sister Outsider" in which she called out the feminist conference for not including women of all kinds. Today, this is seen as white feminism which includes the ignorance to ignore people who do not fit who is considered the "acceptable woman." Lorde calls upon women of Color to educate white women that their acceptance and recognition of differences are necessary for survival (113). By educating white women, just as women educate men about feminist theories, understanding is formed between all. This doesn't mean pretending there aren't differences, it's starting a conversation. It's unacceptable that only certain women are allowed to bring their opinions, just as Lorde was the only one invited to the conference. Although she was invited, Lorde does a wonderful job of looking out for other women who were not granted the same opportunities.
Lorde (Zami)
ReplyDelete"I reached up under the welter of dress and petticoats and took hold of the waistband of her knickers. Was her bottom going to be real and warm or turn out to be hard rubber, molded into a little crease like the ultimately disappointing Coca-Cola doll?" (40).
Lorde ("Sister Outsider")
“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill...For the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house...They will never allow us to bring about genuine change” (112).
We hear on the news all the time of black men shot, white women raped, but the stories of black women are commonly silenced. It is always a new and terrifying revelation to read about the lives and abuses of those who are often ignored or passed over. (Also, in reality, it is terrifying to read about anyone's experience who has faced terrible things, so each story is eye-opening and a learning experience.) I don't know if we're far enough in for me to truly grasp Lorde's story, but already as a reader I am forced to face a culture I know nothing about, because this is not my life or my story. And learning about oppression is always scary. But it is necessary.