Speak frankly
Love, Maybe
Always
in the middle
of our bloodiest battles
you lay down your arms
like flowering mines
to conqueror me home.'
in the middle
of our bloodiest battles
you lay down your arms
like flowering mines
to conqueror me home.'
- Audre Lorde
Poetry Is Not A Luxury is one of the essays in Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde. Through poetry we gave name to those ideas that are formless and nameless, but which we feel already. True poetry springing is like how a dreams births a concept, as feelings births idea, as knowledge births understanding. Womxn have dark places, they are hidden, and that’s where true spirit rises: they dark because they are hidden and ancient. They are reseverse of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. It isn’t white: it’s dark. It isn’t superficial, it’s deep, it’s ancient.
We need to respect those sources of power. In these quotes I feel she captures the spirit the most.
'I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.'
'For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.'
We need to respect those sources of power. In these quotes I feel she captures the spirit the most.
'I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.'
'For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.'
Lorde stresses the importance of poetry, the necessity of understanding yourself, of finding a form to share it in. Poetry does all that. For her, some things remained incomprehensible, even intolerable, until they came as dreams or poems, connected to her ancient depths. She calls it the skeleton architecture of our lives. And it makes her want to get to action, to change the world, to be an activist.
It’s is inherently linked to (black) womxnhood. Through the history womxn have been told that they were chldish, Schopenhauer is notorious for his misogyny. Womxn have no universality, no rich think world where philosophy, art, and frienship collided. We are forever changeable, “draaien met de wind.”. But, Lorde says, is the artist/writer alering your aura, your ideas, your dreams, or are they merely moving you to temporary and reactive ideas?
Are you being influenced to change, or is just occupying your head for a while?
I live by this quote from the moment I read it:
'The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us — the poet — whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom.'
It’s is inherently linked to (black) womxnhood. Through the history womxn have been told that they were chldish, Schopenhauer is notorious for his misogyny. Womxn have no universality, no rich think world where philosophy, art, and frienship collided. We are forever changeable, “draaien met de wind.”. But, Lorde says, is the artist/writer alering your aura, your ideas, your dreams, or are they merely moving you to temporary and reactive ideas?
Are you being influenced to change, or is just occupying your head for a while?
I live by this quote from the moment I read it:
'The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us — the poet — whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom.'
The head won’t save us, she says. The brain won’t set us free. There are no such things as new ideas that are waiting to save us as womxn, as humans. She says that there are only forgotten and old ideas, new combinations, new extrapolations, and recognitions from within ourselves. And the only thing we need then is courage to try those new ideas out.
You have to get to know yourself, and your feelings, and be willing to change. To fight for change, don’t let injustice happen, search for your own injustice. Which things the society has told you, have you started to believe? That you feel too much? That you’re too feminine, too masculine?
You have to get to know yourself, and your feelings, and be willing to change. To fight for change, don’t let injustice happen, search for your own injustice. Which things the society has told you, have you started to believe? That you feel too much? That you’re too feminine, too masculine?
Insist on talking face to face
When I don’t know what I'm feeling, and that happens every year two or three times, I can bring myself in a crisis very easily. Instead of taking my time to soul search, I start reading. Book after book, the more feminist the better, and I all hope they will offer me a solution. A blueprint for my life, but as Friedle told me once, they don’t exist. No one can give me a blueprint for my life. Patriarchy tried, I hated it.
My bachelorproef “Bedroom Girl (in pink)” was all about that. I was struggling to find a way to lead my life, and knowledge didn’t provide it for me. The academic words, the arguments, the reasoning. The storytelling, but in no ways it was my story. I went through love, through break-up, through love again, and in the light of a bachelorproef all of that made me panic to my core. All I wanted was to rest, but that’s the hardest thing for me to do.
We performed it for only the jury, I organised a clandestine try-out for a few of my friends, so maybe ten people saw it. I can’t think about it too much, it makes me very sad and frustrated.
So no non-fiction books, no knowledge, they tear my bell curve down.
I always find myself back in performance, and in literature, in art. That’s what makes this time so hard for me, I rarely get to be confronted with what I am suppressing again. I used to see at least one performance or play a week, I was being constantly stimulated, other people’s work brought me to thinking.
We performed it for only the jury, I organised a clandestine try-out for a few of my friends, so maybe ten people saw it. I can’t think about it too much, it makes me very sad and frustrated.
So no non-fiction books, no knowledge, they tear my bell curve down.
I always find myself back in performance, and in literature, in art. That’s what makes this time so hard for me, I rarely get to be confronted with what I am suppressing again. I used to see at least one performance or play a week, I was being constantly stimulated, other people’s work brought me to thinking.
You’ll notice that I didn’t talk about all the books in the pile. Some were too much knowledge again, and others were pure poetry. Poetry as Audre Lorde says, a necessity to understand yourself, and to share it. A quote I want to live my life by. As a woman, a lover, an artist, a writer.