As companion to this, sent along by delux-vivens, in this space I will give you the Open Letter to Mary Daly as soon as I have time to type it in. Unless one shows up on on the internet(s) and I can just link to it.
Both works were written in 1979. Or, to put it another way, Twenty Eight Years Ago.
Quick background: Mary Daly (this link actually goes to a site about her) wrote Gyn/Ecology and sent a copy to Lorde. Lorde and other not white feminists had problems with the book. Lorde wrote Daly a letter laying out her concerns. Daly never bothered to answer. (To my knowledge Lorde went to her grave waiting for a response from Daly. 'Cause, you know, why bother to extend the respect of a reply to a black woman, even if she is a radical lesbian feminist academic poet type?) Lorde waited a few months, then released her letter to all. A few months after that Lorde delivered this talk. It is that talk which has been used and misused by white mainstream and radical feminism for nearly 30 years now, the WisCon panel incident just being the latest wearying example. Nearly 30 years of saying PLEASE stop appropriating this particular work without care, followed by nearly 30 years of being ignored by our peers. Because that's the way the world works. Ever has it been, ever shall it be.
But hey, it's all about the Patriarchy, so what do we know.
(The "He / We" thing could be a typo. That's my assumption, because the whole thing looks like raw notes. When time allows I will continue to hunt for a better write-up of this panel and swap out the link when I find one.)
I'm offering up this letter because I feel it's companion to Lorde's other piece. If it's clear that quite a few attendees at WisCon -- aka The World's Leading Feminist SF Convention -- did not instantly recognize the source of that panel title then they might also be unaware of this letter, which is also infamous, important and caused a bit of a roil before our more white than we are feminist peers went back to ignoring the whole issue Lorde was addressing. Reading it again, I remain stunned by the amount of grace and restraint Lorde demonstrates. If it's true one tends to admire in others what they lack within themselves, maybe that's one reason this letter and several of Lorde's nonfiction pieces have always impressed me.
And yet, every time I read it I am a bit depressed because fuck all has changed, really. For example, I was introduced to Gyn/Ecology in college, seven or so years after the book was published. I picked up immediately on the ommission Lorde talks about below but the instructor never brought it up so I figured I'm not an academic so what do I know? Maybe there was a reason for it I was not equipped to understand, which is why I was in school. Toward the end of the week or so we spent on Gyn/Ecology, the only other brown person in the class, a Latina, asked our intstructor (I think it was a grad student, not a full prof) if she was going to address Lorde's response. I had no idea what she was talking about. At that time my awareness of Lorde centered on her poetry and a couple of essays. Our instructor's response was to flush red and attempt to make this woman feel like a traitor for bringing it up. This kind of freaked out everybody in the class because up until then the instructor had been a rather low-key hippie type. The only time she got upset was when she was talking about the patriarchy. Right then it also hit me that this college class presented us with *only* the work of white feminists, and though she talked lots and lots about class systems and political structures she never addressed race except for in a vague 'poor dears see what the patriarchy does' sense, or to criticize MLK, SNCC, the Panthers and others for their treatment of women. (To be fair, she did talk about Angela Davis. She liked Angela Davis.)
That ended my blanket acceptance of the rhetoric of academic/mainstream/so-called radical/focused on white women feminism and began my Broader Education. Began immediately by first hitting up the library, then next time around doing my research to pick a more inclusive course, which lead me to a class with a black instructor. Still only two or three brown students in the class, but having a black teacher made all the difference! Let's just say there was a hell of a lot less affirming in that class and a lot more shouting matches and uncomfortable silences. It was great! Those were the only formal classes I've ever taken on feminism, though. Like a lot of things, I've taken the Jeffersonian approach since.
Anywho, any typos below are my fault. However, note that you will see some words in lowercase and others in uppercase in a way you are perhaps not used to seeing. Lorde was deliberate with those choices. As you read it, you should be able to figure out why she made those choices and what she was signaling by doing so.
This letter, like the Master's Tools piece, has nothing to do with Buffy Summers. Thought it might be helpful to make that clear.
Dear Mary,
With a moment of space in this wild and bloody spring, I want to speak the words I have had in mind for you. I had hoped that our paths might cross and we could sit down together and talk, but this has not happened.
I wish you strength and satisfaction in your eventual victory over the repressive forces of the University in Boston. I am glad so many women attended the speak-out, and hope that this show of joined power will make more space for you to grow and be within.
Thank you for having Gyn/Ecology sent to me. So much of it is full of import, useful, generative and provoking. As in Beyond God The Father, many of your analyses are strengthening and helpful to me. Therefore, it is because of what you have given to me in the past work that I write this letter to you now, hoping to share with you the benefits of my insights as you have shared the benefits of yours with me.
This letter has been delayed because of my grave reluctance to reach out to you, for what I want us to chew upon here is neither easy nor simple. The history of white womenwho are unable to hear Black women's words, or to maintain dialogue with us, is long and discouraging. But for me to assume that you will not hear me represents not only history, perhaps, but an old pattern of relating, sometimes protective and sometimes dysfunctional, which we, as women shaping our future, are in the process of shattering and passing beyond, I hope.
I believe in your good faith toward all women, in your vision of a future within which we can all flourish, and in your commitment to the hard and often painful work necessary to effect change. In this spirit I invite you to a joint clarification of some of the differences which lie between us as a Black and a white woman.
When I started reading Gyn/Ecology, I was truly excited by the vision behind your words and nodded my head as you spoke in your First Passage of myth and mystification. your words on the nature and function of the Goddess, as well as the ways in which her face has been obscured, agreed with what I myself have discovered in my searches through African myth/legend/religion for the true nature of old female power.
So I wondered, why doesn't Mary deal with Afrekete aas an example? Why are her goddess images only white, western, european, judeo-christian? Where was Afrekete, Yemanje, Oyo, and Mawulisa? Where were the warrior goddesses of the Vodun, the Dahomeian Amazons and the warrior-women of Dan? Well, I thought, Mary has made a conscious decision to narrow her scope and to deal only with the ecology of western european women.
Then I came to the first three chapters of your Second Passage, and it was obvious that you were dealing with noneuropean women, but only as victims and preyers-upon each other. I began to feel my history and my mythic background distorted by the absence of any images of my foremothers in power. Your inclusion of African genital mutilation was an important and necessary piece in any consideration of female ecology, and too little has been written about it. To imply, however, that all women suffer the same oppression simply because we are women is to lose sight of the many varied tools of the patriarchy. It is to ignore how those tools are used by women without awareness against each other.
To dismiss our Black foremothers may well be to dismiss where european women learned to love. As an African-american woman in white patriarchy, I am used to having my archetypal experience distorted and trivialized, but it is terribly painful to feel it being done by a woman whose knowledge so much touches my own.
When I speak of knowledge, as you know, I am speaking of that dark and true depth which understanding serves, waits upon, and makes accessible through language to ourselves and others. It is this depth within each of us that nurtures vision.
What you excluded from Gyn/Ecology dismissed my heritage and the heritage of all other noneuropean women, and denied the real connections that exist between all of us.
It is obvious that you have done a tremendous amount of work for this book. But simply because so little material on non-white female power and symbol exists in white women's words from a radical feminist perspective, to exclude this aspect of connection from even comment in your work is to deny the foundation of noneuropean female strength and power that nurtures each of our visions. It is to make a point by choice.
Then, to realize that the only quotations from Black women's words were the ones you used to introduce your chapter on African genital mutilation made me question why you needed to use them at all. For my part, I felt that you had in fact misused my words, utilized them only to testify against myself as a woman of Color. For my words which you used were no more, no less, illustrative of this chapter than "Poetry Is Not a Luxury" or any number of my other poems might have been of many other parts of Gyn/Ecology.
So the question arises in my mind, Mary, do you ever really read the work of Black women? Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might not valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us? This is not a rhetorical question.
To me, this feels like another instance of the knowledge, croneology and work of women of Color being ghettoized by a white woman dealing only out of a patriarchal western european frame of reference. Even your words on page 49 of Gyn/Ecology, "The strength which Self-centering women find, in finding our Background is our own strength, which we give back to our Selves," have a different ring as we remember the old traditions of power and strength and nurturance found in the female bonding of African women. It is there to be tapped by all women who do not fear the revelation of connection to themselves.
Have you read my work, and the work of other Black women, for what it could give you? Or did you hunt through only to find words that would legitimize your chapter on African genital mutilation in the eyes of other Black women? And if so, then why not use our words to legitimize or illustrate the other places where we connec tin our being and becoming? If, on the one hand, it was not Black women you were attemption to reach, in what way did our words illustrate your point for white women?
Mary, I ask that you be aware of how this serves the destructive forces of racism and separation between women -- the assumption that the herstoryt and myth of white women is the legitimate and sole herstory and myth of all women to call upon for power and background, and that nonwhite women and our herstories are noteworthy only as decorations, or examples of female victimization. I ask that you be aware of the effect that this dismissal has upon the community of Black women and other women of Color, and how it devalues your own words. This dismissal does not essentially differ from the specialized devaluations that make Black women prey, for instance, to the murders even now happening in your own city. When patriarchy dismisses us, it encourages our murderers. When radical lesbial feminist theory dismisses us, it encourages its own demise.
This dismissal stands as a real block to communication between us. This block makes it far easier to turn away from you completely than to attempt to understand the thinking behind your choices. Should the next step be war between us, or separation? Assimilation within a solely wester european herstory is not acceptable.
Mary, I ask that you remember what is dark and ancient and divine within yourself that aids your speaking. As outsiders, we need each other for support and connection and all the other necessities of living on the borders. But in order to come together we must recognize each other. Yet I feel that since you have so completely unrecognized me, perhaps I have been in error concerning you and no longer recognize you.
I feel you do celebrate differences between white women as a creative force toward change, rather than a reason for misunderstanding and separation. But you fail to recognize that, as women, those differences expose all women to various forms and degrees of patriarchal oppression, some of which we share and some of which we do not. For instance, surely you know that for nonwhite women in this country, there is an 80 percent fatality rate from breast cancer; three times the number of unnecessary eventrations, hysterectomies and sterilizations as for white women; three times as many chances of being raped, murdered or assaulted as exist for white women. These are statistical facts, not coincidences nor paranoid fantasies.
Within the community of women, racism is a reality force in my life as it is not in yours. The white women with hoods on in the Ohio handing out KKK literature on the street may not liek what you have to say, but they will shoot me on sight. (If you and I were to walk into a classroom of women in Dismal Gulch, Alabama, where the only thing they knew about each of us was that we were both Lesbian/Radical/Feminist, you would see exactly what I mean.
The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences. nor do the reservoirs of our ancient power know these boundaries. To deal with one without even alluding to the other is to distort our commonality as well as our difference.
For then beyond sisterhood is still racism.
WE first met at the MLA panel, "The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action." This letter attempts to break a silence which I had imposed upon myself shortly before that date. I had decided never again to speak to white women about racism. I felt it was wasted energy because of destructive guilt and defensiveness, and because whatever I had to say might better be said by white women to one another at far less emotional cost to the speaker, and probably with a better hearing. But I would like not to destroy you in my consciousness, not to have to. So as a sister Hag, I ask you to speak to my perceptions.
Whether or not you do, Mary, again I thank you for what I have learned from you.
This letter is in repayment.
In the hands of Afrekete,
Audre Lorde
May 6, 1979
