{"id":29291,"date":"2020-04-14T07:20:51","date_gmt":"2020-04-14T07:20:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lesbianfunworld.com\/books\/?p=29291"},"modified":"2020-04-14T07:20:51","modified_gmt":"2020-04-14T07:20:51","slug":"between-our-selves-by-audre-lorde","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesbianfunworld.com\/books\/between-our-selves-by-audre-lorde\/","title":{"rendered":"Between Our Selves by Audre Lorde"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Between Our Selves<\/em><\/h2>\n

<\/em><\/h3>\n

Audre Lorde<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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These two small volumes (Between Our Selves and If You Want To Know Me by P. Halsey, G. Mor\u00edan and M. Smith ) melt together like Yin and Yang to form a natural sphere of cross-reference and transmigration, though one is by a single black American woman poet, and the other is a collection<\/p>\n

(by three American women) of an assortment of Southern African poets.<\/p>\n

Audre Lorde has taken those linear, those vertical divisions that separate us, and has drawn a circle around them in Between Ourselves. It is not a witch’s circle; it is an embrace. The great moments are here, the estrangements of power and of powerlessness, the universal questions, and the only possible responses.<\/p>\n

In ‘Solstice,’ she asks:<\/p>\n

who do you think me to be<\/p>\n

that you are terrified of becoming<\/p>\n

or what do you see in my face<\/p>\n

you have not already discarded<\/p>\n

in your own mirror<\/i><\/p>\n

She supplies her own answer:<\/p>\n

for most of all I am<\/p>\n

blessed within my s elves<\/p>\n

who are come to make our shattered faces<\/p>\n

whole. (Italics mine)<\/i><\/p>\n

The poet in Between Ourselves (sic) is greater than her art, bigger than her race, than her sex, than even her own priorities. ‘Once it was easy to know\/who were my people,’ she reveals in the title poem. But identity is a bigger, more circular thing than this: ‘I do not believe\/our wants have made all our lies\/holy.’ Thus she moves softly from identity to dignity. Somehow the struggle must be as noble as its goals, or perhaps even more so. There is a constant refusal to submit to or mimic, for whatever high ends, the indignity of the captor, of the dehumanizer. She continues her circle in references to her own childhood, and to her own children. The circle is completed in ‘School Note.’ The continuing struggle meets itself full face, where ‘their playgrounds \/were graveyards.’<\/p>\n

The theme is concentrated within her when she writes in ‘Power’:<\/p>\n

But unless I learn to use<\/p>\n

the difference between poetry and rhetoric<\/p>\n

my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold<\/p>\n

Audre Lorde speaks to the few, to the select, to everyone, as she describes the<\/p>\n

place we all seek, and each of us more than the other:<\/p>\n

for the embattled<\/p>\n

there is no place<\/p>\n

that cannot be<\/p>\n

home<\/p>\n

nor is.<\/i><\/p>\n

~ Mary McAnnally-Knight, Obsidian (1975-1982), Vol. 4, No. 2 (Summer 1978)<\/p><\/div>\n

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Check for it on:<\/h2>\n