The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House by Audre Lorde | This is not a book review

The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House by Audre Lorde
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Five beautiful essays. The first one says how poetry is no a luxury for women.

'Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.'

We have been taught by white male culture to ignore our feelings. Poetry says otherwise.

'For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt - of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 a.m., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead - while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths.'

The second essay is 'Uses of the Erotic'.

It starts by explaining why female erotic is suppressed.

'There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information of our lives.'

She argues that the erotic is in fact the opposite of the pornographic. This misnomer is deliberate and done by men. She defines erotic as 'an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.' And for men, this can be a dangerous proposition because in all probability, that which gives us this internal sense of satisfaction is not, well, men. And once we recognize this, we will start demanding that satisfactory experience from ourselves all the time. We will not feel like settling for less. And this is not easy, Lorde says.

'It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society.'

She says that we shouldn't confuse it with demanding the impossible from ourselves or others.

'...the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavours bring us closest to that fullness.'

Now imagine women realizing their endeavours that bring them closest to fullness don't have men in it. Now you see why men fear the erotic. So she says,

'Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex.'

She speaks of the spiritual and the political and explains how they are not antithetical. I have not been able to understand completely because i don't know what exactly constitutes 'spiritual'. Lorde explains it as 'psychic and emotional'. I understand the emotional part. And agree that it is a wrong tendency to say that the emotional and the political are antithetical. Spirituality is misrepresented as aspiring to feel nothing and this is wrong, she says. And she says that the dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is false because the erotic is the bridge which connects them.

It became a little clearer to me over here when she says,

'Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase 'It feels right to me' acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light towards any understanding.'

'Feels right to me' is often ridiculed in the political. Lorde says, and i agree, that it need not be so. Feels right is not abstract or silly. It is, often based on years of our understanding and experience, sometimes even as a species.

Recognizing the erotic is a dangerous proposition not only for men but also for gods and other such. Because the erotic, Lorde says, is also about the 'open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy.'

'...that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.'

She also lays emphasis on the fact that this feeling of satisfaction cannot be borrowed. That's abuse, she says.

'When we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse.'

'To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused and the absurd.'

The third essay, 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House' is about the importance of intersectionality, if i may put it that way. It is important to note how all the topics of these essays are relevant to the feminist movement even today. And not just the feminist movement. The Black, Dalit, Adivasi... movements as well.

The essay talks about the practice of exclusion in academics - something she experienced in a conference in a New York University Institute in 1978. But the input of black feminists and lesbians was represented only in one panel at the conference, called 'The Personal and the Political'.

'To read this programme is to assume that lesbian and Black women have nothing to say about existentialism, the erotic, women's culture and silence, developing feminist theory, or heterosexuality and power. And what does it mean in personal and political terms when even the two Black women who did present here were literally found at the last hour?'

This reminded me of a short film by Rajesh Rajamani, 'The Discreet Charm of the Savarnas' where the film crew is desperate to find an actor to play a Dalit character.

Lorde talks about the futility of 'tolerance'. It is not enough that 'tolerating differences' is not enough.

'Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in out lives. Difference moust be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency becomes unthreatening.'

I am reminded of some of the recent discussions on 'Islamic feminism' i read on social media. Feminism cannot survive without accepting the differences. (Some don't even accept these differences, they say that something like Islamic feminism cannot exist.) It is not enough to accept these differences but it should be integrated into feminism without seeing it as a threat. I am an atheist and cannot ever understand why people believe god exists. But don't those who believe it (god) exists have rights? Don't they need feminism? Till recently, i used to be proud that i am one of those atheists who 'tolerates' these differences. Hell, isn't it highly benevolent of me to even accept that something like Islamic/Christian feminism can exist? Lorde taught me it is not. It is necessary for feminism to listen to the differences and nurture interdependency. See how beautifully she explains it.

'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 pretence that these differences do not exist.'

Feminism should understand that difference is strength. It should aim to 'define and empower' instead of 'divide and conquer'. Divide and conquer is patriarchy's tool. And it is here that Lorde says those beautiful words, 'For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.'

A bitter pill to swallow, isn't it? That if you are a woman who cannot believe in community and creatively addressing differences and integrating them, it means you are comfortable in patriarchy.

'The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson.'

She talks about how 'educating' is a tool of oppression used by dominant groups. White feminists need not be 'educated' about Black feminists. It is not the responsibility of Dalits to 'educate' savarnas about Dalit feminism or caste.

'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 our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns.'

'Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism'

There is no need to ignore our immediate response to oppression, Lorde assures us, in this essay.

'My response to racism is anger.' she says. The oppressor's fear of this anger is not your burden to bear. You do not have to bear the additional responsibility of making them comfortable. Scared of women's anger? Black women's anger? Dalits', disabled people's, homosexuals' anger? Deal with it yourself. Do not ask them to change so that you can be comfortable. You have been comfortable for too long, and the whole world was designed to make you comfortable.

'Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.'

This might be why they fear anger, like how they fear the erotic?

'Anger is loaded with information and energy. When I speak of women of colour, I do not only mean Black women. The woman of colour who is not Black and who charges me with rendering her invisible by assuming that her struggles with racism are identical with my own has something to tell me that I had better learn from, lest we both waste ourselves fighting the truths between us.'

She also explains the difference between the anger of the oppressed and the hatred of the oppressor. For example, it is not anger that lurks in the streets of my land - that results in my breasts being pinched, lewd remarks being passed etc. It is hatred.

'This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.'

'I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action.'

She goes ahead and says,

'Guilt is only another form of objectification.'

'And my anger is no excuse for not dealing with your blindness, no reason to withdraw from the results of your own actions.'

and further,

'No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman.'

'Learning from the 1960s' - the final essay is about how we can use the history of any movement to our advantage without romanticizing it. Romanticizing the past is a tendency i am familiar with, especially coming from Kerala. Here everything of the past is romanticized. Communism, the 70s, the golden era of cinema...

'Which is not to say that I have to romanticize my mother in order to appreciate what she gave me - woman, Black. We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present.'

Lorde speaks about what the Black people can learn from the 1960s and it is relevant to feminism too. It is relevant to all ideologies and i would like the communists of my land, especially to listen to her.

'...we must move against not only those forces which dehumanize us from the outside, but also against those oppressive values which we have been forced to take into ourselves. Through examining the combination of our triumphs and errors, we can examine the dangers of an incomplete vision. Not to condemn that vision but to alter it, construct templates for possible futures, and focus our rage for change upon our enemies rather than upon each other. In the 1960s, the awakened anger of the Black community was often expressed, not vertically against the corruption of power and true sources of control over our lives, but horizontally towards those closest to us who mirrored out own impotence.'

As woman, this is very familiar to us. Women turning against women has historical precedence in all ideologies. See how clearly Lorde explains the psychology behind it.

'Historically, difference had been used so cruelly against us that as a people we were reluctant to tolerate any diversion from what was externally defined as Blackness.'

The same way how some women turn against those who say they are lesbian women, dalit women etc. This is counter productive especially in the light of the fact that revolution is never a private affair or a personal achievement. '

'Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to address each others' difference with respect.'

'Change is the immediate responsibility of each of us,...' she clarifies.

We cannot be in our comfort zones with our delusions. Like how Christians think they are safe under RSS because the enemy is the Muslim. If the Muslim is the enemy, it means all are enemies.

'We share a common interest, survival, and it cannot be pursued in isolation from others simply because their differences make us uncomfortable.'

'Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don't mean me) or by despair (there's nothing we can do).'

I wish to read the whole of this Penguin collection, the thin books with absolutely delightful font for the covers. Of course, that will take me forever.

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