February 1st, 2005
Good stuff from Rain and Thunder
This is from an article by Andrea Clark in the Winter Solstice issue of Rain and Thunder. It’s deep and pretty writing, if in some places odd and obscure, and I like it. This part especially struck me:
“Misogyny is composed of lies, and lies make me invisible. It’s not hatred that makes me anxious, it’s being lied to about being hated. It’s being told that hatred is love, is respect, is nature, is sex, or is right, by George Bush, my parents, Sports Illustrated, lovers, friends, revolutionary heroes, commercials, or the U.N. I negotiate that anxiety how I would deal with the devil…My antidote is this: The truths I tell must be greater than the lies I hear. I will risk being seen, and no small fear is that, if what I write will replace one lie. Seeing my writing in print doesn’t make me feel better in the short run and that’s what makes me think it’s not the devil I’m doing…
This is how I survive as a radical feminist…
I sit with my fear, knead it through my body and away from my heart like a pellet of yellow in Audre Lorde’s packet of margarine. I take a walk and return to the keyboard. I digest and develop the ideas of the elders as my own. Something relevant to and inclusive of my world. And choosing that as my methodology, I commit myself to broadening my world. I will not rely on tearing other feminists down. Most of us do that enough on our own, and I believe our promise is in that work we haven’t made time to get to.”
Someone told me last night that she’d read something of mine and it made her think about the topic in a completely new way. That was a big uncomfortable compliment for someone who can’t bear to look at her work printed in an actual publication and Andrea’s words let me know I’m not alone in feeling that. But this piece also reminded me of all the reasons I write, and all the reasons I try to move forward, using the work brilliant feminists have already done and taking it farther, envisioning deeper, unsnarling more complex layers, re-membering that so much of what feminists have come to advocate as ends in themselves were originally means to a larger, better, more beautiful end that for the most part we’ve stopped even thinking about–because we’re so beaten down and marginalized that getting through the day seems like an accomplishment. But that re-membering, that moving forward, is crucial to real feminist change, to real justice for women, and I thank Andrea and RAT for reminding me of that, today.
