Her Self – Informed by Audre Lorde

For the first time in my life I am alone. Hopefully this year and only perhaps the two years after it will be the most alone I will ever be. The quality of my position is best appreciated with a reminder that I grew up with a twin sister – whom I loved and was inseparable from in my everyday sense of self. I love her still but we have become used to finding communion with the nearer souls considering our well over 3,000 miles distance this past 5 years. I filled my life with debate and boyfriends during college. But now my boyfriend, Buddy Khan, is in law school in D.C. and I’m coaching debate again where we met at the University of Rochester.

First of all, it was entirely my decision to come back to the U of R to coach again and I cannot, will not regret it. Something about the “project” I inadvertently signed up for by working alongside Novice-focused debate minds like Ken Johnson and Gordie Miller and with my entire Rhetoric department at St. John’s University (gorgeously sensitive to their own pedagogy – Steve Llano, Jaime Wright, Michael Hostetler, John Greg and Jeremiah Hickey) left me unsatisfied with my only one year of “work.” Last year I was overcoming so many personal dilemmas as the go-to person of a classroom (I can’t call myself a full out “teacher” without some sense of presumption) and had to feel out the dimensions of a Policy/Worlds debate squad. I felt the team was owed some sort of consistency on the Worlds side of the squad. For all of my flaws as a debate mind I think I can at least offer them consistency of practice and improving feedback.

So I am here. May I always make such decisions so as not to become complacent with simple wifehood. This was not meant for me.

That being said, this may be consistency for URDU debaters but not for me. My roommate is a well-meaning and nice 17 year old young lady from MCC and my boyfriend is bushy eyebrows deep in law school work at Georgetown. And the time to myself fluctuates between some pretty damned productive thinking to the resonating sound of self criticism that I feel I cannot control. It breaks the laws of physics in that the repetition becomes louder each chorus.

I told myself I learned by talking and that was why I fought meditation. Other people were my refuge from me. Left to my own tools I dismantle each interaction with a tiny magnifying glass, a large hammer and dull screw driver – rough tools. “Why did I say that?!” and “They are so much smarter/prettier/likable than me.”

But this blog entry isn’t to say that I’m the only one to kick myself… hard. I started taking notes on what I expected this year during my summer in Boston and D.C. I knew my self-worth would rollercoaster with the calls I did (but more likely didn’t) get and the passion of the debaters I was working with. However, reading Zami by Audre Lorde has helped me grasp at a new understanding of aloneness.

She writes about her awakening to erotic expression and love-of-women lifestyle in a time when the name Rosenberg in the Village invoked tears of grief. Difference had literally been killed. In Lorde’s women-centered lifestyle she spent quite a bit of it alone because she was attracted to women and possibly even more often because she was a black and unwilling to take up a specified role as dominator or femme. With that time she wrote poetry on her bathroom walls, in her journals and on her own heart. She fortified herself but tore down some walls with each interaction and modified the structure after moving experiences. I was moved deeply by her courage to move to Mexico for a time just to get away from the oppressive mindset she felt in New York City. And her bravery to go back to school and continue on with her degree considering the kind of college culture she was submitting herself to to do so… she who helped inform pedagogy so that the college experience we have today is different for her.

Her aloneness seems, to me, a difficult but valuable path towards … several things! Her personal voice and sense of strength (though she attributes much of this to her mother, she is on her own when each loss strikes her). Had she spent time in an environment that disrupted her navigational tools with busyness she may not have had the insights she did. Her Aloneness explored:

“We [Audre Lorde and her white lover/girlfriend Muriel] were too afraid those differences [race] might infact be irreconcilable, for we had never been taught any tools for dealing with them.”

Redefined:

“ Being women together was not enough. We were different. Being gay-girls together was not enough. We were different. Being Black together was not enough. We were different. Being Black women together was not enough. We were different. Being Black dykes together was not enough. We were different… It was awhile before we came to realize that our house was the very house of difference.”

I kick myself now for not having treated Zami as a more serious text worth marking up more intensely than I did. I was so comfortable with her voice and straightforward, beautiful style that I felt her rather than analyzed her. But the impression I have of the brief picture she provides of her young life is inspirational and evocative. The separation she feels between her parents and siblings is both realistic and heartbreaking especially for the qualities she enjoys in her dear family that she leaves behind to further herself. And for all the love she awakens to, the relationships are punctuated. And what I love most about Audre Lorde is that she can work through the hardship, which even poetry could not express, to grant the empathetic reader light unto their own path towards Her Self lovingly.

I feel less alone because of Audre. She helps me imagine the strength.