“Sister Outsider”: Audre Lorde’s speeches finally in German. – Culture

In spring, Mairisch-Verlag published a book that the editors Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting had previously lacked: “Philosophinnen”. It brings together portraits of outstanding women in the history of philosophy from Hypatia to Angela Davis, written by thinkers currently active in academia around the world. At the end of the book there is a list of other thinkers worthy of the portrait: to be continued. Audre Lorde isn’t into it yet. Audre Lorde is one of them.

Whoever wants to understand why there is so bitterly serious, persistent and irreconcilable dispute about special characters in the language or the translation of poems or the casting of literary juries, in short: about self-determination, recognition and participation, can perhaps find some clarification with Audre Lorde. She has thought about how anger and racism are related, the latter described as “belief in superiority” and the “right to dominance derived from it”. Lorde has dedicated her work, among other things, to the attempt to “purposefully use this anger as a poet and speaker instead of denying it”.

In an open letter to the philosopher Mary Daly, Lorde also writes: “The story whiter Women who are unable to hear us Black women or enter into a dialogue with us is long and daunting. “That was in 1979. Audre Lorde’s book” Sister Outsider, “which contained these sentences and which in 1984 in The United States made her speeches and lectures accessible to a broader public, has now appeared for the first time in a quarter of a century in the German translation by Eva Bonné and Marion Kraft. And when you consider that this woman has also made history in Germany, one has to say: This one Translation was overdue.

“However, the visibility that makes us so vulnerable is also our greatest strength.”

Born in Harlem, New York City in 1934, Audre Lorde first came to West Berlin in 1984 at the invitation of Freie Universität. The documentary “Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years, 1984 – 1992″ by Dagmar Schultz tells of the importance of those years, in which Lorde made a significant contribution to the emergence of an Afro-German women’s movement that ultimately led to the associations Adefra and ISD, advocacy groups ” Black people in Germany “. Most recently, Mithu Sanyal set a literary memorial to the importance of Lorde in her novel “Identitti”, in which she also gave features of Audre Lorde to one of her main characters, the charismatic professor Saraswati.

“Sister Outsider” combines relatively well-known thoughts on racism and emancipation with irritating moments. This is what makes this book so productive as a historical document, but also as a highly contemporary area of ​​friction. “We were never meant to survive. Not as human beings,” wrote Lorde in a 1977 lecture for the “Lesbian and Literature Panel” of the Modern Language Association in Chicago. “However, the visibility that makes us so vulnerable is also our greatest strength.”

These words are probably aimed primarily at Women of Color. Lorde shared one of the moments with them in her 1983 essay “Eye to Eye. Black Women, Hatred and Anger” when she internalized the hatred of white people as a child: A three-year-old girl in a snowsuit climbs into the winter with her mother Subway and is placed by her in an empty seat next to a fine lady. “Her hand in the leather glove tugs at her smooth, shiny fur coat, exactly where it touches my new blue snow pants. With a jerk she pulls the coat close to her. I take a closer look, but can do the terrible thing that she discovers between us couldn’t make out, presumably a cockroach. But I can sense her disgust. “

“Women raised to fear often fear that anger will destroy them.”

Addressing such passages is important. Lorde retrospectively analyzes this iconographic scene in order to name the “internalized assessment of the white world”. So it appeals to people with similar experiences. It’s not about a person of color telling a “white” audience of traumatic experiences, as, for example, the German TV documentary “Schwarze Adler” has just done. Such attempts are “a pure waste of energy”, said Lorde as early as 1979. They repeated racist and patriarchal thinking. If she is asked whether she also writes about “white anger”, she replies that it is not her job to feel this anger vicariously. But she also writes: “Yes, it is not an easy task to hold still and hear how another woman describes a pain that I do not share or to which I have even contributed myself.”

There is sometimes a therapeutic hue when Audre Lorde speaks of the usefulness of anger or that of eroticism in an anti-erotic society. And sometimes sentences like “The machinery will try to grind us to dust” or the phrase “the tools of the rulers” seem like mere anti-capitalist, feminist-activist jargon of the time, Lorde’s view of motherhood and a “female power” Being “dark, ancient and deep” is definitely problematic. Finally, in her story of her pubescent son, maternal abuse appears, from which her daughters and sons suffer to this day. But her analysis is basically still valid: that guilt and defense are means of “maintaining one’s own ignorance and leaving things as they are”, that they are the “ultimate protection against change”, the wall, “against whom we all run up”; that fear of one’s own anger does not protect women and especially Women of Color, does not benefit anyone and only lays down all future visions “in ruins”: “Women who were raised to fear often fear that anger could destroy them . “

Again and again Audre Lorde makes her plea to see differences as a “drive for change” and not to ignore them or just to see them as a “cause of division and mistrust”. She takes apart the claim of the contemporary women’s movement that it wants to take care of the future of all women without talking about racism and without having the experiences of Women of Color themselves represent them. She asks why white feminists write the history of women and why non-European women only appear as victims, why the “powerful foremothers” of African myths are absent in the chapter dedicated to the female deities: “Where are Afrekete, Yemayá, Obá and Mawu-Lisa? Where are are the combative goddesses of Voodoo, the Amazons of Dahomey and the warriors of the Dan? ” The question reverberates up to the present day, until the enthusiastic astonishment at Bernadine Evaristo’s novel “Mädchen, Frau etc.”, which begins with the Amazons of Dahomey. Evaristo may also have read Lorde, who said in her 1982 speech “Learning from the 1960s”: “In the 1960s, political correctness did not become the guideline of our lives, but a new fetter.” A small, vocal part of the community forgot at the time that unity does not mean unanimity and that “Black people are not a standardized, compliant crowd” – and neither is everyone else.

At the moment, in the debates about anti-Semitism and colonialism, about left and right, about liberality and morality, there is suddenly talk of ideology again. This, too, can be a kind of even well-meaning discussion person to prevent factual disputes, because one becomes powerless if one is assumed to be ideological. When thinking about such cold aggression it has something liberating to read: “Anger among like-minded people is an impetus to change, not to rift; we develop ourselves further through the discomfort and feeling of loss that it sometimes triggers.” So be it, because when, if not now, is the time for collaborative approaches and cooperative intelligence?

The Germanist Peggy Piesche, the filmmaker Dagmar Schultz and the translator Marion Kraft, the publishers Orlanda and w_orten & meer have long made a name for themselves with others for the memory of Audre Lorde and the documentation of their work. The fact that it is now the Hanser-Verlag that makes Lordes speeches and essays – hopefully – better known and can take credit for them is on the one hand unfair. On the other hand, one can say: The market is currently on the side of emancipatory efforts. May he do his job and spread Audre Lorde’s thoughts.