Thursday Short Poem: Lorde's "Who Said..."

If there's one famous feminist debate that seems to happen in my classes each semester, it's the one over the twin oppressions of race and sex in the lives of women of color.   Feminist women of color have had disagreements on this issue.  The late Shirley Chisholm, the first black congresswoman, often said that her sex was a greater obstacle to her success than her color:

I've always met more discrimination being a woman than being black," she told The Associated Press in December 1982, shortly before she left Washington to teach at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. "When I ran for the Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being black. Men are men."

Audre Lorde, one of my favorite feminist writers whom I discovered in college, had a more nuanced view.  I often think of these lines, which for me capture the complexity of the intersection of race and gender perfectly.

Who Said it Was Simple

There are so many roots to the tree of anger
that sometimes the branches shatter
before they bear.

Sitting in Nedicks
the women rally before they march
discussing the problematic girls
they hire to make them free.
An almost white counterman passes
a waiting brother to serve them first
and the ladies neither notice nor reject
the slighter pleasures of their slavery.
But I who am bound by my mirror
as well as my bed
see causes in color
as well as sex

and sit here wondering
which me will survive
all these liberations.

Comments

[annika]

i like it. Do you know when it was written, Hugo?

[Hugo Schwyzer]

I'll look it up. It screams 1970s to me.

[NancyP]

Lorde, not Lord.
Nedick's might date it, also.

[Hugo Schwyzer]

Oh, Nancy, it's the evangelical in me -- I just see the word "Lord" everywhere. How embarrassing, given that I assign her in class still! I've made the change, but let the notice of my error stand.