by Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad
As I celebrated Audre Lorde’s birthday on February 18th, I watched a documentary film about her years in Berlin.
Approximately an hour into the film, she states: “I think that despair is an endemic part of revolution because no revolution happens in one lifetime. We work to capacity. We will not see the results of our labor. If we keep this going long enough, we will collectively find an answer.”
I link this statement to Lorde’s embrace of dreams. In her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” she writes: “[Poetry] forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”
I hear her saying that we have to tap into our inner lives and cultivate our imagination, our dreams, in order to keep going.
This makes so much sense to me. We are in a state of rage, and many of us feel a depth of despair. The naked cruelty taking place on a minute-to-minute basis – in Iran and the Arab states, including Palestine; in the United States and Ukraine, in the Sudan and the Congo – fuels a sense of powerlessness, even despair. I think about the fact that billions of our tax dollars are funding bombs, immigrant detention camps, the ongoing genocide and occupation of Palestinians, the mass murders of schoolchildren. It is crushing.
But I hear Audre Lorde calling us forth, telling us that in her lifetime, she contended with the Reagan administration and apartheid South Africa. Even facing such horrors, she continued to dream, to believe in the possibilities of collective action. She passed before the first free elections in South Africa took place. She did not live to see the fruits of her activism. Still, she believed in the possibility of liberation.
I strive to remember her fierceness and capacity for dreaming when I am especially overwhelmed by the conditions confronting us. She did not look away. Neither did she believe that all she saw in front of her was all that this world could be.
In this time of great violence and terror, may we recall the wisdom of our spiritual ancestor Audre Lorde.