Tough-Soft

My grandmother drank her coffee out of a teacup.

It was a ritual.

Every morning she would put a heaping spoonful of Folgers instant coffee into a delicately cracked teacup with pink flowers on it. She’d then pour in liquid sugar, milk, and fill the cup to the brim with boiling water from a heavily patinaed kettle.

(Up to the brim is a precious lie. Her cup over-flowed.)

She’d fill her teacup with water, until it ran over the sides and settled in the saucer below the cup. As she stirred the brew, the spoon pushed more coffee over the sides of the cup and into the saucer; gentle rhythmic cascades of coffee settled into the fine lines of the well-loved china (the only one of its kind remaining in the house), caffeinated kintsugi.

It was a ritual of feeling.

The kettle didn’t whistle, so once she heard the water in it begin to boil, she’d touch it with her fingers to “see if it was ready.” She didn’t measure—anything, ever—by way of propositional logic; she knew through the practice, the senses, the “just when, Undra.” (My name is pronounced ahn-dree-uh, but my Grandma always pronounced my name in the tune of Humboldt, TN, where she was from. “Undra” is simultaneously supple and stubborn, a softly caressed “Un” paired with a surprisingly purposeful, “dra.”)

I love the way she said my name. I love the way her hard-won and arthritic knuckles were compli/emented by the roses, the filigreed cracks, and the faint gold lining (on the handle) of the teacup. These were the hands that once “cut a white girl in the fields; taught her to smile,”—tough, not rough. She slurped. She loudly crunched fishtails fried hard and even more loudly sucked the eyes out of fish heads. She hummed over her eggs and let the sunlight from the window over the kitchen table rest on her face. Soft. Elegant.

~~~

In mid-2023, my then-partner of nearly twenty years (nearly thirteen married) announced that she wanted a divorce. In early winter I moved out; an act that required dealing with the practical logistics of extricating our lives as well as the affective acrobatics of leaving one future behind and making space for this unforeseen one. I began a kind of radical scrutiny of myself, a practice of questioning, introspection, reflection, and reimagining. I immediately became aware of the change in the quality of light.

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized.

(Lorde 2007, 36)

There is more light—brighter, more direct, more consistent, and more nourishing—in my new apartment. In and with this light, I attend to myself and continue, in earnest scrutiny of my life, moving into and with a level of uncertainty that is both titillating and terrific, terrifying.

So, I come to this post with uncertainties—not, insecurities—and attempt to make something with them. One of the hardest things to accept is learning to live within uncertainty and neither deny it nor hide behind it.  Most of all, to listen to the messages of uncertainty without allowing them to immobilize me, nor keep me from the certainties of those truths in which I believe. I turn away from a need to justify the future—to live in what has not yet been. Believing, working, for what has not yet been while living fully present now.

(2017 [1988], 131)

This uncertainty is experienced as a deliberate inattention to the kind of hard lines the “white fathers” of philosophy who tell us, “I think, therefore I am” enforce and that have come to pass as rigor (2007, 38). More than one student has looked at a syllabus of mine and, seeing mothers, sisters, daughters, and cousins, asked me “where the philosophers” are. My work (both as an educator and as a scholar) is in these fine cracks between the presumably clean breaks between poetry and philosophy, philosophy and feeling, feeling and knowledge. I write in the mornings when the sun is soft and eases into day, and in the afternoon when the sun is tougher (not rougher, tougher) stubborn, playful, and earnest—like marbles.

What and who does “women” mean, intend, welcome? What might an appeal to an unscrutinized account of “womanhood” require us to sacrifice or cosign (Lorde 2007, 66-71)? What does “philosophy” mean, intend, welcome? 

And what to do when I know the answers to these questions hovers somewhere near a “mythical norm” (Lorde 2007, 116)? 

I write at the intersection of both the unanswered—as in Mary Daly’s careful, but care-less response to Lorde’s open letter—and often unasked questions—as in, “under which head[ing do] I come” (Cooper 1892). I write at a site where the conjunction of women + philosophy logically breaks down into epistemic oppression (Dotson 2014) and ontological and phenomenal silence/violence. I write from this vestibule of disjunct, liminal space—but not on the way to a fixed destination—living, working, and “lov[ing] in doorways coming and going / looking inward and outward / at once before and after / seeking a now that can breed / futures”. The light in this vestibular space allows me to scrutinize this location. It is not, and I mean this in the very tough and forceful sense, a place of lack; it is not a location exhausted by sorrow, it is a point of orientation that appreciates that fact that I was never meant to be here at all, much less, survive, and that my being here is a wayward intervening of sorts, a “beautiful experiment in how-to-live” (Hartman 2019, 227-228).

In the quality of these lights soft and tough, tough and soft, what is illuminated are the ways in which women + philosophy might participate in distortions that imperil futures while appealing to a kind of neutrality and innocence.

Paper is neither kind nor cruel
merely white in its neutrality
I have for reality now
the brown bar of my arm
moving in broken rhythm
across this dead place.
(Audre Lorde, “Paperweight,” in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde, 197)

There is something curious here, as Lorde first encounters paper, blank and then later weighted and dressed in leavings—leaving her free to do with them—and with the Audres she’s left behind—what she will. This pairing—seemingly innocent or at least, unremarkable—of whiteness with neutrality reads to me as an appeal to the universal. In this way, one might consider it analogous to an appeal to both sisterhood and to the philosopher-king—and attempts to extend coronation rights to queens as well. This is appeal to sisterhood as something unremarkable and light. Some same thing shared and unifying. Yet, we are called to scrutinize this appeal and the “product which we live;” we must not turn away from our differences and/in the weight of life. Sisterhood is a kind of haze, a kind of myth that the “reality” of “the brown bar of my arm” brings down to earth. “For then beyond sisterhood is still racism” (Lorde 2007, 70).

Reading “Paperweight,” feel the way the mouth moves to sound out this difference between the mouthy, fleshy yumminess of the entrance of Lorde, the warrior poet, lover, mother, lesbian against the stifling staccato of the merely white neutrality highlighted by consonance of the short “t” in “white” “its” “neutrality” and the almost off-putting alliterative c/k of “kind” and “cruel.” Let us linger here for a moment with the assonance and alliteration in these two lines’ deceptively soft alliterative b (or br) sounds in “brown” “bar,” “broken” and the rich and resonant, thick “r” sound in “bar” and “arm.” All luxuriate in the voluptuous “mm” that end/begin/end these two lines—arm/moving/rhythm—that encapsulate the lived experience of entering a space that never intended you to be there, much less survive (Lorde 2007, 42). Poetry is accomplished through its being sounded—and, as she is a poet, I suggest that even much of Lorde’s prose is accomplished in its being sounded aloud. When we give voice to our scrutiny, we hear how easily neutrality leads to death. Reading Lorde’s work—particularly The Cancer Journals (1980) and A Burst of Light (2017 [1988])—is to encounter someone deliberately practicing “refusal” in service of survival (Campt 2019). 

And so, what am I to do in this neither kind nor cruel (blog) space? “How did I ever come to this place? What can I use it for?” (Lorde 2017 [1988], 85). I write, “under the pressure of time, I work with the consciousness of death at my shoulder, not constantly, but often enough to leave a mark upon all of my life’s decisions and actions” (1980, 16). 

Not a woman.

Not a philosopher king/genius.

At work surviving.

I enter the space in a blog on women in philosophy to demand more from women, philosophy, and myself (Lorde 2007, 54). In this light I ask myself (and you), why would any sister outsider want to be consumed by the dragon of philosophical genius? 

Genius requires the very siphoning of energies/identities/selves into the subject that Lorde, as I read her, turns away from. This, I believe, is what is at stake in Lorde’s phenomenal naming of her selves. Woman + philosophy asks my selves to do battle against one another, for at the root of this conjunction is “an inability to recognize the notion of difference as a dynamic human force, one which is enriching rather than threatening to the defined self, when there are shared goals” (Lorde 2007, 45). What are the shared goals of woman + philosophy?  Why do those goals require psychic war and death (Byrd, Cole, Guy-Sheftall 2009, 157)?

Lorde’s work arms those who need her words with a mandate to honor and develop a concept of self that destabilizes notions of the subject as mastered, atomic, individual—selves that are engaged in the interdependent erotic lifework of scrutinized survival (2007, 41-42).

I am myself and I must define myself, right? But I am connected I am part of a…and I get this feeling more and more and more the older I get…I am part of a chain, I am part of a continuum. It did not start with me and it will not end with me, but my piece is vital. I feel this so strongly now.

(Hall 2004, 124)

The impetus to articulate the selves—I’m just a soul whose intentions are good! Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood!—may be less an attempt to reconcile with the limits of the white imaginary, and more a kind of insurgency (Spillers 1987, 80), an urgency of the “too muchness” (Sharpe 2019) and the “yes, and” (Musser 2018, 9) of “irrepressible” (Crawley 2017, 23, 27, 72, 220) Black life, Lorde’s Black life in particular.

In order to be a genius, one must deny a plurality of selves, must deny the need those selves have for each other and the selves of others, and to seek external validation. Lorde, who minored in philosophy at Hunter College (De Veaux 2004, 35) and—if the program was even remotely like it was when I attended—most likely knew her Plato, strikes me as offering a movement away from formal mastery. This movement away from the formal recognition, the formal adulation of the philosopher king—even as Lorde, her selves, was anxious for a kind of renown—is a movement away from the notion of the subject and a myopic notion of rigor that fuels the genius. The genius is tough, impenetrable, extricated from the movements of and toward love, interdependency (Lorde 2007, 111), and the scrutiny of self-definition. He is also insulated from the deeper feelings of work in the erotic sense, as the connection between creativity and desire.

On the flip side, to be a woman has been set up in some ways in opposition to genius. Woman is soft as pejorative. Specifically, woman is soft as a binary deviance from the toughness of the genius. In this sense the creative is frequently limited to one’s proximity to and interest in the (white) maternal (Lorde 2007, 111). Though there may be greater acknowledgement of the need for others, this need—in its near constant desire to be picked, to be taken seriously as a genius, too—is cannibalistic, and reduces the other to an object for consumption/use. In this construct woman is fixed, soft, and knowable other. This concept and lived practice mobilizes sisterhood as reward for the capacity to limit the selves, to throttle all difference in service of woman qua sister (qua white, cis-het [or cis-heteroflexible]). No one has done more damage to me in my short time in this field, than white women. No one has attempted to reduce me and my work to survive, to so little.

SISTER! Your foot’s smaller
but it’s still on my neck.
(Parker 1999, 78)

Lorde rejects and critiques this orientation/practice through her self-definition, self-scripting, and her turn toward feeling as a necessary pre-condition for knowledge—not as a replacement for the rational, but as the very ground from which rational knowledge must spring (Hall 2004, 147-148). In this, I think, very real sense, Lorde is not a woman. Lorde is a Black woman, a lover, a doer, a feeler, a feminist, a poet, a warrior, a mother—and all these simultaneously. And though it doesn’t matter which of her selves is singled out for genocide, it is each and every one of those selves that provides the power to survive as someone not easily definable and made useful by systems of knowing that seek her silence. Lorde is messy and problematic. Lorde is afraid of pain but prepared to face it, even prepared to sacrifice beloved things survive (Lorde 1980, 32-34, 73). 

Survival is not an academic skill (Byrd, Cole, Guy-Sheftall 2009, 185, 204; Hall 2004, 119,151-152; Lorde 2007, 112; Lorde 2017 [1988], 122-124, 129-133). Neither is survival a marathon, a feat of endurance. Survival is a battle “to live whatever life [one has] as fully and as sweetly as possible” (Lorde 2017 [1988], 130). Survival is the life project, of the tough-soft. 

Once we talked about how Black women had been committed without choice to waging our campaigns in the enemies’ strongholds, too much and too often, and how our psychic landscapes had been plundered and wearied by those repeated battles and campaigns.

“And don’t I have the scars to prove it,” [Afrekete] sighed. “Makes you tough though, babe, it you don’t go under. And that’s what I love about you; you’re like me. We’re both going to make it because we’re both too tough and crazy not to!” And we held each other and laughed and cried about what we had paid for that toughness, and how hard it was to explain to anyone who didn’t already know it that soft and tough had to be one and the same for either to work at all, like our joy and the tears mingling on the one pillow beneath our heads.

(Lorde 1982, 250)

It is a particular strategy of/for Black lives. Survival here is methodologically rich. This is a marked difference, in my experience from white/womanhood, where survival is an attempt to either expand the notion of the genius/master/philosopher to include the white woman as subject, or a focused and tunnel-visioned betrayal at one’s exclusion. There is much life outside of the confines of woman + philosophy. Lorde’s heavily scrutinized poetic survival cannot be as an attempt to fit into a limiting conjunction (or conjecture). Survival for Lorde is a process of making use of pain and giving voice to our dreams (Byrd, Cole, Guy-Sheftall 2009, 163). It is the recognition, articulation, and sharing of the experience of being. This is poetry as survival, as self-scrutiny, as political movement, as feeling, as growth.

And so, to “survive in the mouth of this dragon” (2007, 42) we call philosophy I must know that I—as a gender-dubiously-conforming, self-diagnosed autistic, queer, Blackwoman, sister, daughter, and PhD—was never meant to survive by these lean and insufficient soral pledges to “woman.” 

Christina Sharpe—in conversation with Saidiya Hartman—positions beauty as a method. Beautifying is an example of the tough-soft, the mingling of joy and tears, that is necessary for and a creative element of Black life.

Beauty is not a luxury, rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.

(Hartman, quoted in Sharpe 2019)

Every morning my grandmother performed this ritual, practiced this method. And even when she was so angry with me her hands trembled with restraint, they were steady, beautiful, intransigent, when taking her coffee. It never occurred to me to question where the whistle of Grandma’s kettle had run off to, why there were no other cups of its kind, how it had acquired its cracks, who had repaired them, and why eggs were for humming. The sunlight on her face, in her house that she owns outright, this girl from the sharecropped fields of Humboldt, TN, my Grandma drank dessert with breakfast, easing the day in with unspeakable and deliberate sweetness. Tough-soft.

~~~

I would like to thank Tiara Raven Marie Jackson for listening to my WhatsApp voice-notes about how well my plants are growing and reminding me that things tend to grow in the light. I also would like to thank Caleb Ward, Ph.D. for his care-full comments on a very early draft.