Krishang Nadgauda
26th April, 2019.
“Deep,
deep, deep down I knew that dream was never mine. And I wept and I cried and I
fought and I stormed, but I just knew it. I was Black. I was female. And I was
out – out – by any construct wherever the power lay. So if I had to claw myself
insane, if I lived I was going to have to do it alone. Nobody was dreaming
about me. Nobody was even studying me except as something to wipe out.” – Audre
Lorde
These
words reek of desolation. Leaving behind the presumable thematic weight of Audre’s words
for a moment, the words themselves appear representative of a unique cultural
isolation that is never really true. Identity is secondary to human solidarity.
And though it is easy for me to say so amongst other humans, hoping from class
to class – social gatherings finely orchestrated by an institution – I believe that having a certain faith in solidarity and the maintenance of a certain hope of
achieving it is fundamental to ever being able to grasp it.
You simply cannot light a candle
without trusting the matches.
Though I’d love to dive into the
truth behind Audre’s cultural ostracization – free from her agency – I feel I
must nudge it towards the opposite end of the spectrum. For despair in itself
is an enticing feedback loop; reveling in its strength only makes it stronger.
And so I’d like to direct Audre’s
literature to what I’ve extracted from Stoicism. Something she definitely,
always knew, deep, deep, deep down. It’s something plausibly repulsive,
stemming from aristocrats at the apex of the intersectionality ladder some two
millennia ago. Its truth however, transcends space and time. That society’s
filth is cleansed first by the cleansing of the self.
