Resistance-Ready at U of T: Community, Care, and the Radical Emotionality of Audre Lorde

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” - Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light.

When the political crisis would come, I believed myself to be ready. As a queer Black Muslimah pursuing English Literature and Creative Writing, I have been radicalised practically since birth. I idealised a revolution underscored by Kendrick Lamar tunes and fist-raising chants. I suddenly would not be ordinary — I would be addressing a crowd behind a pulpit, narrating a piece I had written about our world’s resilience. Something about us, in realising the foolishness of our self-serving cruelty, postponing our certain loneliness and banding together against the odds. 

Instead, I was isolated in my despair.

Mark Hamill, who I grew up swooning over in Star Wars, affirms support for Israel after the October 7th attacks. I wonder how you can recognise fascism when it is fictional, but not a 76-year-long real-life campaign of everything Luke Skywalker would have condemned. Headlines hide histories. Headlines will not say "genocide," just "conflict." Headlines will hierarchise suffering, dividing pity by the pigment and by the profit.

If Katniss Everdeen was adorned with a hijab, “PRESS” branded across her chest, screaming about how The Capitol just bombed a hospital full of unarmed innocents, she would be called a terrorist. District 12 would deserve violence, steamrolled with condemnation for wanting to exist, moreso if they met violence with violence instead of sitting as actionless playthings for their tormentors. The Capitol would have the right to “defend themselves”, openly, with offensive intent.

I remind the audience before readings of my work at launch parties that there is an ongoing genocide in the Middle East. Half of me urges me to say the rest: that there are simultaneously at least five other genocides happening too. The other half berates, “Black girl always has something to say about politics.” How dare I make everyone uncomfortable because the apathetic silence was making me uncomfortable? There are enough funerals in the world without shrouding the celebrations in gloom too.

Inspired Art By: (Hannah Arabella Gabling//The Underground)

I had to cause discomfort to the little girl inside of me who always wanted to win the Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious fiction award. Scotiabank has sponsored the prize since 2005, and this year, they have had their investments revealed. One of such investments was into Elbit’s systems, an Israeli military technology company providing armaments for the genocidal campaign in Palestine. The Giller dropped Scotiabank’s title in the prize name but refused to divest from sponsorship ties. Its founder is currently harassing writers it once platformed for anti-war novels into silence after their outrage involved withdrawing their Giller-related event attendance and pulling their novels from prize consideration.

Every day, I am watching starving, sobbing, shakily smiling people boxed in on my phone. Children and adults alike are whipping out their own phones with an instinct stronger than grief and devotion firmer than prayer, filming their decapitated babies and their burning civilian capitals. Supplicating into the void of the world’s indifference. 

We, the student body, have an involuntary role in all of this. The University of Toronto, exercising a lack of transparency in their investments and shadowed by a history of shamelessly publicised colonial complicity, has created the perfect environment for academia practiced in isolation.

Approximately 8.2 billion dollars, held under their Asset Management Corporation as of December 31st last year, have been directly invested in companies contributing to military operations in the West Bank—illegal settlements, mass murder, scholasticide, forced displacement. How can we, in good conscience, carry on under the weight of this international infraction, directly aided by our own tuition? How can a school that is “dedicated to fostering an academic community in which the learning and scholarship of every member may flourish, with vigilant protection for individual human rights and a resolute commitment to the principles of equal opportunity, equity, and justice” spend $4.1-million seeking to expulse its students exercising the decolonial anti-racist teachings it prides itself in, on a front lawn once owned by Indigenous people? 

This university that has forced encampments like the longest standing one it had ever seen in May this year, most notably for South Africa too in the 1980s—an instance in which it was the last Canadian university in 1990, seven years after the protest encampment was established, and two years after the Governing Council’s 30-2 vote, to divest from apartheid. New College on St. George campus has one of the first and most established African studies programs in North American undergraduate education, launched in 1978. 

How do you begin to utilise your frustration and navigate your helplessness? For me, it begins with sitting in my ENGC05H3 poetry class in experimentation and activism and the irony of reading Audre Lorde.

Audre Lorde, self-identified as a “writer, activist, poet, mother, warrior, lesbian, black, woman, feminist, socialist, teacher, librarian." To UofT, she is to be performatively taught but never exercised or preached. However, Lorde is as relevant today to the current intensity of social justice and political change as she was in her own time. Her theories on what facets were most important to political movements contained emotionality over rigorous, strikingly powerful, and obvious action. It may even seem counterintuitive, but I contest this. In its seemingly passive confusion lies a cautionary necessity.

Take, for instance, the quote that opens this article. It is from her book of essays entitled “A Burst of Light”, which detailed the inner workings of her personal life in struggle—from the cancer that complicated most of her efforts in activism to her thoughts on apartheid, mimicking the same thoughts I and many students on our campus are cycling through. “Self-care,” the quote’s topic, has been co-opted into self-indulgence by our society. No one is winning the revolution with a face mask or staycations, and yet this has often been the individualised approach to a world becoming too harsh—once again, we are giving ourselves the seeming convenience of isolation. 

Self-care, however, was partially rooted in Black culture (Socrates also spoke of self-care) and never originated as a capitalist ploy by translating care to consumerism. Instead, it mandated a communal effort of dismantling. In a world that is constantly demanding revolt, it is easy to commit a disservice to trauma-processing for afflicted communities during a political crisis. Lorde posited that resistance be first and foremost care for one’s mental state, not a burdened practice for marginalised people to confront. Self-care is to discuss vulnerabilities and to share stories, not slogans. 

Inspired Art By: (Hannah Arabella Gabling//The Underground)

Another reason self-care is meant to be preservation instead of indulgence is that it is often a false choice presented in our society. As students, it is not easy for us to cut our university off—I believe it to even be a disservice to those who cannot pursue their education, to cut ourselves off from the fulfillment of our own educational goals. Not acknowledging the advantage in our role as students is to invite apathy into our resistance practices. The middle ground is self-preservation. If self-indulgence is individualised, then the burden of taking care of ourselves is shifted away from the institutions causing us distress and onto us. There may not be flashiness in discussing our vulnerabilities, our guilt, and our frustrations, but there is worth in having a community alleviate the burden for you by showing up and offering support when you need an outlet. The University’s complicity in genocide enables isolation in academia, promoting the myth that change is a discussion board post, an academic paper, an aftermath we cannot see the steps to. Lorde believed our bodies to be political—it is possible to imagine our open dialogue as protest. 

These themes of anger, collective care, and vulnerability permeate her life and work. Among them, a common translation of the body from sociopolitical trapping to activist tool—there is nothing more political than your voice. 

In Audre Lorde’s essay, “Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”, there is a repeated warning: “Your silence will not protect you." Silences are regretted temporary shields; moments the absence of your voice is given the power of erasure, not restraint. Though Lorde contextualises speech over silence with her battle with breast cancer, how silence impacts the life of the activist should not be discounted. 

“We must not just act for ourselves, but also stand up for others who suffer. In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear”, Lorde writes. 

Oppressive systems thrive on the fear Lorde mentions. Silence maintains the status quo. The face of educational fear is the institution that betrays its importance. As threats of arrest, expulsion, and violence swept the country in the face of student demonstrations and disruptions, it is because a certain silence is being reclaimed—a silence Lorde calls a "tyranny." These tyrannies, if left continuously swallowed down, Lorde warns, will “sicken” and kill. The political crisis that tempts these silences, these moments of choosing comfort over speech, reveals an existential quality we do not often immediately associate with it—and yet it is the work of Lorde and other writers we will refer to as proof and theory of our actions. You are still acting by turning inward—examining your mortality is examining your political potential. Lorde prods on these questions—"What are the words you do not have?"—because these are the essential questions. Why do you not have them? What is causing the emotions you feel? This too is self-care, “political warfare"—you are not fit to join the movement and the larger issues it confronts if you cannot confront the smaller-scale silence that immobilises you.

This is the crux of Lorde’s political theory—emotion. How the political crisis acts upon our emotions is what will influence our thoughts and actions. Lorde knew this and validated emotions not in their immediate recklessness but in their way of magnifying perspective. In “Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”, she considers fear as the inhibitor of language and action.

“In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality...what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence…And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength.”

In her poem “A Litany for Survival”, “afraid” ends several of the lines in each stanza, centering the emotion in the “litany”, where Lorde acts as clergy and the readers are called to respond. The form mimics political crisis. The marginalised are under threat, and there exists our voices as a defense. Fear provides options and empowers action because it poses questions: What is there to lose? Lorde determines nothing, as “we were never meant to survive” is the ending to her poem. Instead, the inexorable need to express ourselves, standing up for ourselves and others, and her point in the aforementioned essay about “death being the final silence” is incentive enough. Of all that we could be doing on this earth, the most necessary and most liberating act of all is caring for each other. There is validity in a fear that leaves you vulnerable. But there is a power in fear that motivates, that sees its vulnerability as the basis of its future strength.

Same with anger in Lorde’s essay, “The Uses of Anger.” Anger by itself will not power a movement or offer an actioned reprieve, but a loud anger, one that wishes to transmute itself from a silent guilt—doom scrolling through families begging for their lives, choosing societal comfort over moral empathy, cocooning yourself in your inadequacy because you cannot possibly believe actions add up—is what Lorde believes makes all the difference in her unorthodox theory.

If U of T will demand education be performative and sanitised, then the student must demand that education be a bridge. Art has consistently served as that bridge, as a mirror, as a portal—Lorde and others have offered us the possibility to travel from the pages of their penned words to a cause greater than the individual and the accumulation of their worries and hopes—the only reason such words were penned at all. Navigating our feelings, treating our feelings, connecting our feelings—it feels impossible when surrounded by an omitting environment. Every English classroom makes me feel like Noor Hindi—"Fuck your lecture on craft, my people are dying.”

But it does not have to be this way if there are other Noor Hindis with you, if there are Audre Lordes that tell you that you do not need to be extraordinary to be human. To be an activist, you must simply crave the chant, always dissatisfied when you cannot hear it. To cross the bridge, you must know that it does not diminish the distance between experiences, but it does seal the tyrannical chasm of the silence—vanquished in unity with other dissatisfied people.

Writing nowadays feels like screaming into a void. It has been more isolating than ever, rolling around in the silence. Then you find yourself gravitating to a noise—for me, it was Occupy U of T’s Instagram page. In the Linktree, there is a PDF titled “Letters of Hope." This strange, lyrical thing, amidst legal jargon and serious organisations—a collection of letters to the encampment members from the larger community, with excerpts: 

  • “You are not alone in this journey.”

  •  “I know that we are burning bright right now.” 

  • “I must admit that I don’t have the courage to confront the school and the police directly. Please forgive my weakness. Despite this, I want to express my gratitude for your courage.”

  • “Your continued action has made it feel less scary to talk about this genocide openly and made me hopeful that change will soon come. It has also challenged me to more deeply consider what further action I could be taking.”

  • “I hope you can work in time for rest and taking care of yourselves. And I hope you are feeling the support of those in the community. We will continue to show up as long as you are there.”

  • “All I have is a voice, to undo the folded lie” - W.H. Auden (a poet Lorde admired as an advocate for change)

  • “The habitual inertia of my daily life has often led to a silence that does not reflect the urgency of [Palestine’s] plight [and] has too often overshadowed the gravity of the struggle. Yet, it is this very realization that compels me to strive for meaningful change—not just in words, but in actions…Your actions remind me that we are more than passive observers; we are active participants in the narrative of humanity…I acknowledge the fear that comes with uncertainty—how to effect change, how to be a voice for the voiceless. But let this fear not paralyze me; instead, let it be the catalyst that drives me to learn, to speak out, and to act. Knowing that efforts, however small they may seem, can ripple out and contribute to a larger tide of transformation.”

  • “I’m proud to be alongside you on this journey and honoured to be in a collective community with you…Sending you nothing but love and good energy :)”

If this is not Lorde’s activist spirit living on, I do not know what is. If this is not a litany that says you too will survive this, even if you were not meant to, I can only hope the silence of your death is a peaceful one. After reading the letters, I resolved that this article is actually my ordinary mortal pulpit, where I am blubbering about the resilience of our world. I have to believe it is my resilience too.

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