Anointing the Self with Healing Light: Radical Self-care and Recovery/Reintegration

I begin this essay, in response to reading in my seminar class on historical notions of self-care, Audre Lord’s powerful Burst of Light and Other Essays and Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America, with the above meditation on consumerism because it illustrates a key point of Lorde’s I, a (white) feminist, keep coming back to: “[Survival] is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.” I–born with some privileged and not-so-privileged status markers as Lorde beckons us to recognize as she does when she counts her privileges in Burst of Light as a form of self-care/consolation–stand outside Lorde’s definition of “those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women” to whom she addresses her seminal “master’s tools” statement. “Those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older” encompass Lorde’s group of those who know that to survive means to make strengths out of differences. I keep coming back to this point and many like it because it especially resonates with me, and strikes me as a key phrase to wrap our heads around and live out if we are to defy discriminatory practices of our past. Lorde does not evade questions of identity, quite the opposite: she is constantly bringing her identity as a “Black lesbian” to the forefront, in Burst of Light and Other Essays. I keep coming back to this point because, though it resonates with, and strikes me as a key phrase to live out to defy discriminatory practices of our past, I am not poor, I am not a lesbian, I am not black, and though older than some, I at 32 would not constitute my “self” as “older.” In this way of self-identification, self-marking, “I” can be defined by what I am not, and I am not included Lorde’s address. Though Lorde did not address “I”–or the exterior labels that I ascribe/collect to adorn my interior “self”–whatever that might be (would it even be visible without the stuff that I/others affix around it?)–something within latches “me” to this notion, because I think at a time when women are asserting their will to not be dominated/raped/assaulted then shamed for it by men, it is important that females use their own tools, not those of men; that we capitalize on the strengths that are considered “feminine” such as empathy as we attempt to heal sexism, racism, and rampant industrialization and consumption contributing to global warming and our eventual collective death, or at least destruction of that feminine “Mother Earth” which gives us life. Wielding hate speech, silencing the other “side” and fear-mongering tactics are not an option. Even Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius knew “the best revenge is not to be like your enemy” (Meditations, 160-180 A.D.). The non-power-hungry like myself might ask, “Who needs revenge?” yet still would benefit–mentally as well as physically–from not assuming the tactics of the perceived “enemy,” from a perspective of self-care and self-preservation.

Taking to heart Lorde’s extolation of strengthening non-dominant tools to dismantle the “master’s house” of oppression, applying it to Wedgwood’s pottery and its role in the abolition of the slave trade in England, yields an interesting conundrum. To break the double-bondage of slavery, Wedgwood the abolitionist profited–monetarily as well as purposefully–from the very consumerism that caused slavery. In short, he was one of the masters of the house and thus assisted in the dismantling of his own house with his own tools. Or did he? In strengthening and reinforcing the consumerist tendencies–namely, self-identification through objects–the perceived “need” or demand for labor rose. The identification of the self via a set of exterior markers was invented by male consumerists in the eighteenth century and stamped “individual” during the nineteenth century, when the demands commodity fetishism rose to previously unheard-of heights to fuel outward, white male expansion into the American and other territories in service of the British Empire.

In many of her speeches across the world, to include Germany and Australia, her “Burst of Light” journal entries record, she begins to address the crowd by asking “Where are the women of Color?” and also by defining terms, what she means when she says “Black,” “of color,” “lesbian,” “feminist,” and other identifying markers. Lorde refuses to hide behind complacency or shed her exterior “self” in service of an interior, liberal, “true” self. She writes, “It is a time for the real work’s urgencies. It is a time enhanced by an iron reclamation of what I call the burst of light–that inescapable knowledge, in the bone, of my own physical limitation” (Lorde). Lorde co-opted her own “physical limitations” using her body not for self-subordination but for self-care and self-promulgation, leaving behind on this earth her children and her ideas. In Burst of Light she takes care of the body that racism and oppression, sexism and heteronormativism have sought to undermine throughout her life, she writes: “Among my other daily activities I incorporate brief periods of physical self-monitoring without hysteria. I attend the changes within my body, anointing myself with healing light” (Lorde). She harnesses the “burst of light”–that ”inescapable knowledge” within her–by “anointing” herself with “light.” Her self-care, light-filled regimen, too, has limitations: “It’s nonsense, however, to believe that any Black woman who is living an informed life in America can possibly abolish stress totally from her life without becoming physically deaf, mute, and blind” (Lorde).

Another radical, white-male-abolitionist (albeit far less prosperous) contemporary to Wedgwood, William Blake, harnessed another tool of domination in an attempt to dismantle the master’s house when he illustrated Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam in 1796. One of his most famous illustrations, pictured below, capitalizes on the sexualized bodies of black women during this time which included the exhibitionist parading of the “Hottentot Venus” around London. “Blake’s attitudes towards slavery and colonialism were indebted to Stedman’s autobiographical narrative, as is particularly evident in the texts and designs of his illuminated books Visions of the Daughters of Albion and America, both dated 1793” (BlakeArchive.org). This, too, was an instrument in service of British dismantling of the house of the slave trade.