Facilitating Change

In 1991, when I was 22, Peggy Antrobus gave me a mixed tape of Sweet Honey in the Rock. I was surprised and thrilled with the gift and listened to the tape over and again. Later, when I lived in Washington DC, I had the opportunity to see them live and hear them speak at Politcs & Prose.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how hard it is to make your own way and I keep hearing this phrase from one of their songs:  “You gone catch hell if you don’t do it the way they say do it.” So true. Here’s the context:

It’s good news when you reject things as they are, when you lay down the world as it is, and you take on the responsibility of shaping your own way, that’s good news. Everybody talking about spirituals, and they say, Oh Lord, black folk singing about going to heaven. No, this lesson is for you, tonight, November the eighth, 1980, in All Souls Church. Lay down the world, pick up my cross — and they don’t say it’s good times, they say good news. It’s hard times when you decide to pick up your own cross. You gone catch hell if you don’t do it the way they say do it. But when you lay down the world and shoulder up your cross, that’s what? Ain’t that good news?

— Sweet Honey in the Rock, “Good News,” from Breaths (Flying Fish, 1988).

I wasn’t thinking of this phrase in terms of activism. Rather, I was thinking about how hard it is to be different. I’ve been struggling with this recently and have observed some dear friends struggling with it too. I’m not marginal (well, some folks might think so) and yet even I feel the pressure. The worst is the judgment that comes from inside — from a set of norms that I’ve internalized through socialization. About what I should have achieved by now. About relationships, sexuality, family, work. I can only imagine how those who truly live on the edges feel. What they must battle with daily to feel good about themselves.

The reverse is true also. When you follow the rules — the dominant narrative — you get support and approval from all directions. You get to be good.

Following your own way, asking questions about the container and not just what you can do within it, means opening yourself to scorn, condemnation, and perhaps even exile.

black sheep
–noun
1. a sheep with black fleece.
2. a person who causes shame or embarrassment because of deviation from the accepted standards of his or her group.

How do we deal with those who are different? It’s hard. People who are different are manytimes annoying. Ultimately, though, how we deal with those who are not like us is defines our beauty. It is what makes us just and compassionate. When I think about difference I often go back to an essay by Audre Lorde that I’ve been carrying around since Peggy gave me that tape. It’s called The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. Here’s an excerpt:

Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic…. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged. ..we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. …community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

Lorde also talks about survival as the strength to stand alone and be unpopular, as well as the capacity to make common cause and form community. Which brings me to e.e. cummings and his essay, A Poet’s Advice, where he says

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

So I hope that I — and those around me — can ignore unsupportive judgments, keep asking questions, keep focused, keep trying to figure out what works and how to do things better, and find solace and strength in each other. I hope for resilience.