Every Black woman in america has survived several lifetimes of hatred, where even in the candy store cases of our childhood, little brown niggerbaby candies testified against us. We survived the wind-driven spittle on our child's shoe and pink flesh-colored bandaids, attempted rapes on rooftops and the prodding fingers of the super's boy, seeing our girlfriends blown to bits in Sunday School, and we absorbed that loathing as a natural state. We had to metabolize such hatred that our cells have learned to live upon it because we had to, or die of it. Old King Mithridates learned to eat arsenic bit by bit and so outwitted his poisoners, but I'd have hated to kiss him upon his lips! Now we deny such hatred ever existed because we have learned to neutralize it through ourselves, and the catabolic process throws of waste products of fury even when we love.
I see hatred
I am bathed in it, drowning in it
since almost the beginning of my life
it has been the air I breathe
the food i eat, the content of my perceptions;
the single most constant fact of my existence
is their hatred . . .
I am too young for my history**
It is not that Black Women shed each other's psychic blood so easily, but that we have ourselves bled so often, the pain of bloodshed becomes almost commonplace. If i have learned to eat my own flesh in the forest - starving, keening, learning the lesson of the she-wolf who chews off her own paw to leave the trap behind - if i must drink my own blood, thirsting, why should I stop at yours until your dear dead arms hang like withered garlands upon my breast and i weep for your going, oh, my sister, I greive for our gone.
~From Eye to Eye: Black women, Hatred, and Anger by Audre Lorde
*From The I Ching.
**From "Nigger" by Judy Dothard Simmons in Decent Intentions
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