THE AUDRE LORDE QUESTIONNARIE TO ONESELF
Created by Divya Victor
1. What are the words you do not have yet? [Or, "for what do you not have words, yet?"]
Faced with this question i don't have the words for anything. Something i know is each time i have a conversation about something meaningful, something i'm knowledgable or at least thoughtful about, i run into something i say i don't know the words for, something i say i wish i could articulate better. I've never gone a good conversation without disclaiming some limitation in my language impeding the way to all that i really mean.
2. What do you need to say? [List as many things as necessary]
I need to scream about what it means to be Queer, about anti-assimilation, about zionist bastardization and robbery of Judaism, about the fraud that's been made of our history, about the way we too were strangers, about the way we still are strangers and this has never been a true escape, about how i can't afford to live like this, about how i can't afford anything at all, about how i want to become a cold, angry, stone of a man, and only look at anything if i'm looking it in the eye
3. What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? [List as many as necessary today. Then write a new list tomorrow. And the day after.]
Wage-labor
Cost of living
Living requiring a cost
What i want
zionists
Angry men
antisemites, particularly among the left
xtian investment in israel
israel's army and their warcrimes
Misinformation, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, priority of social media over research
All Palestinian journalists witness hourly
Dead journalists
Loneliness
Immobility [in action, self-education, hobbies; stagnancy in life]
The weaknesses of every human body
Emotional physical exhaustion from work keeping me from everything i want to do for myself, and only getting $930 every two weeks for it.
4. If we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language, ask yourself: "What's the worst that could happen if I tell this truth?" [So, answer this today. And everyday.]
This is something i've been thinking about forever. When faced with speaking, i'm afraid of being wrong. Big wrongs, big falsehoods i didn't know were so- it can lead to ostracization (especially among leftists), since each of us believe those who differ in opinion even a slight are impure, immoral, niave, uneducated, malicious, wrong. I've been lonely my whole life- i don't want to be excluded from a community i've put so much stake in. I worry, too, about the loss of stability: my job, the little money it makes me, whatever comforts i have such as the bedroom i hate but sleep in, the medication at the same counter each month, the weak standing fan on my face. It's taken too long and too much hardship to get a job or find myself where i am, and even though it's not where i want to be i won't have much of anything if i lose it all again. I have to move calculated. I fear words being attached to me because words outlive the thoughts, mentalities, wisdom of people who write them, and being so young and thinking so much i outgrow my own thoughts as often as in a day. I fear losing what little i have because i've lost it over a dozen times already, and i need to have control over when that comes next. I need to be calculated, and writing and speaking freely doesn't make for a consistent equation.