I went in to this blog wanting to talk about Audre Lorde's description of the erotic, but I'll admit, I got a little sidetracked and instead went to look at her poetry and found an amazing poem that tied in my blog from last week and to her chapter titled "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action". I pasted it below for your reading pleasure:

Coal by Audre Lorde

I
is the total black, being spoken
from the earth's inside.
There are many kinds of open
how a diamond comes into a knot of flame
how sound comes into a words, coloured
by who pays what for speaking.

Some words are open like a diamond
on glass windows
singing out within the crash of sun
Then there are words like stapled wagers
in a perforated book—buy and sign and tear apart—
and come whatever will all chances
the stub remains
an ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.
Some words live in my throat
breeding like adders. Other know sun
seeking like gypsies over my tongue
to explode through my lips
like young sparrows bursting from shell.
Some words
bedevil me

Love is word, another kind of open.
As the diamond comes into a knot of flame
I am Black because I come from the earth's inside
Now take my word for jewel in the open light.

Now, I realize there is only a loose connection between my previous blog (namely, the title of coal) and this poem, but what stood out to me more was the theme of words and what is being spoken. In the aforementioned chapter, what struck me as most powerful was her reasoning behind the pointlessness of silence. Essentially her point was that she was only hurting herself by staying silent--if she had, she would have been unable to communicate with those who helped propel her forward into a new life of understanding and acceptance. When she was dealing with cancer she realized that "death...is the final silence" (41). Her point there is that at some point (hopefully in the distant future), we will all die, and then the privilege of speaking will no longer be afforded to us. What we need to do now is take full advantage of our opportunity to speak while we can.

Further, I think that there's another inherent point within that. While she says that we all need to speak up more, even if we need to force ourselves out of our normal silent habit, some people are not able. The reason the feminist movement began was because women didn't have a voice. We had been socialized to believe that our rightful place was beneath men in every aspect of life. Women have had to, and continue to this day, to fight for the voice that didn't exist.

I think this shows a greater importance to what Audre Lorde is saying. So many people (both within the feminist movement, and any other movement) have been born without the privilege to speak. Therefore, to ignore that privilege, is to laugh in the faces of those who live in forced silence.

I'd like to add a small disclaimer to this blog before I start:

I am not well versed in the subject of Feminism. While it is one that my friends and I have brought up in discussion on numerous occasions, I do not count myself as one who understands it as well as I know it deserves. However, a subject that I have spent a bit more time working with, is Environmental Justice (EJ). I think a good definition of EJ is from the EPA's website, "Environmental Justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies."

The reason I'm bringing up EJ is because I've given up on keeping track the number of times I've compared the Feminist movement to the Environmental one. If you were to interchange a few words here and there, they'd seem nearly identical. In bell hooks' book Feminist Theory, she has a big beef to pull with the bourgeois women feminists--and for good reason. "The condescension [the white bourgeois feminists] directed at black women was one of the means they employed to remind us that the women's movement was 'theirs'--that we were able to participate because they allowed it, even encouraged it; after all, we were needed to legitimate the process. They did not see us as equals" (12). This exact feeling of being 'used' as tools to legitimate a process has been felt by every single person in MSU Beyond Coal, as well as all others working in the environmental movement on campus. 

For the past two years, I've been president of this incredible group working to transition MSU off of coal and other fossil fuel energy to 100% renewable energy. We currently have the largest on-campus coal plant in the entire nation, which begs the question: exactly how Spartan Green are we? When 37 people die in Ingham county every year because of coal related issues, I say--not very. Last year, the University decided to put together an Energy Transition Steering Committee to map out MSU's energy future--this was a public acknowledgment that our current energy infrastructure would not do for the long haul--some of our boilers are over 45 years old, and some without regulatory measures taken to ensure the smallest amount of emissions are emitted. When we administration told us of this committee, we were ecstatic! Finally, we could actually get somewhere in protecting human health and the safety of the environment--this plan could do that. When they asked me and a member of MSU Greenpeace to be on this committee as the student voices, we were encouraged even further. 

However, it was mere weeks into this committee that we learned our presence on the committee was no more than a PR move. They didn't actually want our opinions on the matter, considered the suggestions we posited naive and it seemed had an agenda the whole time without a true effort of wanting to work towards something new. And so I bring us back to the aforementioned hooks quote. The exact same feelings she and the black feminist community were feeling are shared by the MSU environmental community, as well as the environmental movement as a whole. 


We cannot allow our movements to become complicit with those who would try to prevent us from moving forward. The most important thing for us all to do is to continue on full speed ahead. Change has happened in the past and it can happen again, but not without some serious passion to fuel it.