Love in A Season of Drought: Letter to A Sister

I will be honest: I myself often despair of the possibility that I will find a partner who loves me in the ways that I hunger for love and I try to live my life in a way that won't fall apart because I don't get this immense need of mine fulfilled. I am learning to survive on crumbs. Learning how to endure the hunger of the soul. I don't expect three meals a day and I've come to a place where I know how to metabolize despair and loneliness. And I've done this to survive.

In his biography, Black Boy, Richard Wright penned words that struck and resonated with me ever since I first read them:

Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America...[,] when I brooded upon the cultural bareness of black life, I wondered if clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty, and the capacity to remember were native with man [sic]. I asked myself if these human qualities were not fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual from one generation to another.

Perhaps these are controversial views, but they ring true to me. There is a bleakness to the life of the oppressed. It is not complete or total. It does not negate that there is a vitality and a joy as well. But it is there nonetheless. And the joy that we do have as well as the love and the hope and all the rest, is not something automatic merely because we exist. For, as Audre Lorde says, we were not even meant to survive/exist--not as human beings. We cannot take our existence, our love, our joy for granted. It is something that we can lose and something that we can gain more of. It is something at stake in our living. And I believe that if we don't want to deceive ourselves, if we don't want to silence one another from speaking our truths, we must be honest, even as we speak of the power of the love we have struggled for, that this love is still too scarce, too thin, not enough.

There are those who have tried to encourage me to believe that my experience of this lack---this absence of affirmation in my life and in this society---is a matter of perception. Those who believe that the love that we need is already there, that all that remains is for us to learn to see it or find it. My experience and understanding of history does not permit me to share this belief. I believe that the love that I/we seek is sometimes (perhaps often) beyond my/our reach. I believe that like food, shelter, and education, love is a need of which we can be deprived by a cruel and dehumanizing world and that unjust social relations can limit the potential for loving which each of us has. I believe that love, like all living things requires certain conditions, structures, and nutrients to survive and that it takes even more to make love thrive. Finally, I believe that new kinds of love are only possible when oppressive situations are abolished. I will tell you honestly: I do not know if the conditions exist for me to experience the love that I am yearning for. Perhaps it is a type of love that hasn't ever existed before.

But I do not, cannot, and will not accept that if I myself never find the love for which I so desperately hunger that that is the way things are "supposed to be" or the way that they always will be. No. Just as I do not accept that the reality of bodily hunger and starvation is the way that things are supposed to be, in that same way I do not accept that the reality of emotional, spiritualm and erotic hunger and deprivation is the way things are supposed to be. It is undeniable that these realities exist. But it is my/our vocation to change these realities; to contribute to a world in which love and dignity are abundant. Marx wrote that

Hunger is an acknowledged need of my body for an object existing outside it, indispensable to its integration and to the expression of its essential being. The sun is the object of the plant – an indispensable object to it, confirming its life – just as the plant is an object of the sun, being an expression of the life-awakening power of the sun, of the sun's objective essential power. (Critique of Hegel's Philosophy in General)

Precisely because I hunger for an abundant love, I know that we have net yet achieved it and that I am therefore called to act, so that this need can be met, not only by/for myself, but by/for so many others who also hunger. What I do not know is if I will live in the world which I am struggling for, in which this need is met. I do know that I have caught glimpses of it. That I have met and loved the prophets of that world. That I have experienced my own revelations of it. I know that I myself am called to love abundantly, above, beyond, in spite of and against the limitations of this soul-devouring machine. This love is the seed that I carry and despite this 500+ year-long season of colonial drought, I water it and care for it above all things, even my own survival.

Because I cannot and I must not forget: I am surviving, I endure, because I hope and I struggle for a time when the love that I desire will be more possible. I do not endure in order to suffer tomorrow. We may grow accustomed to living in a state of hunger. (How could we not, living as we do in this unfinished world of ours?) But we must never become resigned to or complicit with this state of affairs. I do not participate in the struggle for justice or in the raising of children merely so that others may live a few days (or years, or lifetimes) more merely in order to prolong the pain. I survive in the seasons of drought because I carry seeds, nurtured by my own desire and perseverance, of a new world. I await the rain and know that rain will mean nothing without the seeds (and the seedlings) that I have taken care of through the drought, the seeds and tender possibilities that are my inheritance from 500+ years of resistance; seeds passed on to me in spite of and against 500 years of colonialism and slavery. The drought, my sister, has been so, so long. And yet I wait, believing that despite it all, I am called. That I have been entrusted with a task specifically mine. I hold up this corner of the sky.

And yet...I often fear that I will be alone, inevitably, utterly and irrevocably. I am afraid that who I truly am (and could be) will go unnoticed/unchosen by others. I am afraid that I am a means to an end and not myself an irreplacable need for which others yearn. And this fear sometimes seizes me when I cook alone or when I am among friends and feel an unfathomable distance between us or when the Black woman who looks like my aunt frowns and wishes for my extinction because I am holding hands with a white boy who loves me. When I came out to my mother she wept and said "the road ahead of you is so, so lonely" and those words often make it difficult for me to breathe.

I want to pose this to you, companera: when we say that we are lonely, is it only a loneliness for a partner? Or is it a loneliness for something more expansive? As I've been writing this letter to you it is dawning on me that my loneliness springs, not (merely) from the absence of a partner, but from the absence of a society which affirms my significance. I am lonely because I live in a society which desires my destruction. What I yearn for cannot be compressed into a romantic relationship (and when I have tried to do this I have often hurt myself and others). I wonder if we have not been convinced to lower our sights and search for that sense of completion and love which only a life-loving society can give, in personal relationships. Or rather, we use personal relationships to cope with the scarcity of love in our social lives. This is not to say that our romantic, friendship, and community relationships are not essential. But I sense that the love of which you and I speak is not only about these kinds of relationships. I know that my isolation, my difficulty in loving myself and others, my loneliness all grow from inherently oppressive social relations, many of which I have internalized. And while I can internally resist this colonization of my self, decolonization of the self without decolonization of the land and society is self-deception. I wonder, will my loneliness disappear if I find someone who loves me deeply, but I continue to live in a society that does not love me? Does not love you and I? I do not believe that it will.

I say this because, as you know, I have recently had my ability to earn a living (what a terrifying phrase!) taken away from me because I would not cut my hair. And ever since the day that I was fired I have been overcome with the need to find someone to love me. I feel more strongly than ever the desire to be desired. I want someone to love my hair, to need me just the way I am. I need someone to affirm me against the social system which does not love me. It is true that I myself must love myself. It is true that I must affirm my own existence. But isn't the fact that I love myself against an entire society the root of my feelings of loneliness and isolation? If I am alone in valuing my whole self, who am I and what does it mean for me to live here, today, in this united states? The sense that our lives are significant and the sense that our lives are (socially) valued are two different (though related) things. And in many ways the realization of my own self worth against my social devaluation is the source of so much pain, hurt, and loneliness as well as a source of strength and defiance. Perhaps this is something like what you said about being a single mother. Knowing that you have not been able to rely on others has become, in some ways, a source of strength. But it is also at the root of so much pain and it makes it difficult to reach out and ask for help. This kind of contradiction which we daily and hourly negotiate in order to survive, generates a deep-seated longing for communion. And the absence of that communion takes the form of loneliness.

But loneliness, my beloved, will not destroy me and I have faith that, if we can struggle together, it will not detroy you either. We have endured it before and we are still here. I know that I have survived because I have been a part of relationships and struggles that have made new types of love possible where they were not possible before. When I was growing up I did not have the conditions--the knowledge, the community, the space--to love myself. But I have struggled against it all and, with ever more comrades, today I can say that I am able to love myself in ways that I previously could not. And in similar ways I have struggled to make love possible between myself and my white and my hetero companer@s. Each of these struggles was more than "realizing" an already existant love. It was more than "learning" to love. Our love---and the character of solidarity and intimacy of which that love is composed---is possible because of abolitionists and the freedom movements and because of feminists and queer radicals who ended situations of oppression that limited our capacities and our abilities to love one another more fully. And in turn I pass on and make more possible through my everyday living, seeds of a world more dignified and loving, more beautiful, more human. A world where each of us will be less and less alone.

And so I must ask myself, what will it take, what kinds of struggles are necessary to make the love for which we hunger (more) possible? Sister, let me rephrase my question: how does the hunger for a love which we have never (fully) known but always needed, how does that hunger help us understand how and for what we must struggle? What kinds of relations must be destroyed and what kinds of relations must be created to bring that love into being? And what of the meantime? How will we survive in struggle?

I have only begun to think of answers. Rather, I have only begun to live the answers that I know and I am still finding ways of living the question itself so that one day, perhaps, I will arrive at more complete answers (as Rilke suggets and I have come to believe). I do not know how to "find" someone to love me. But I am learning how to create the conditions which make this kind of love possible for myself and others. I am teaching myself and learning with others how to infuse our struggle with a fierce and tender kind of love. With accountability and recognition of desire. I do not know how or if or when someone will fall in love with me in the ways that I feel a need. I know that if they do fall in love with me it will be because they see that I am living what I have been called here to do.

I know that we will need affirming community, dignified housing, nourishing food, and meaningful work. I'm fighting for more of us to have more of these things. I am fighting to live my life as an out QueerBlackRadical so that others can see that it is possible to be and to love ourselves--and that the struggle to do so is worth the trouble. I am fighting to be there when someone needs to hear/know that they are something miraculous and invigorating. I am learning not to wait for a crisis to let them know this. I am learning to celebrate all the beautiful things even in my moments of defeat. I am fighting to do intellectual work which helps us imagine something new and understand ourselves in new and liberating ways. I am learning to speak even when I am afraid. That is I'm fighting for a world in which it is more possible to love more fully. This is what I know how to do. It is the way that I know how to love abundantly. And although this work has not yet led to the kind of love for which I yearn, it has begun to bring that love into my life. Through friends, through self-realization, and through changing broader social relations. It is my hope that someday it will attract the love of a partner. But I do not struggle simply in order to receive this love that I need. I struggle because I love; because I need to express the love which is the life-giving force of my existence. And such love is so desperately necessary in this season of drought.