“The white fathers told us: I think therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free”  - Audre Lorde

^{Leanne Brady @tships}

This paper seeks to interrogate western notions of being and how these concepts have continuously missed the black African experience. It is a contribution to efforts to build epistemologies of the South. What is needed in moving forward is a determined effort to declutter consciousness, ridding ourselves of epistemic referents that were never built to think of black consciousness productively. Understanding the importance of decluttering consciousness sets free histories that previously weighed heavily on the pace of self-development in Africa. The idea here of self-development speaks to an oft-used phrasing, “doing the work” that has become a sine qua non of the South African black consciousness movement in the 21st century. When we “work” we open ourselves to bask in the glow of being ‘woke’. There are various dialects of freedom that exist and the one I am most fluent in is Black freedom – my intonations leaning heavily into the black South African experience. The re-emergence of a language of freedom based on a premise of self-development is an important stride in society’s continued long-walk to freedom. There are many writers, activists, poets, and artists that challenge grammars of whiteness in South Africa or radically transform negative perceptions of being black and educated. In a sense, South Africa is blessed with a particular vernacular of resistance to myopia and a parochial reading of identity politics.

In order to assist in the joint project of collapsing and freeing the Self (decluttering consciousness), I turn to Audre Lorde whose maxim, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” remains as an important guideline to build epistemologies of the South. An earnest effort of “doing the work” means that one must constantly and consistently have a practice of undoing and of unlearning. What struck me in the opening pages of the collection of works Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde is the quality of reflection she held in her reportage of her everyday. Lorde teaches us that what is important to the “work” is paying attention to the qualities of reflexivity. This is something I imagine, is proximal to a practice of decluttering, where my humanity is intricately woven into another’s, through a practice of reflexivity. What caught my attention in this particular book of Lorde’s, was her beautiful exchange she had with a Chukwo woman. Lorde reflects how this woman’s presentation at the conference moved her completely. Her name was Toni and she was among 14000 Chukwo left. Lorde shares, “In her speech at one point, she said, ‘it’s a very sad thing when a whole people cease to exist.’ And then she sang a little song which she said her people sing whenever something new happens” (32). She later says that this moment touched her because she related so intimately to the sentiment of being an “endangered species”, that as a black American, the feelings of one’s un-timely demise was so apparent in the everyday.

The apparent death of both the material and immaterial selves experienced by black Americans that Lorde describes was never a consideration of mine as a black African woman, and so, upon reading Lorde’s reflections, I began asking myself; Is it useful to regard myself as being on some watch-list? Is my reality defined by an existence of extermination? The death could be spiritual, psychological, historical…there are many ways in which death happens. This is part of the experiences of the intersect of blackness, womaness, youngness, and oldness (having been documented both as the personal-political and as a series of complex laws that serve to subjugate me and my kind) that serve as testament to an experience of living dangerously, always watched, always preyed, being waited on for our veritable vulnerability. To transform the ever-lurking possibility of extinction, decluttering consciousness becomes increasingly necessary, making room for a liberated Self that no longer lives under predation, scrutiny and sabotage.

So, what of this idea of being black and how is it related to building epistemologies of the South? I have wrestled with notions of ‘being’, continually revisiting a Heideggarian sense of being in space and time - I am cautiously aware that he bought whole-heartedly into Nazi fascism. Without burrowing down too deeply into a moral-superiority rabbit hole, what Heidegger does offer is a challenge to the rational, dual-based knowledge economy of René Descartes. Part of the importance of Heidegger’s challenge (where he argues for a broadening of how we understand time, space and Self) is in essence what black people have been saying all along (long before Heidegger was born) – that we live in multiplicity through and within our ancestors, that we are our ancestors in living manifestation. We are the combination of our past and our future living out in the present. Thus, to live is to seize one’s own multiplicity of being, collapsing notions of our finitude and embracing notions of our shared plurality.

Seemingly being black for me is characterized by an endless yearning to be free, but at what cost? Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason, questions amongst other things what it means to be free. His text is dark and dense. Each of the characters he conjures up seem to be embroiled in a conflicted state of existence and non-existence, dark and light, grotesque and beautiful. His use of Cartesian binaries positions the reader between one state of ease and the other of discomfort, desperate to find the resolution in the macabre images he invokes. For Sartre, the banality, even the absurdity of personhood is examined. Whilst his text is philosophically engaging, it lacks the lateral penetrations of what black consciousness offers. Sartre writes from an entirely Eurocentric center that ultimately underwrites black ontological experiences. He is obviously not writing about freedom in the sense of how Othered identities pursue freedom.

Lorde says, “The white fathers told us: I think therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free”. This phrasing touches on many points of departure. One point being that the sentient, feeling and action-world hold valuable meanings. This phrasing affirms that life is lived within the meanings we sustain and not in the evidence that we exist. The enactment of both living and thinking freely, is possibly one birthing point of Southern epsitemologies. It is our springboard out of the doldrums of European supremacist, patriarchal thinking. Acknowledging that we literally live alongside our othered Selves (ancestors and immaterial experiences) as a collected sum of collapsed time and space, is one of the ways in which we can declutter our collective consciousnesses, freeing up space to live in freedom.