Listening to the "Within Outwardly" - A Conversation with Audre Lorde
written by Seare Farhat
Bahlest Eeble Readings Cycle 13 Fellow
My conversations with Audre Lorde have been numerous, healing, inspiring, and entirely in my head. She has described herself as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” and for me a voice of conflict and liberation. Lorde has defined liberation in her work as the rediscovery of the self and the reclamation of our past into the future. However universal her thoughts on liberation are, she is still adamant in centering herself in her discovery. When I first encountered her work, I did not understand the gravity of her subjectivity as revolutionary until I was required to question my own sense of the subjective. As a subjective artist situated in a context that did not value her personhood, she was distinctly aware that her silence and trepidation was a manifestation of her oppressor within her. The liberation of her art, and other oppressed artists, therefore became an urgent necessity for the community at large. The following is an excerpt of the never-ending conversation I have had with her in my process of healing:
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AUDRE LORDE: “Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves – along with the renewed courage to try them out.”
Audre Lorde, in “Poetry is not a luxury” (1977)
SEARE FARHAT: I have fallen into the trap of dreaming fresh ideas – imagining that my fusion of cultural backgrounds (Afghan, American, Queer, Southern) would promote a new art form I could embrace as my own. The rare times I have felt like I have uncovered anything new, no matter how novel the actual material of my music was, were unintentional. Most importantly, I felt like it didn’t belong to me. This trap was like using a thousand synonyms to grasp at a nebulous concept so certainly felt, yet uncomfortably distant, and still never truly describing it fully. Have you ever repeated a single word or a phrase so many times that you develop an uncomfortable awareness of your tongue? A heavy, wet, and conscious discomfort with the act of making words that renders the combination of syllables, once significant, now meaningless and disconnected. It is a process of disembodiment, one that separates the sign from any objective signifier. The word remains in the mental sandbox, taken away from its connotations and into the realm of physical and auditory sensations as its own independent object. The immediate reaction to the feeling is uneasiness. Sometimes it then becomes humor. In certain cases, though, you can push through the awkwardness of language-ing itself and start to reinvent the word for yourself. Tasting each syllable in order, swirling each long vowel within your chest to the consonants on your lips. The satisfaction of the word on your taste buds, far from its original context, now might remind you of some forgotten moment – maybe the first time you tasted the syrup of honeysuckles in midsummer – an ephemeral image you never before dreamed of connecting to the word otherwise. The past corridors of referentiality you once had with the word, the horrors, joys, and inescapable connectedness of a phrase, give way to a clean slate with infinite possibilities. Instead of imagining that there is some uncharted cultural territory to explore, I have been subjecting my language, my music, and all my expressions of the self to this treatment. I’m discovering the reading of my culture that is uniquely my own rather than seeking “newness.” In another sense, I am re-envisioning “the global map of identities” to include my own intersections of cultures as a landmark itself, not as emergent phenomena. I like to think that the process of disembodiment and re-discovery is a type of pure listening our ancestors have been musing about in many forms, a type of pure listening that relieves us from fixed dogmas that repress our growing expression of identity. But, however fruitful, this re-envisioned practice has also led me to a crisis. Does it make sense that we should reinvent culture in multiplicity for all of us individual interpreters? Can we simultaneously experience the same context differently while still being in consensus?
A.L.: “When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on the external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs…then our lives are limited by external and alien forms…
But when we begin to live from within outward…we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense…begin to recognize our deepest feelings.”
“The need for sharing deep feeling is a human need… [It] can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world.”
Audre Lorde, in Uses of the Erotic (1978)
“Difference [between people] is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged…Without community, there is no liberation…but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”
Audre Lorde, in The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (1979)
S.F.: That pure listening I described earlier is the closest I have gotten to being able to “live from within outwardly” or at least hear the within outwardly. Sometimes, however, I fear that this new listening does not invite the very community to whom I owe the most debt.
I discovered this treatment of language out of a necessity to heal from my past and reconcile my present self with my origins, taking in and chewing the old Seare and hearing myself for the first time from the perspective of someone not fully complete – in progress, learning, and re-learning. This process of re-discovering and re-identifying has been intimately tied with my music-making.
Almost two years ago, I started writing a piece for sinfonietta and felt a sense of confidence as a composer at the academic institution. At the same time, my relationship with my family became increasingly hostile to a breaking point – our value system may have shared a core, but deviated so distantly from it that I became alienated to them. In turn, my one living connection to my homeland, Afghanistan, became frayed – hanging on by a single thread. What was surprising, however, after this distance from my family was discovering how little personal ownership I had to my culture and upbringing without them. My native language, the music of my heritage, and the color of my skin were at odds with this “new-but-same” self, a version of myself I thought was more liberated. These parts of me I thought I knew as certain slipped like sand between my fingers into a basin of culture to which I was voyeur. It felt as if my living existence in culture was bestowed on me with contingencies, and failing to meet these expectations revoked my access to myself and what I used to think was my “free expression” – an expression of the seemingly-novel fusion and intersection of cultures.
My most trustworthy passion, especially during the trying emotional time of my identity in flux, was failing me. I would spend days motionless, laying on the floor saturating my ears with pure sine tones on blast, slowly moving the tones from unisons into harmonies, just to hide the anxious noise in my brain. As I listened to these sine tones more, however, I stopped hearing “musical intervals” in the sound of these waves – instead the connotations of the pitches became physical sensations and interactions in my ears. The distinction of “in-tune” became a color and the beating dyads another layer of expression in the sound. It was a sense of play and re-discovery I thought I was not capable of anymore. During this period, I also started repeating a mantra to myself, one that I borrowed from an idiom my parents would repeat to me throughout my childhood:
موجیم که اسودگی ما عدم ماست We are waves, for our being is in unrest
ما زنده بر آنیم کھ آرام نگیریم We exist to be in motion
Repeating this mantra obsessively was the first time I really listened to the language with open ears. The Dari utterance with all of its signification became some silly mouth-feelings. The diphthongs and fricative consonants were joyous moments of relief between vowels. The invitation to my own culture and memories, once revoked, was now given a back entrance. A new entryway validated my belonging within this cultural practice. Months of being in a state where I thought I was blank, empty, and devoid of creativity were in fact the opposite – I had been making the most genuine and engaging music of my life, just by listening deeply. This realization was only the beginning of my journey to reclaim the ownership of myself as an observer at the intersection of cultures. I began writing again, this time unchecked and with the sounds of this re-discovery. The piece for sinfonietta that came out of this, Maujem, entirely changed me. I opened the doors to a way of writing that is integrally tied to my healing and the active reclamation of my past anew. Around the same time in Fall 2021, I started as a participant in the GLFCAM community: I had the opportunity to introduce myself as the learning and dynamic individual unafraid of the consequences of discovery, instead of a static and historical replication of my heritage and nurturing. But, for whom am I speaking when I share my discoveries on my watan (my Afghan-ness) and what right do I have to own my expression…
A.L.: “What do you mean
No no no no
You don’t have the right…”
Audre Lorde, from “But What Can You Teach My Daughter”
“Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors.”
Audre Lorde, in “Poetry is not a luxury” (1977)
S.F.: I see, it’s not about ownership at all if it’s a matter of making the “within outward.” But what if I can’t bring myself to “dare” and to make concrete these fears of my personal discovery? Though now I see a path to defining myself on my own terms, I still feel reluctant. I feel as though I am trespassing on the mutual respect of my elders – that I am not fulfilling my role to give īhteraam to the goozashtā. Does the same not make you afraid to speak out?
A.L.: “Of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger…”
Yet,
“In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear – fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live….and that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength…we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.”
Audre Lorde in “Transformation of Silence” (1978)
Works Cited
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Edited by Cheryl Clarke, Crossing Press, 2007.
Lorde, Audre. The Selected Works of Audre Lorde. Edited by Roxanne Gay, W. W. Norton & Company, 2020.
Seare Farhat
Seare Farhat strives to compose music that connects a listener to the visceral imaginations, energies, and transformations in narrative forms. Starting out his musical endeavors in Afghan folk music, he later built on these valued experiences in the western classical tradition along with other interests, such as mathematics. Seare has received commissions from the IU New Music Ensemble, Metropolitan Youth Symphony, Quintessence Wind Quintet, and the Oberlin Sinfonietta, and served as the young composer-in-residence of the Detroit Chamber Winds and Strings in 2019. He has received honors such as FLUX Quartet's 2019 call for scores and being a finalist for Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra's 2019 call for scores. Seare holds a B.M. in Composition and B.A. in Mathematics from Oberlin College and Conservatory and is currently pursuing a master’s degree at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he holds the position of Assistant Director of the New Music Ensemble and studies under Aaron Travers.
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