notes from fallow

on distortion

i.

Distortion keeps twisting away from me, refusing my attempts to grapple with it. I type the word distortion and the page looks different, as though the word moves something. I try to shepherd the term by using epigraphs, but the word pushes against them, demanding a space that it alters. I wonder about this word that refuses to be thought. Not merely a word, then. A practice.

What kind of practice is distortion?

I come to distortion through Audre Lorde. It is one of her keywords, repeated across essays, used to map various relationships, and their impossibilities. I want to sit with Lorde’s understanding of distortion, even as the word itself keeps twisting away. I must try to follow its twists in Lorde’s writing.

ii.

distortion (noun)—the act of twisting or altering something out of its true, natural, or original state

iii.

Distortion twists relation.

The distortion of relationship which says “I disagree with you, so I must destroy you” leaves us as Black people with basically uncreative victories, defeated in any common struggle. This jugular vein psychology is based on the fallacy that your assertion of affirmation of self is an attack upon my self — or that my defining myself will somehow prevent or retard your self-definition.

–Audre Lorde, “Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving”

I start with the quotation that made me notice the word distortion.

Distortion (noun): —a change to the intended or true meaning of something

This twisty word demands that I start with “uncreative victories.” And to think with “uncreative victories,” I turn to the Combahee River Collective.

In the practice of our politics we do not believe that the end always justifies the means. Many reactionary and destructive acts have been done in the name of achieving “correct” political goals. As feminists, we do not want to mess over people in the name of politics.

—Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement”

What grounds this position?

Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.

—Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement”

Here’s Essex Hemphill:

At the end of the day,
through some other vision,
perhaps the consequence
of growing firm and older,
I see the thorns of the rose
are not my enemy
—Essex Hemphill, "The Tomb of Sorrow"

Uncreative victories privilege ends over means and seek victory at all costs. It is the dominant model for practicing politics. It is what wins across multiple geohistories—I think of how Kenyan elections are perpetually rigged by winners and losers alike. If I read Lorde alongside the Combahee River Collective, I can imagine that creative victories sustain and transform relationships. Not, “I disagree with you, so I must destroy you,” but “I disagree with you, so we must use the creative energy of our differences to imagine something else together.”

Distortion refuses the creative and transformative force of working across difference. Distortion insists that difference is destructive. Distortion requires unity based on sameness, rejecting autonomy.

There is more to be said here.

iv.

Distortion is not simply out there, an effect of competition; it is also within us.

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women,

—Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”

Distortion happens across relations and also within us. The out there also moves in. Wynter and Fanon call this moving in sociogeny: we are porous, formed through and in the social worlds we inhabit. If sociogeny is the process of formation, distortion is one result. We worry that if we look too deeply, we will truncate ourselves: “the fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves.” We worry that the distortions are the truth. After all, do we not live within systems that tell us truth is “difficult” and “ugly”? That to look inside must be to find unhealable wounds, the traumas that make us possible. If we look too deeply, we might be unable to live with what we find.

For women, especially. Raised—even today—to seek external approval. Raised—even today—to seek approval from the mirrors of external gazes. Raised—even today—to sit with the possibility of failing at gender, at sexuality, at kinship. Raised—even today—with a chorus of voices that create an echo chamber of distortions. What, then, can self-examination be if not a perilous journey—“diving into the wreck,” Adrienne Rich calls it. It takes courage—it takes a village and a movement—to look past the distortions of “should.”

v.

Distortion (noun): a change in or loss of sound quality, due to changes in the shape of the sound wave

vi.

It is not difference that divides; it is distortion.

Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change. But our time is getting shorter. We have been raised to view any difference other than sex as a reason for destruction, and for Black women and white women to face each other’s angers without denial or immobility or silence or guilt is in itself a heretical and generative idea. It implies peers meeting upon a common basis to examine difference, and to alter those distortions which history has created around our difference. For it is those distortions which separate us. And we must ask ourselves: Who profits from all this?

—Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”

Who profits from all this?

Who profits from the distortion of relation that leads to uncreative victories? Who profits when movements for Black liberation fracture?

Who profits when women remain “docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined”?

Who profits when Black women and white women “face each other’s angers” with “denial” and “immobility” and “silence” and “guilt,” and so are unable to imagine freedom together?

Who profits when self-definition is externally imposed and so the self is always lacking and always needs to be improved?

vii.

On the much more to be said.

Distortion is still twisting away from me.

I think, now, it must be thought alongside other terms: difference and relation. Distortion is a practical term. Even when we meet face-to-face, we must remember that “History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives” (Dionne Brand), and the history in the chair is most often an accumulation of distortions. We arrive to distorted sound, unable to hear each other because history filters the sound.

I have been thinking about demands for unity in times of crises. Historically, such demands have often been at the expense of minoritized people, whose labour is accepted—if not valued—only for the minoritization to persist at the hands of those who demand unity. We will get to your demands later on, we are told. We must pursue the urgencies of the now, we are told. One grows tired of insisting that the casual homophobia and transphobia of leaders is deadly. Uncreative victories.

May we have the courage to grow beyond whatever distortions we find within ourselves.