Never Meant

There’s lot of things I don’t know about, even as I’ve aspired to broaden the reach of my awareness. I’ve mentioned before how social media (specifically, at the time, Twitter) almost was single-handedly responsible for exposing me to lived experiences not my own, often by expanding the range of authors and books I choose to read, fiction and nonfiction alike.

Recently, I finished Survival Is a Promise by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, mostly because I’d read Gumbs’ terrific Undrowned and because I basically knew nothing much about Audre Lorde beyond the standard references that pop up in spaces for white liberals. I’m not mentioning this now because I’ve suddenly got anything interesting or incisive to say about Lorde, but because in the midst of my existential birthday tension between wanting to be heard and thinking that wanting to be heard is just useless ego I was struck especially by one thing.

Discussing the induction of Lorde into the American Poet’s Corner at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Gumbs mentions the inscription carved into a memorial stone taken from Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival”.

When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.

As described by Gumbs, this stone inscription represents “her line breaks sutured into life sentences”, and I will say it’s important for me to note that it abruptly leaves off the poem’s pointed conclusion:

and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.

Anyway, I post all of this with full awareness that whatever the nature of my eventual dissolution, I’ve had and continue to have some obvious degree of privilege as provided to the white, straight, cisgender male. Nevertheless, because even these in time and with near-inevitability will fail to protect me from being disabled and unemployable and so of absolutely no productive use to society whatsoever, I’m particularly struck by these particular words of Lorde’s, and it didn’t seem fitting to pass them by without noting them here.