The Black Radical Tradition has made me more human. In other words, it has taught me that there is no singular way to be human, and that any hierarchy between humans is dehumanizing; not only towards those that are pitted at the bottom of the hierarchy but also those that inhabit the highest level. In order for dehumanization to end, the Black Radical Tradition offers loving acceptance- of difference and plurality. However, it should not be mistaken that it does not turn to the oppressor to end the oppression. Instead, it turns to the oppressed. Here then, the Black Radical Tradition offers resistance. Together, resistance against oppression, and acceptance of humans as humans; not as blacks, as women, or as homosexuals; becomes life-affirming.

For a world divided in two by a veil, and people faced with duality and internal bifurcation, the Black Radical Tradition offered reconstruction. It attempted to create a better world, and better people; on the basis of acceptance, love, and recognition. Love that transcended the color of the skin, or the genital organs of a body. Love that strived for a world of multiplicities. Love that whole-heartedly accepted difference. Love that was not discriminatory, and made space for everyone. Love that disenabled theft; of knowledge, time, self, and future; occur. Then, practicing love meant healing scars, repairing ruptures, and opening possibilities. It meant for all people to be in tune with their time, and to not be out of joint, and in the waiting room of history. It meant for all people to be able to see themselves without a second gaze. It meant for all people to be able to see and fulfil dreams. It meant accepting humans as they were, and on their own terms. Being human was enough a reason to not oppress, negate, and reduce, and to not feel oppressed, negated, and reduced. To be human was to be levelly human, and no other way.

Then, if the due love and recognition was not given, it was to be fought for. The Black Radical Tradition offered resistance. For Nyrere, resistance that didn’t let go off African histories. For Hartman, resistance that defended the dead. For Patrice Lumumba, resistance that bore witness, even in death. For Fanon, resistance that violently cleansed out fear and shame. For Cesaire, resistance that named the oppression. For Gilroy, resistance that redeemed through music. For Malcolm X, resistance that was fearless, frank, plain and unintimidated. For Senghor, resistance that made space for the marginalized through Negritude. For MacKinnon, resistance that uprooted relations of view-fullness and view-lessness. For Morrison, resistance that read and wrote history to be a healing power. For Butler, resistance that refused to accept status quo as a norm. For Anzaldua, resistance that unapologetically demanded to be heard on one’s own terms. For Audrey Lorde, resistance that broke silence. Then, to resist meant to no longer be treated as objects or victims. It meant to not wait or ask for justice but to demand it urgently. It meant to remain strong, to never give up, and to not stop trying. Whatever its size and form, to resist meant to cause misfires and movement.

Therefore, the Black Radical Tradition offered me a feeling of responsibility; to love and to resist, because the two go hand in hand in a uniquely beautiful manner.

“Pain makes us acutely anxious to avoid more of it, so we hone that radar. It is a kind of survival tactic, that people caught between the worlds, unknowingly cultivate.”

In the chapter ‘Entering into the Serpent’, Gloria Anzaldua introduces the concept of la facultad, which she defines as the ability to capture the depth of the world and the soul by breaking the habitual modes of seeing reality and perceiving consciousness. La facultad is ‘excruciating’; because it is enabled through fear, because only those who live in the borderland experience it, because it does not reside in reason but in the body, and because it is born not out of choice but out of compulsion; to protect, to survive. In other words, la facultad is to know that you are living in a borderland, to experience oppression as a part of existing, to feel fear and pain as an ever-present emotion, to be alert of a continuously lingering danger, and then, to live in a way that is reactionary. Reactionary because it is a reaction to birth in the borderland.  It is to be shaped by, and refracted through the white male lens. It is to live in ‘half and half’, and never as a whole. It is to suffer from ‘absolute despot duality’ such that you are reduced to either this or that. It is to be looted and silenced. It is to survive from within the power webs that aim to kill.

Anzaldua’s la facultad resonates with Frantz Fanon’s notion of the world ‘divided into two’, and native percipience. In ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, Fanon talks about how “the native is always on the alert, for since he can only make out with difficulty the many symbols of the colonial world, he is never sure whether or not he has crossed the frontier.” The people on the border live a life of duality, denial, and dichotomy. They experience pain because they are unable to find themselves a ‘home’ where they belong. They experience fear because they are constantly being treated like a nobody. They are pushed to a ‘zone of non-being’, such that they are invisible, and assured to remain so by looting their language, and silencing their histories. However, for Fanon, pain and fear makes the ‘colonized man an envious man’ such that he desires to replace the colonizer and become the persecutor. He is dehumanized, and desensitized. On the contrary, for Anzaldua, pain and fear can open new possibilities if it is experienced by those that live on the borderlands but are not caught in the mode of acceptance and victimization. In other words, la facultad can be an opportunity.

La facultad is destructive and creative at one time. It is created when ‘one’s defenses and resistance’ are destroyed. In other words, it is here then, that pain becomes a survival tactic. Pain and fear destroys, but at the same time, it forces to know and see differently. If to know is to conquer, then for Anzaldua, to know is to achieve la facultad, and to conquer is to survive. To be able to achieve la facultad is to reject singularity; of past, present and future alike. Instead, it is to open up the creation of new possibilities, interception of multiple ways of being, and acceptance of plural futures.

This is the journey that Anzaldua undertakes for the creation of a new Mestiza consciousness. Rebirth, for Anzaldua then, is the realization of a human existence which transcends class, race, gender and sexuality, and wherein all people are of the same level as others.

Simply put, intersectionality is the understanding of multiple oppressions that one can be subjected to, and the consequent degree of marginalization. It focuses on interlocking oppressions, human agency, historical evolution of norms, and identity politics; each of which is a broad and complex topic. However, intersectional politics is not free of paradoxes. To me, the most interesting paradox is its power to be hopeful and hopeless at one time.

Beginning with how intersectional politics can lead to hopelessness, it produces a vast number of intersections such that it becomes impossible to know which should be emphasized at any particular time. Creating a hierarchy of oppressions is also a hopeless idea because it cannot be unanimous. For example, race would be on the top of the hierarchy for a black man, gender for a white woman, and both race and gender for a black woman. Then, from where does one start? Another cause of hopelessness stems from intersectional politics’ fixed conceptualizations of structure and power. In other words, by focusing on agency and experience, intersectionality reduces an individual to an essence, such that it takes differences for granted, and ignores how the difference is produced in the first place. As for power, hopelessness results from the nature of power to seep into all spheres of life and action. No one and nothing exists outside of power relations, and hence, there is no unlimited capacity of action. In this sense, intersectional politics becomes constraining.

However, at the same time, intersectional politics is also hopeful. It is empowering and liberating. By eliminating the dichotomy between nature and social, and material and discourse, Judith Butler suggests that identities are fluid. In other words, they are socially constructed. To restore given identities to history and not to nature means that there is nothing natural about being born, for example, as a black lesbian woman. As a result, there is room for movement; towards an identity that is not given by the system due to mere birth in it, but an identity that is taken upon willingly. Intersectional politics teaches one to argue to refuse to accept what was given as a natural norm. Then, intersectional feminists’ rejection of biological determinism against historical evolution becomes emancipatory. It allows space for change. Another way in which intersectional politics is hopeful is because it rejects binary identities. By claiming that identities are multiple, any attempt to pen one down as this or that becomes difficult. Then, humans cease to be understood as subjects because of subjugation. Instead, they become subjects because of their subjectivity. Intersectional politics enables them to exceed categories which have been imposed on them, and to view themselves through their own lived experiences. In other words, it allows humans to exist on their own terms. When they cease to take what was given to them as destiny or natural, they push towards destabilizing the norm and making themselves heard and seen. In this sense, intersectional politics is liberating.

To conclude, intersectional politics is hopeless and hopeful, and constraining and liberating, at the same time. However, it is not unproductive. Even if a new identity does not lie independent and outside of existing structures of power, it is productive to refuse the congenital identity and take up a new identity. Even if a struggle is carried out from a position within the existing structures of power, it is productive to be carried out. Even if one is faced with multiple oppressions that do not synthesize with the larger solidarity against oppression, it is important to speak about them. Identity does not mean complete escapism, struggle does not mean complete revolution, and uniqueness does not mean unimportant. Each of these matters. It matters because it disrupts the oppressor’s tactic of shutting down the oppressed through lies of ‘not yet’, ‘step by step’ and ‘not most urgent’. It matters because it makes space, little but alive. It matters because it is a refusal to be treated lesser. Therefore, to find unity in diversity and not be misguided by difference and categorization, and to keep trying to destabilize the norm from whatever position and to whatever capacity, should be the aim of intersectional politics.

I am trying to understand de-colonial aesthetics through black feminism. My project; in the form of an essay; will focus on four female feminists: Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Rosa Parks, and bell hooks. De-colonial aesthetics will be defined as ‘a new way of being’, or in the words of bell hooks, ‘from margin to center’.  Then, the aesthetic will be seen in Truth’s speech called ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’, Wells’ anti-lynching crusade, Parks’ refusal to give up her bus seat for white passengers, and Hooks’ authorship. An attempt will also be made to critically analyze how these histories are written to fit under categories of resistance; for example; based on their degree of spontaneity. In culmination, two final questions will be answered. First, what is resistance? Second, what does it mean to be free?

My project is important because it is about black women, intersectionality, and black feminism. It will find de-colonial aesthetics in acts of those that have been at the heart of the negation caused by colonialism- the black women. Oppression as well as resistance to it, is best understood from the vantage point of the most oppressed, which in this case are Truth, Wells, Parks, hooks, and black women. Doubly marginalized on the basis of race and sex, black women’s histories are of absence. But feminists such as the aforementioned turn this silencing upside down when they refuse to give up a seat or demand an answer to the question of ‘Ain’t I a Woman’. Their body becomes an archive, and they act in correspondence to the way their body has been treated- misrepresented and abused.

Black feminism fought to redeem whatever beauty was left in the world; true sisterhood, honest journalism, unsegregated buses, and institutional equality. It healed the scars caused by racism and sexism, and affirmed life by fighting back when a black life was taken by a white life.

Senghor’s Negritude is a reaction, and an alternative. It is ‘a certain way of conceiving life and of living it’; one that is different from that of Europe. Senghor calls it ‘nothing more or less than…the African personality’, and equates it to mean ‘no different from the black personality’. In doing so, he creates a ‘black world’ which is characterized by ‘the sum of the cultural values’ that are innate to an African-ness or black-ness.

In other words, Senghor essentializes Negritude and compartmentalizes the world. First, he creates a ‘black essence’ due to which his Negritude becomes exclusionary- towards those that don’t have the innate way of being African. Because an innate essence also suggests a fixedness, the exclusion tends to be permanent. Second, he adds to the binaries of black and white, and emotion and reason- the binary of rhythm and order. He places Negritude in stark contrast to Europe’s ‘static, objective, dichotomic, dualistic’ philosophy. In doing so, he does not rid the relationship between the European and the African of existing binaries.

But is it fair to say, that his Negritude is ahistorical? That in creating binaries, Senghor is no different than the whites? That he is repeating the European mistake? I believe, no.

If Negritude is to be understood as ‘the sum of the cultural values of the black world’, then it will be unfair to say that Negritude is ahistorical. Because in saying so, the assumption is that the African culture is static and cannot evolve. To Senghor, African culture is alive, thriving, and moving. An essence is innate and fixed, but a culture is not. In this way, Senghor’s Negritude can be essentialist but historical at the same time. Dismissing it as ahistorical defeats the purpose of Negritude itself, because it feeds back into Europe’s notion of Africa as having no past prior to what Europe saw.

Although Senghor’s framework of Negritude is based on binaries, it is not the same as the binaries that Europe created. The problem lies not in seeing oneself in relation to another. Instead, it lies in the negative connotation. When the West compartmentalized the world into modern and backward, rational and mythical, and subject and object, it placed the black man lower than the white man. It was through the negation of the black man that the white man was born. However, when Senghor compartmentalizes, he does not negate or dehumanize the white man. Rather, he seeks to find a collective conscience of the colonized African in order to use it to challenge West’s value judgement about the non-West.

Since Europe spoke of non-Europe as a homogenous group of people who had a backward essence that was rooted in myth and superstition, Senghor reclaims this essence and inverts it. He uses it to claim that the African rhythm sets into motion a life of ‘pure harmony’ whereby man, God, and nature connect with each other in a manner that European civilization cannot. Although he speaks through the binaries and in relation to the West, it is unfair to say that his use of binaries serve to reaffirm the function of the West’s binaries. Instead, his compartmentalization breaks the old compartmentalization, and allows for a new possibility. It tries to accommodate black skins. He is not repeating the European mistake. He is not dividing through difference. Rather, he finds ‘affirmation’ and ‘self-confirmation’ in uniqueness. Negritude, then can be read as an attempt to find; in the words of Gandhi; ‘unity in diversity’.

However, for me, the important question is not whether Senghor only inverts the roles in otherization while continuing to thrive on a system of negation of the other or not. Instead, what is most important to ask is that who is always on the receiving end of negation and otherization? The women. In creating a black world with a unique black essence, Senghor claims to make space for all blacks that have been marginalized by the whites. But he assumes that every woman from the African and black diaspora will exist within a black essence. If he repeats a European mistake, then it’s this- he excludes and keeps the women on the margins.

 

Power is a vicious cycle, not only because it is non-linear but also because it creates perpetual binary groups by infiltrating into all spheres. In Mohanty’s writing, material power of women from the first world grants them discursive power. First world women enjoy the power of representation whereby they self-present themselves, as well as represent an ‘other’ group- the third world women. Through these representations, first world women and third world women are placed in binaries; the former being powerful and the latter being powerless. It would be fair to say then that the issue of power of representation does not conclude at any point, because ‘one enables and sustains the other’.

Why is it that the ‘third world woman’ is constructed in the hands of the Western women, and not vice versa? The answer is similar to the answer of why the West colonized the East. The answer is the ‘white man’s burden’, and in the former context, the ‘white woman’s burden’. Therefore, when first world feminists perceive third world women in negation to themselves, they reduce them to beings that ‘have not evolved to the extent that the West has’. Judged by Western standards, a third world woman is what a first world woman is not. Being religious, family oriented, and veiled is understood as being not progressive, not modern and not emancipated respectively. First world feminists will tell her that she is backward in time, and hence oppressed, underdeveloped and lacking. Therefore, the project of first world feminism runs by the motto of ‘they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented’; ‘they’ being the third world women, and project’s undertones being imperialist.

But is it first world feminism only that is imperialist, ignores intersectionality in women and otherizes them? What about third world feminism itself? Can it not be imperialist as well? Does it not otherize its own women on the basis of class, culture, ethnicity, and geography? Is it free from the process of elitist judgements? The answer is no. Along imperial lines, third world feminism can be understood as a micro reproduction of first world feminism. Similar to how first world feminists deem themselves to be the rightful representors of women across the globe because they belong to the part of the world that has material power; i.e, West; third world feminists are women from upper class who presume to be fit to represent women of all classes because they have an acquired material power by the virtue of being born into a rich family. Whether consciously or not, third world feminists repeat the first world feminists’ mistake of treating women as a homogenous group that is the victim of patriarchy. What this does in the third world is that it diverts attention from differences between women, such as marginalization based on class. As a result, a third world woman who belongs to the lower class faces double marginality- at the hands of men as well as upper class women. A common example is of a maasi and madam in third world countries, the latter of which would engage in feminism in a manner that universalizes the particular, and fails to acknowledge that the maasi does not share common lived experiences with her because they don’t belong to the same class.

It is important to remember that when there is an oppression, there is someone benefitting from the oppression, and in most times, there is more than one beneficiary. When distinction between woman and women is blurred, and women from different countries, or different classes are treated as a monolithic and homogenous group, the fact that oppression is multi-layered and has a number of beneficiaries on different levels is ignored by an oversimplified idea of ‘sisterhood’.

We are in LUMS. The year is 2070. The best culture has won. Everyone speaks English, wears Gucci belts and blazers, carries apple mac books, and eats chicken sandwiches. There is harmony in everything. All the disciplines are the same. History is the history of the Culture. Literature are the stories of the Culture. Everything is from the lens of the Culture. SDSB trains you to be resourceful to the economy. The engineering school focuses on maximizing the utility of human body through science. Our motto is earnest creation of labor for the world’s market and economy. For the global good. It is only through standardized quality, technological advancement, and specialized labor that the doors of development and progress can be opened.

The Pakistan I was born was entrenched in chaos and anarchy. Angry men took to the streets, burnt tyres, destroyed automobiles and chanted slogans in the name of national liberation. The speeches that were aired on television comprised of sentiments that aimed to protect the Pakistani culture which, according to the men, was being replaced by the Western culture. I remember my first day of school. It was recess time. I was sitting in a circle with my class fellows, and eating lunch. Our teacher was called to the principal’s office. When she came back, she had an expression of frustration and weariness on her face. She grabbed us by our arms, and took us to the basement. We stayed there till dark. She told us that bad men were outside so as long as people stayed inside, they were safe. That day, a fear settled in. I grew up praying that the men would disappear from Earth. Why did they want to burn shops and hurt people? What did they want to preserve? Their idea of food and those weird clothes? What they frequently called “pakistaaniyat”? Why did they hurl abuses at English medium schools, western attire (my attire), office jobs and recreational life? Why did they warn the country to reject Western ideas or we would lose our freedom as a nation?

These questions remain unanswered till today. In what they rejected, I saw success. All successful men of the past that I studied about in school dressed up in pant suit, wore oxford boots, and carried laptop bags with them. My rich friends’ fathers also wore the same clothes, spoke the same language, and lived the same lifestyle. The country’s Prime Minister, President, and ministers were the same. These men lived a life of happiness, luxury and ease. They were always on a vacation in Europe or the States, ate European cuisine, played soccer and golf, and listened to American pop music. Young boys wanted to grow up to be just like them.

Standing in the PDC counter queue, I know what I will be having for dinner. There is no unnecessary city wars about food; about how the Kashmiri chaye isn’t authentic, or how the biryani tastes like pulao because Lahoris can’t differentiate between the two. I will watch a soccer match at the Student Lounge after dinner. There is no hustling due to a loud and charged crowd of students for a Karachi Kings versus Lahore Qalandars match. On the weekend, LUMS will host a rising singer with a British accent for a concert which I will attend. No one bats an eye about why Coke Studio’s renditions continue to destroy classic music, or how tabla and raag should be taught in schools. Everything is standardized. All people agree with each other. There are no arguments. No one feels the need to dress a certain way, or eat a certain cuisine, or speak a certain language for the purpose of identity, culture, or resistance. None of it matters, because everyone is the same. The world is a simple and harmonious place to live in.