Adrienne Rich - Notes Toward a Politics of Location lyrics

I am to speak these in Europe
But, I have been searching for
Them in the United States
Of America a few years ago I would have
Spoken of the common oppression of women
The
Gathering movement of women around the globe
The hidden history of women's
Resistance and bonding, the failure
Of all previous politics to
Recognize the universal shadow
Of patriarchy, the belief that women now
In a time of rising consciousness
And global emergency
May join across all national and cultural
Boundaries to create a society free of
Domination, in which "sexuality
Politics, work
Intimacy thinking it'self will be
Transformed"1 I would
Have spoken these words as


A feminist who "happened"
To be a white United States citizen
Conscious of
My government's proven capacity for
Violence and arrogance of
Power, but as self-separated
From that government
Quoting without second thought
Virginia Woolf's statement in Three Guineas
That "as a woman I have no country
As a woman I want no country as a
Woman my country is the whole world"

You could see your own house as a
Tiny fleck on an ever-widening landscape
Or as the center of it all from which the
Circles expanded into the infinite
Unknown it is that question of feeling at
The center that gnaws
At me now at the center of what?

As a woman I have a country as
A woman I cannot divest myself of
That country merely by
Condemning it's government
Or by saying three times "As
A woman my country is the
Whole world" Tribal loyalties aside
And even if
Nation-states are now just pretexts used by
Multinational conglomerates to serve
Their interests
I need to understand how a place on the map
Is also a place in history within which
As a woman, a Jew, a lesbian
A feminist I am created and trying to
Create begin though, not with a continent
Or a country or a house
But with the geography closest
In-the body here at least I know I exist
That living human individual whom the young
Marx called "the first premise
Of all human history"2 But it was not as
A Marxist that I turned to this place
Back from philosophy and
Literature and science and theology in
Which I had looked for
Myself in vain it was as
A radical feminist the
Politics of pregnability and motherhood the
Politics of orgasm the
Politics of rape and incest
Of abortion, birth control
Forcible sterilization of prostitution
And marital sex of what had
Been named sexual liberation of
Prescriptive heterosexuality of
Lesbian existence and Marxist feminists
Were often pioneers in
This work but for many women I
Knew, the need to begin with
The female body-our own-was
Understood not as applying a
Maxist principle to women
But as locating the grounds from
Which to speak with
Authority as women not to
Transcend this body
But to reclaim it to reconnect
Our thinking and speaking
With the body of this particular living human
Individual, a woman begin, we
Said, with the material
With matter, mma, madre, mutter
Moeder, modder, etc, etc

Begin with the material pick up
Again the long struggle against
Lofty and privileged abstraction perhaps this
Is core of revolutionary
Process, whether it calls it'self Marxist
Or Third World or feminist or all three long
Before the nineteenth century
The empirical witch of the European
Middle Ages, trusting her senses
Practicing her tried remedies against
The anti material, anti-sensuous
Anti-empirical dogmas of the Church
Dying for that, by the
Millions "A female led peasant
Rebellion"?-in any event
A rebellion against the idolatry
Of pure ideas
The belief that ideas have a life of
Their own and float along above the
Heads of ordinary people-women, the poor
The uninitiated3 Abstractions
Severed from the doings of living people
Fed back to people as
Slogans theory-the seeing of patterns
Showing the forest as well as
The trees-theory can be
A dew that rises from the earth and collects
In the rain cloud and returns
To earth over and
Over but, if it doesn't smell of the earth
It isn't good for the earth

I wrote a sentence just now and
X'd it out in it
I said that women have always
Understood the struggle against
Free-floating abstraction even when they were
Intimidated by abstract ideas I
Don't want to write that
Kind of sentence now
The sentence that begins "Women have
Always" We started by
Rejecting the sentences that began
"Women have always
Had an instinct for mothering" or
"Women have always and everywhere been in
Subjugation to men" If we
Have learned anything in these years
Of late twentieth-century feminism
It's that that
"always" blots out what we really
Need to know: When, where
And under what conditions has
The statement been true?

The absolute necessity to
Raise these questions
In the world: where, when
And under what conditions have women acted
And been acted on
As women? Wherever people are
Struggling against subjection, the specific
Subjection of women
Through our location in a
Female body, from now on has to be addressed
The necessity to go on speaking of it
Refusing to let
The discussion go on as before
Speaking where silence has
Been advised and enforced, not
Just about our subjection
But about our active presence and
Practice as womenWe believed
(I go on believing) that
Liberation of women is
A wedge driven into all
Other radical thought, can open out
The structures of resistance
Unbind the imagination, connect what's been
Dangerously disconnected let us pay
Attention now, we said, to
Women: let men and women make
A conscious act of attention
When women speak let us insist on kinds of
Process which allow more women to
Speak let us get
Back to earth not as paradigm for "women
" but as place of location

Perhaps we need a moratorium on saying
"the body" for it's also
Possible to abstract "the" body when
I write "the body, " I see nothing
In particular to write "my body"
Plunges me into lived experience
Particularly: I
See scars, disfigurements, discolorations
Damages, losses, as well as what please
S me bones well nourished from the placenta
The teeth of a middle-class person
Seen by the dentist twice a
Year from childhood white skin, marked and
Scarred by three pregnancies
An elected sterilization
Progressive arthritis, four joint operations
Calcium
Deposit's, no rapes, no abortions, long
Hours at a typewriter-my own
Not in a typing pool-and so forth to say
"the body" lifts me away from what has
Given me a primary perspective to say "my
Body" reduces the temptation
To grandiose assertions
This body white, female or female, white
The first obvious, lifelong facts but
I was born in the white section
Of a hospital which separated Black
And white women in labor and Black and white
Babies in the nursery
Just as it separated Black and
White bodies in it's
Morgue i was defined as white before
I was defined as female the
Politics of location even to being with
My body I have to
Say that from the outset that body
Had more than one identity
When I was carried out of
The hospital into the world
I was viewed and treated as female
But also viewed and treated as
White-by both Black and white
People i was located by color
And sex as surely
As a Black child was located
By color and sex-though the
Implications of white identity were
Mystified by the presumption
That white people are the center of
The universe to locate myself in
My body means more than understanding
What it has meant to
Me to have a vulva and clitoris
And uterus and breasts it
Means recognizing this white skin, the
Places it has taken me
The places it has not let me go

The body I was born into was
Not only female and white
But Jewish-enough for geographic location to
Have played, in those years, a determining
Part i was a Mischling
Four years old when the Third Reich began
Had it been not Baltimore, but
Prague or Lódz or Amsterdam
The ten-year-old letter writer might have had
No address had I survived Prague, Amsterdam
Or Lódz and the railway stations for which
They were deportation points, I would be
Some body else my center, perhaps
The Middle East or Latin America
My language it'self another language
Or I might be in no body at allBut, I
Am a North American Jew
Born and raised three thousand miles
From the war in Europe

Trying as women to see from the center
"A politics, " I wrote once
"of asking women's questions" 4 We are
Not "the woman question" asked by
Somebody else We are the women who ask
The questions trying to see so
Much, aware of so much to be
Seen, brought into the light
Changed breaking down again and
Again the false
Male universal piling piece by piece
Of concrete experience side
By side, comparing
Beginning to discern patterns anger
Frustration
With Marxist or Leftist dismissals
Of these questions
This struggle easy now to
Call this disillusionment facile
But the anger
Was deep, the frustration real
Both in personal relationships and political
Organizations i wrote in 1975:
Much of what is
Narrowly termed "politics" seems to rest on a
Longing for certainty even at the cost of
Honesty, for an analysis which, once given
Need not be reexamined such is the
Deadendedness-for women-of Marxism in our
Time5 And it has felt like
A dead end wherever politics
Has been externalized
Cut off from the ongoing lives of women
Or of men, rarefied into an
Elite jargon, an enclave
Defined by little sects who feed off
Each others' errors but even as we shrugged
Away Marx along with the academic
Marxists and the sectarian Left, some of
Us, calling ourselves radical feminists
Never meant anything less by women's
Liberation than the creation of
A society without domination we never
Meant less the making
New of all relationships the problem
Was that we did
Not know whom we meant when we said "we"

Living for fifty-some years
Having watched even
Minor bit's of history unfold
I am less quick than I once was
To search for single "causes" or
Origins in dealings among human beings but
Suppose that we could trace
Back and establish that patriarchy has been
Everywhere the model to what choices
Of action does that lead us
In the present? Patriarchy exists
Nowhere in a pure state we are the latest
To set foot in a tangle of
Oppressions grown up and around
Each other for
Centuries this isn't the old children's game
Where you choose one strand of color in
The web and follow it back to
Find your price, ignoring the others as mere
Distractions the prize is life it'self
And most women in the world must fight for
Their lives on many fronts at once

We often find it difficult to separate race
From class from sex oppression because in
Our lives they are most
Often experienced simultaneously
We know that there is such
A thing as racial-sexual oppression
Which is neither
Solely racial nor solely sexual we need
To articulate the real class situation of
Persons who are not merely raceless
Sexless workers but for whom
Racial and sexual
Oppression are significant determinants
In their working
Economic lives this is from the
1977 Combahee River Collective
Statement, a major document of
The US women's movement, which gives
A clear and uncompromising
Black-feminist naming to the experience of
Simultaneity of oppressionEven in the
Struggle against free-floating abstraction
We have abstracted marxists and radical
Feminists have both done this
To come to terms with
The circumscribing nature of
(our) whiteness7 Marginalized though we
Have been as women
As white and Western makers
Of theory, we also marginalize others because
Our lived experience is thoughtlessly white
Because even our "women's cultures"
Are rooted in some
Western tradition recognizing our location
Having to name the ground we're coming from
The conditions we have taken
For granted-there is a confusion
Between our claims to
The white and Western eye
The woman-seeing eye
8 fear of losing the centrality of the
One even as we claim the other

How does the white Western
Feminist define theory?
Is it something made only by
White women and only by women acknowledged
As writers? How does the
White Western feminist define "an idea"? How
Do we actively work to build
A white Western feminist
Consciousness that is
Not simply centered on it'self
That resists white circumscribing?

It was in the writings but
Also the actions and speeches
And sermons of Black United States
Citizens that I began
To experience the meaning of my
Whiteness as a point of location for which I
Needed to take responsibility
It was in reading poems by
Contemporary Cuban women that I
Began to experience the meaning
Of North America as
A location which had also shaped
My ways of seeing
And my ideas of who what was important, a
Location for which I was also responsible
I traveled then to Nicaragua
Where in a tiny impoverished
Country, in a four-year-old society
Dedicated to eradicating poverty
Under the hills of
The Nicaragua-Honduras border
I could physically feel the weight of
The United States of North
America, it's military forces
It's vast appropriations of money
It's mass media, at my back
I could feel what it means, dissident or not
To be part of that raised boot of power
The cold shadow we cast
Everywhere to the south
In the United States large
Numbers of people have
Been cut off from their own process and
Movement we have been hearing for forty years
That we are the guardians of freedom
While "behind the Iron Curtain"
All is duplicity and manipulation
If not sheer terror yet the legacy
Of fear lingering after the witch
Hunts of the fifties hangs
On like the aftersmell
Of a burning the sense of obliquity, mystery
Paranoia surrounding the American Communist
Party the Khrushchev
Report of 1956: the party lost
30, 000 members within weeks
And few who remained were
Talking about it to be a Jew, a homosexual
Any kind of marginal person was to
Be liable for suspicion of being
"Communist" A blanketing snow had begun
To drift over the radical
History of the United States and
Though parts of the North
America feminist movement
Actually sprang from the Black movements of
The sixties and the student left
Feminists have suffered not only
From the the buying and
Distortion of women's experience
But from the overall burying
And distortion of
The great movements for social change9
A movement for change lives
In feelings, actions
And words whatever circumscribes or
Mutilates our feelings makes
It more difficult to act, keeps our actions
Reactive, repetitive: abstract thinking
Narrow tribal loyalties, every kind
Of self righteousness
The arrogance of believing ourselves
At the center it's hard to look back on
The limit's of my understanding a year, five
Years ago-how did I look without seeing
Hear without listening? It can
Be difficult to be
Generous to earlier selves and
Keeping faith with the
Continuity of our journeys is
Especially hard in the United States
Where identities and loyalties have
Been shed and replaced without a tremor
All in the name of
Becoming "American" Yet how
Expect through ourselves
Do we discover what moves other people
To change? Our old fears
And denials-what helps us let
Go of them? What makes us decide we have
To reeducate ourselves
Even those of us with "good"
Educations? A politicized life
Ought to sharpen both the
Senses and the memory

The difficulty of saying Ia phrase from
East German novelist Christa Wolf10 But
Once having said it, as we realize
The necessity to go further
Isn't there a difficulty of saying "we"? You
Cannot speak for me i cannot speak
For us two thoughts: there is no
Liberation that only knows how to
Say "I" there is no collective movement that
Speaks for each of us all
The way through and so even ordinary
Pronouns become a political problem

64 cruise missiles in Greeham
Common and Molesworth 112 at Comiso
96 Pershing ii missiles in West Germany
96 for Belgium and the Netherlands

That is the projection for the next few years

Thousands of women, in Europe
And the United States
Saying no to this and to
The militarization of the world
An approach which traces militarism back to
Patriarchy and patriarchy back to
The fundamental quality of maleness can
Be demoralizing and even paralyzing
Perhaps it is possible to be
Less fixed on the discovery
Of "original causes" It might be
More useful to ask
How do these values and behaviors
Get repeated generation after generation?

The valorization of manliness and masculinity
The armed forces as
The extreme embodiment of the
Patriarchal family the
Archaic idea of women as a "home front" even
As the missiles are deployed in the
Backyards of Wyoming and Mutlangen the
Growing urgency that an anti-nuclear
Anti-militarist movement must be a feminist
Movement must be a feminist movement
Must be a
Socialist movement, must be an anti racist
Anti-imperialist movement that it's
Not enough to
Fear for the people we know, our own kind
Ourselves nor is it empowering
To give ourselves up to abstract terrors
Of pure annihilation the anti-nuclear
Anti-military movement cannot sweep away the
Missiles as a movement to
Save white civilization in the West
The movement for change
Is a changing movement, changing
It'self, demasculinizing it'self
De Westernizing it'self
Becoming a critical mass that is
Saying in so many different
Voices, language, gestures
Actions: It must change we
Ourselves can change it

We who are not the same we who are many and
Do not want to be same trying to watch
Myself in the process of writing this
I keep coming
Back to something Sheila Rowbotham
The British socialist feminist
Wrote in Beyond the Fragments:
A movement helps you to overcome some of the
Oppressive distancing of theory and this has
Been a continuing creative endeavour
Of women's liberation
But some paths are not mapped and
Our footholds vanishi see what I'm writing as
Part of a wider claiming which is
Beginning i am part of the difficulty myself
The difficulty is not out there

My difficulties, too
Are not out there-except in
The social conditions
That make all this necessary i do
Not any longer believe-my feelings
Do not allow
Me to believe-that the white eye
Sees from the center yet I often find myself
Thinking as if still believed that were
True or, rather, my thinking stands still i
Feel in a state of arrest
As if my brain and heart were refusing to
Speak to each other my
Brain, a woman's brain
Has exulted in breaking
The taboo against women thinking, has taken
Off on the wind, saying
I am the woman who asks
The questions my heart has
Been learning in a much
More humble and laborious
Way, learning that feelings are
Useless without facts, that
All privilege is ignorant at
The core the United
States has never been a white country
Though it has long served
What served what white men defined as their
Interests the Mediterranean
Was never white england, northern Europe
If ever absolutely white, are
So no longer in a Leftist
Bookstore in Manchester, England
A Third World poster: WE ARE HERE
BECAUSE YOU WERE THERE in
Europe there have always been the Jews
The original
Ghetto dwellers, identified as a racial type
Suffering under pass laws and
Special entry taxes
Enforced relocations, massacres: the
Scapegoats, the aliens
Never seen as truly European but as part
Of that darker world that must
Be controlled
Evntually exterminated today the cities
Of Europe have
New scapegoats as well: the diaspora from
The old colonial empires is
Anti-Semitism the model for
Racism, or racism for
Anti-Semitism? Once more
Where does the question lead us?
Don't we have to start here, where we
Are, forty years after the Holocaust
In the churn of Middle Eastern
Violence, in the midst of decisive
Ferment in South Africa
Not in some debate over
Origins and precedents
But in the recognition
Of simultaneous oppression?

I've been thinking a lot
About the obsession with
Origins it seems a way of stopping time
In it's tracks the
Sacred Neolithic triangles, the
Minoan vases with staring eyes and breasts
The female figurines of Anatolia-weren't
They concrete evidence
Of a kind, like Sappho's fragments
For earlier woman-affirming
Cultures, cultures that enjoyed centuries
Of peace? But
Haven't they also served as arresting images
Which kept us attached and immobilized?
Human activity didn't stop in
Crete or Çatal Hüyük we can't
Build a society free
From domination by fixing our sights backward
On some long-ago tribe or
City the continuing spiritual power of
An image lives in
The interplay between what it reminds
Us of- what it brings
To mind-and our own continuing
Actions in the present
When the labrys becomes a badge for
A cult of Minoan goddesses
When the wearer of the labrys has ceased to
Ask herself what she is doing on this earth
Where her
Love of women is taking her, the labrys, too
Becomes abstration-lifted away from the
Heat and friction of
Human activity the Jewish star on my neck
Must serve me both for reminder and as
A goad to continuing
And changing responsibility

And I turn to Etel Adnan's brief
Extraordinary novel Sitt Marie Rose, about
A middle-class Christian Lebanese
Woman tortured
For joining the Palestinian Resistance
And read:

She was also subject to
Another great delusion
Believing that women are
Protected from repression
And that the leaders considered
Political fights to
Be strictly between males in fact, with
Women's greater access to certain powers
They began to watch them more closely
And perhaps with even greater hostility
Every feminine act
Even charitable and seemingly
Unpolitical ones
Were regarded as a rebellion in this world
Where women had always played servile roles
Marie Rose inspired scorn and
Hate long before
The fateful day of her arrest

Across the curve of the earth
There are women getting up
Before dawn, in the blackness before
The point of light
In the twilight before sunrise there
Are women rising earlier
Than men and children to break the
Ice, to start the stone, to put up
The pap, the coffee, the rice, to iron
The pants, to braid the hair
To pull the day's water
Up from the well, to boil water for tea
To wash the children
For school, to pull the vegetables and
Start the walk to market
To run to catch the bus for the
Work that is paid I don't't know when most
Women sleep in big cities at dawn
Women are traveling home after
Cleaning offices all
Night, or waxing the halls of hospitals
Or sitting up with the old and sick
And frightened at the hour when
Death is supposed to do it's work
In Perù: "Women invest hours in
Cleaning tiny stones and chaff out of beans
Wheat and rice they shell peas
And clean fish and
Grind spices in small mortars
They buy bones or
Tripe at the market and cook cheap
Nutritious soup they repair
Clothes until they
Will not sustain another patch they search
Out the cheapest school uniforms
Payable in the greatest
Number of installments
They trade old magazines for plastic
Washbasins and buy second hand toys and
Shoes they walk long distances
To find a spool of thread at a slightly lower
Price" This is the working day that has never
Changed, the unpaid female labor which
Means the survival of
The poor in minimal light I see her
Over and
Over, her inner clock pushing her out of bed
With her heavy and maybe painful limbs
Her breath breathing
Life into her stove, her house, her family
Taking the
Last cold swatch of night on her body
Meeting the sudden leap of the
Rising sun in my
White North American world they have tried to
Tell me that this
Woman-politicized by intersecting
Forces doesn't think and reflect
On her life that her ideas are not real ideas
Like those of Karl Marx and
Simone de Beauvoir: That her
Calculations, her spiritual philosophy
Her gifts for law and ethics
Her daily emergency political decisions
Are merely instinctual or
Conditioned reactions that only certain
Kinds of people can make theory that the
White-educated mind is capable
Of formulating everything that
White middle-class feminism
Can know for "all women" that
Only when a white
Mind formulates is the formulation
To be taken seriously in the United States
White-centered theory has not
Yet adequately engaged with
The texts-written, printed
And widely available-which have
Been for a decade or more
Formulating the political theory
Of Black American feminism: the
Combahee River Collective statement
The essays and speeches of Gloria
I joseph, Audre Lorde
Bernice Reagon, Michele Russell, Barbara
Smith, June Jordan
To name a few of the most
Obvious white feminists have read and
Taught from the anthology This
Bridge Called My
Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
Yet often have stopped at perceiving
It simply as an angry attack
On the white women's movement
So white feelings remain at
The center and, yes
I need to move outward from the
Base and center of my feelings
But with a corrective sense that my
Feelings are not the center of
Feminism and if we
Read Audre Lorde or Gloria
Joseph or Barbara Smith, do we
Understand that the intellectual roots
Of this feminist theory
Are not white liberalism or
White Euro-American feminism
But the analyses
Of Afro-American experience articulated
By Sojourner truth wEB du Bois
Ida B wells-Barnett, CLR james
Malcolm X, Lorraine Hansberry, fannie Lou
Hamer, among others? That Black feminism
Cannot be marginalized and circumscribed
As simply a response to white
Feminist racism or an
Augmentation of white feminism that it
Is an organic development
Of the Black movements and
Philosophies of the past
Their practice and their printed writings?
(And that, increasingly
Black American feminism is actively
In dialogue with
Other movements of women of color within
And beyond the United States?) To shrink from
Or dismiss that challenge can only
Isolate white feminism from the
Other great movements for
Self-determination and justice within
And against which
Women define ourselves once again: Who is we?
This is the end of these notes
But it is not an ending