To Dialogue Across Difference

What is required to dialogue across difference? My brain thinks about this all the time. It all started when I learned about Audre Lorde's "Open Letter to Mary Daly"...

First of all, a disclaimer – I love Mary!! So to learn about Audre Lorde's letter to Mary, where she raises some very important issues about Mary's ethnocentrism and the tensions among feminists across race, and to hear that Mary Daly did not respond, was a bit devastating. But then Mary's latest book came out, Amazon Grace: Re-Calling the Courage to Sin Big, and in it she addresses the “Open Letter,” to which she had responded personally to Lorde but that Lorde never publicly acknowledged.

Agh! I was so discouraged.

Why did Lorde never publicly acknowledged Daly’s response?

Then I asked Mary Daly about it…and to see her pain...it was still a hurtful experience for her. So, I began to wonder...“how can we engage in dialogue across our differences without causing that kind of hurt and damage to one another – and – to the work we want to accomplish, which we are more likely to do if we partner, collaborate and creatively pursue it together?” In my pursuit of this, I began to gather, study and analyze cases in which women were able to engage in dialogue across differences or where women failed to do so and I looked for insights to my questions. I obviously did not find clear answers, but only a starting point for this dilemma.

I have 5 themes I picked up on and at the end, two practical first steps to offer that I think may make a difference in our efforts to engage in dialogue and connect across differences. I offer these now.

1 - People want to have their experiences and their perspectives, acknowledged and understood by the other:

But our experiences shape our unique perspective and understanding of things, and we speak out of these. And to speak out of these is to make ourselves vulnerable. It is to open oneself up to the potential of being misunderstood and hurt.

2 – There is a fear of being erased or dismissed by one another.

And part of the fear is that one will be dismissed or erased as a result of being misunderstood or from being disagreed with. To communicate, is to be vulnerable, and thus to risk rejection or dismissal; to communicate requires courage.

3 – There is an affirmation that the Old Patterns do not work and New Patterns must be created. We can learn from what did not work in the past and create new patterns for the present and for the future without having to invalidate the efforts of those who came before us. Instead we can (and must) work together to create new patterns/practices in partnership with those who have come and begun the work before us.

4 – There is a Hope or Aim that inspires them and out of which feminists work – sometimes made explicit, sometimes not:

Feminists are all working out of a hope or aim that inspires them; this is always personal and therefore also fragile.

5 – And there are Barriers to the Hope.

There are barriers to that hope that we are working to overcome – and sometimes it is in response to these barriers that we speak.

Some of the barriers are:

- Lack of awareness

- Generalizations and oversimplifications

- Not struggling through the hard parts

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But I am left with the question, “How do we avoid reaching the point where we hurt each other irreparably?”

Lorde wrote to Daly, “I would like to not have to destroy you in my consciousness,” (Whimsy, 97).

Eventually Daly did represent, for Lorde, all the white women who refused to deal with race differences.

And for Daly, she experienced Lorde as having betrayed their sisterhood – of scapegoating her for political gains and of not giving their dialogue a chance.

And she is still affected by it to this day.

(And for Daly, did her experiences and hurt by the church cause her to only speak from her own experience without realizing how it would hurt the sisterhood?)

In conversation with my own friend “across difference,” I have come up with two basic starting points for how to engage in dialogue across difference.

1) As a speaker/writer:

We must recognize and explicitly state that we speak from our own experiences.

We “know” what we know and are certain of it because we have experienced it, it resonates with our reality – but that is not necessarily the case with others.

And on the flip side others have just as much certainty about what they know and have experienced, and the truth of their reality – but neither offers the fullness of any reality, it is limited and recognizing that can open us up to hear one another’s contributions.

2) As the listerner/reader:

We must keep each other human. Each person is distinctly shaped by so many different experiences, from terribly hurtful experiences to wonderfully life-giving ones, and their complexity as a human cannot be reduced to any one aspect of what they express, or of what we understand them to be expressing.

For example Lorde states – “To examine Black women’s literature effectively requires that we be seen as whole people in our actual complexities – as individuals, as women, as human – rather than as one of those problematic but familiar stereotypes provided in this society in place of genuine images of Black women,” (FTR, 290).

Could we not do this of one another when we engage with any particular thing another person says and writes? Can we remember to keep each other’s contributions in the context of their whole humanity of which we are only aware of in part?

Can we remember that all of us have all kinds of varied experiences that make us humans? Katie Cannon wrote to Carter Heyward in Whimsy, page 36:

“When we, as various people, can claim the beauty of our innerselves, then we do not have to exploit, oppress, disenfranchise other people in some kind of hierarchical, vertical sadomasochistic pecking order.”

Perhaps in these two small practices of how we listen and how we speak to one another, we can begin to move even closer to the reality of the transformed world that inspires and moves us.

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Texts Used:

A) Audre Lorde’s “Open Letter to Mary Daly,” in This Bridge Called My Back, Eds. Cherrie Moraga (94-97) and Gloria Anzaldua,

and Mary Daly’s response in Amazon Grace, by Mary Daly (25-26).

B) Letters between Katie Cannon and Carter Heyward in God’s Fierce Whimsy, (35-59).

C) Renita J. Weems’ blog, Something Within January 31, 2008 entry “Baby Girl, Where’s Your Line in the Sand.”

D) Also consulted:

a. Rosemary Radford Ruether’s lecture from the “Religion and the Feminist Movement” Conference at the Harvard Divinity School: http://www.hds.harvard.edu/wsrp/scholarship/rfmc/rfm_video3.htm

b. Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, “The New Intergalactic Introduction,” (xxix-xxxiii).

c. Alexis De Veaux’s Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, (233-239, 246-253).

d. Gloria Anzaldua’s essay, “La Prieta,” in This Bridge Called My Back, (198-209).