there’s been a lot of very interesting critiques of “radical love” that stemmed out of Jess’s (re)thinking walking post.
I’ve really wanted to discuss it, but I’ve not really known how to go about it, because as I mentioned in Jess’s post, although I was very deliberate in choosing “radical love” as a concept to work with, I also am not exactly sure what the “solid” definition of “radical love” is.
Believe me, I agree with a certain critique put forth that stated that discussions about “definitions” can be completely and totally academic and alienating. But I also thinking that confronting why “love” (without the radical”) is considered such a treacherous thing by so many women of color is completely important and necessary. I agree with the critique Fire Fly put forth that the idea of “loving” the people she organizes with sounds like her worst fucking nightmare–given what has happened over and over and over again in the feminist blogosphere alone (much less real world organizing where your physical body is a part of the interaction), I have to say, it’s my worst nightmare too.
But at the same time–there is the love that maia talked about.
when i think of radical love. i think of being a birth assistant for working poor african immigrant teenage moms. and loving them. even though i may not particularly like them. not the kind of folks i want hang out with on a saturday aft. but loving them tenderly through an incredibly vulnerable moment of their lives. and that creates a bond between us. and yes they yelled not nice things to me in their final moments of labor. and they resent me because i am a stranger, not their boyfriend, not their mom. but because we have been really vulnerable with each other…the quality of the relationship is…more human(?)
and i think about working in the villages in palestine. and how there are these settlers coming to attack us internationals. and the palestinians are taking care of us. and we are taking care of them. and frankly i dont like everyone in that village either. but we are still putting our lives on the line for each other. and frankly maybe we are all a bit ‘idealistic’ but that barely begins to explain why we would do that for another. and we are not bff. we barely know each other. but we are living. and taking care of each other. because if we dont we are all screwed. does that make sense?
and it was in this village that i really learned what i now call: radical love. because this village centered relationship-building and maintaining. we sat in meetings for incredibly long times because everyone has to feel heard and considered and everyone has to be on board with the next decision.
i guess i learned that you take care of folks first then they trust you.
and her words remind me of the love I have for three amazing women of color in my life, who have agreed to act as tias for my sweet babybfp. How I asked them to act as aunties to my girl for very political reasons–my girl is going to face a fucking tough road in her life, and each of the women, I think, are complete experts in things that she will have to deal with–being a sexual being, a racialized being, a Latina, a girl living in the diaspora, etc. But at the same time–I asked the women to be tias for my girl because I love my daughter with every fiber of my life and couldn’t imagine a greater gift I could give her–AND I love each of these women so much my heart can hardly contain itself when I think of them. There is political and there is love.
So what is all this mess of “feelings” and “emotions” and “political”? Love is a risk, for sure. How much of a risk should women of color take to ‘feel’ this thing? Should they take the risk? Should it even be a part of organizing? Should it be a part of “building a new world”?
What about our current organizing would have to change to incorporate “love” into it? Would we want to do that? Would it be safe for us?
What is this thing called “love”? And what does it mean to radicalize it? Is that possible? Is it desirable?
- Share
April 3rd, 2009 at 9:10 am #
i think it is important to understand that our work stems from love. yes, i agree with the critique that it is scary and sometimes downright dangerous for us to love others that we are organizing with. but that isn’t the only love going on, the only option. it is love for ourselves and our own needs, love for the needs of others who are oppressed, love for humanity (yeah, yeah, i’m hippy dippy, what of it?)… maybe it ISN’T necessarily love for individuals that we have to work with who it is dangerous for us to love… though i hope at some point we can find some compassion for them in their sorry states as well. but it is still love. love of our future, of the coming generations, love of our ancestors, love of those who have held us up, love for those who have inspired us. if we didn’t love, we wouldn’t bother doing the work. that’s what i think. maybe we just have a hard time accepting or imagining that is part of what love is.
April 3rd, 2009 at 3:46 pm #
I think I’m radically heartbroken. Is that possible?
April 3rd, 2009 at 6:50 pm #
if we didn’t love, we wouldn’t bother doing the work.
That’s what it comes down to for me. I often say it, and it’s still true, I wouldn’t do half of what I do if it wasn’t for love.
Even when I hate it, I still love it. When my fingers can barely put a post together, I love it. When my throat is sore and body is numb from the cold, I love it. When the ones on “my side” turn their back on me, I still love it. I have to love it.
April 3rd, 2009 at 6:54 pm #
Um, no, I didn’t mean that we love the work. Not at all (okay, if that is true for you that’s fine, I just mean that wasn’t at all what I was talking about). It’s not love of the work itself. It’s love for the world we are creating by doing the work. Love for the people we are creating that world for. Love of justice, peace, and all the ideals for which we are working. Not love for the work.
April 3rd, 2009 at 8:26 pm #
We’re actually talking about the same thing in two different ways. I love the work because of the goal we have, not necessarily work for the sake of work.
April 4th, 2009 at 7:41 am #
@ chops–totally.
April 4th, 2009 at 9:44 am #
i am definitely perpetually radically heartbroken. how could you not be in this crazy oppressive world?
@bfp
i know what you mean. my daughter has a series of tias all around the world whom i chose because of how much i love them and how much they love the world and how strong and amazing they are. they are outspoken gentle take no prisoners compassionate give their lives loving the world women.
April 4th, 2009 at 11:35 am #
I think that if I could write it, it wouldn’t be love.
I think radical love is seen, done, witnessed in the most ugly, darkest, quietest, unnoticeable of places.
At least, that’s when i think it matters most. That’s when I think it is radical.
April 5th, 2009 at 12:08 am #
Of all the positive things I’ve felt while organising, love is not one of them. I’ve felt invigorated, empowered, passionate, compassionate, empathetic, critical… but there are very few people I’d want to build a relationship with, even fewer that I really trust. I still think it’s important to work with them, but the people I work with are either not trustworthy, or not people I’d want to burden with my end of a relationship. There is a lot of backstabbing, tokenism, and using going on within the activist world, and I absolutely do not want my personal life caught up in that.
To be honest, I have no idea what “organising that centres relationships” looks like or does — a lot of what’s been described as ‘radical love’ is outside my experience and anything I can hope to grasp — so I don’t think I have anything to contribute to a definition of ‘radical love’ other than a critique of it.
I think I summed up my feelings at Noemi’s blog:
April 5th, 2009 at 7:58 am #
I really hear you FF–about the “time and energy”–and I really dug that whole critique of noemi’s–because it’s probably at the very core of everything I’ve been struggling with here. I mean, really, all the people who have called me self-indulgent and narcissistic since I’ve started up this blog as opposed to my other one–they are not calling me anything that I haven’t called myself. I had to read noemi’s stuff very slowly over a few days, because on far too many levels, my own belief in the direction I am choosing to go in these days rest only on the teeniest tiniest veneer of honest belief in–on the one hand, I am 100% about getting better, and centering myself and healing relationships and building trust etc–on the other hand, in many ways, I can’t willingly put time into doing all those things without being sure to add the “So I can be a better organizer” onto the end of it. You know?
Because the thing about “time and energy”–I’ve found that you *have* to make the conscious choice to put more time and energy into “self” or “love” than “organizing”–and especially when we all have such limited resources when it comes to time and energy–that is an incredibly hard choice to make. And I think it’s a deliberate thing, at least here in the U.S., to force especially poor people to have incredibly limited “time and energy” resources–if you’re too tired to do X–well, that keeps the status quo in place, right?
I’ve discovered two things–1. I’ve been able to be much more efficient in my use of “time” when it comes to actual organizing since I’ve begun really centering myself and loving myself in a political sense. when a person is healthier, they can get more done, right? and 2. I think it’s an incredibly unhealthy model of organizing that asks a few people to give the majority of their lives to organizing so that the rest of us can skate buy doing nothing–which is what the 501c3/nonprofit/NGO model follows. 20 people at the local women’s center doesn’t a revolution make, right?
We’re going to need millions and millions of people to bring about “revolution”–and the thing is, if we have millions of people, those people only need to dedicate 2 or three hours (or a much smaller portion, at least) of their lives to “the cause”–which opens up the “time and energy” thing considerably, right? (I got this idea from Andrea Smith, btw)
I think it actually goes the *other* way, where we call focusing on our individual selves narcisistic–when in all reality, isn’t it a narcisistic by product of the “Pull yourself up by your boot straps and save the world because only YOU can do it” culture that gets so many of us to believe that an individual pulling back from 50 hours of organizing to 50 hours of deep personal meditation is actually *impeding* “collective action”? Or that there is something wrong with telling a single mother who has 3 hours of spare time a week that her sitting with her friends and laughing till she cries is not deeply political work? And why on earth wouldn’t we, as organizers, want to mobilize that three hours of laughter time, since that’s all she has to give?
I’m thinking of the women in detroit that organized a “vote for obama” campaign by organizing a dance group at the local bar. If people only have a few hours a week, and decide to spend that time relaxing at a bar instead of knocking door to door–why on earth would we try to convince them to knock door to door instead of getting up and dancing for obama? You know? I guess more to the point, I actually think it makes *more* sense, politically and with community organizing in mind–to look at the few gaps of time and energy that people *do* have, and listen to what they’re saying is important to them to do during that time, then to say, let’s engage a massive campaign on convincing people to give up there precious time and knock on doors or stuff envelopes or whatever.
In my community–in my personal life–people are interested in organizing, but their actually scared to death as to why they are unable to walk a block without killing themselves. Or why they have such issues with food. Or why they can’t wake up and stay awake. Or how they are going to feed their kids because they just got laid off. These are the people that need to be mobilized. And these are the people who *can’t* be mobilized because the traditional model of organizing suggests that they give up their precious time to do something that *doesn’t* fix why the feel like shit or how they’re going to feed their kids.
I don’t know. I go around in circles trying to talk about this stuff. In many ways, I think that Lisa is 100% correct. If you could “write” love, it wouldn’t *be* love. But at the same time–I also think that it’s necessary really examine “love”–because “love” has become such a devalued thing in this society–like I said in other posts–ripped on by sexist men who want to be the studs, dismissed by practical women who’ve had their hearts beaten one too many time with it, mocked by asshole presidents with an agenda…I think it’s something that needs to be examined and brought back into the limelight and “recovered” if only because the reasons it’s been “lost” are so incredibly and deeply political….
April 5th, 2009 at 8:09 am #
which, I wanted to add–when you start talking about the more personal shit like feeding kids and being out of work and feeling like shit–how can you *not* talk about love and taking care of yourself and relationships with the person sitting next to you, etc? How can you not talk about “partner abuse”, for example, outside of the general context of “power’ and “control” “recovery” and in the more personal context of “we need to take care of you just as much as you are trying to take care of your abuser” and ‘yes, it makes sense that you still love your abuser, how can we keep you safe, keep your abuser safe (because you love him/her) and still hold him/her accountable?’
April 5th, 2009 at 11:17 am #
p.s. honestly, FF, i really don’t think we’re that far off. the stuff you said before at the beginning of your comment–*that’s* what I’m talking about.
April 8th, 2009 at 8:18 am #
I don’t know if I have anything deep to say about this subject or any answers, but yes. Yes yes yes. This is the core of radical politics. It’s the core of everything. Love is what we need to be thinking about and talking about (and expressing!). We dance around it because we’re afraid of being vulnerable, but it’s where the real revolution starts. I’m SO happy to see these posts, on such a deep level. Thank you!
April 9th, 2009 at 3:00 pm #
The thing with love is that it means so much. Every Disney movie is a triumph of love… and yet, somehow, still a Disney movie.
Radical love probably doesn’t mean the same thing. Or all of the same things, at least. I agree with all my heart that it’s necessary, but it probably doesn’t mean you want to hold everyone you work with forever and ever.
Just that you’ll hold them when they need it.
April 23rd, 2009 at 7:51 pm #
That concept of “I can love this person at some fundamental level without necessarily -liking- them most of the time” is one that sort of flits in and out of my grasp. As in, I’ve -done- it, and I still don’t quite buy it. It’s also easy to slip into lip service to that idea, but I do know the difference. It’s just…difficult for me to hold onto.
April 23rd, 2009 at 7:54 pm #
I guess how I’d define it is when you see/experience those little cracks in the other person’s “stuff,” you know. There’s a way of connecting that has little to do with how much tolerance you have for someone’s quirks and foibles and flaws (although you might come to a better understanding of where those come from) and has nothing to do with “I want to spend the rest of my life having a intimate relationship with this person.” Just sort of…okay, we see each other, we connected.
April 23rd, 2009 at 7:57 pm #
but I’d say it’s a spiritual thing you’re talking about, except I know that terminology is often even more alienating to a lot of people than “love” (in any sense outside the expected ones).
June 5th, 2009 at 1:44 pm #
hi bfp,
I am writing some curriculum for a program on Self-love, Sisterhood love and Revolutionary love for young women of color. Would it be okay if I quoted parts of this post as part of the curriculum?
Thanks and much respect!