| Title | : | The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Masters House |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0241339723 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780241339725 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 64 |
| Publication | : | First published February 22, 2018 |
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.
The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Masters House Reviews
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You can tell from the title this is going to be a good one. It’s made up of different essays though, so let me talk about them individually.
Poetry is Not A Luxury – I’d read this one before. I would clarify that it isn’t the beginning and end all of all poetry, but it does describe one of the ways in which I perceive poetry. I could totally relate and agree with her! It really moved me to read about why poetry isn’t a luxury for some people, and what it could mean to them.
Use of Erotic – A well written embrace of female beauty and self. I’ve never read such a clear cut distinction between the definitions of erotic and pornographic before.
The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House – This one was about why we need difference feminism and not equality feminism. It also discussed how there can’t be racism and homophobia in feminism as it then doesn’t include all women. It really begged the question of why some people believe in fighting certain types of oppression and then oppress others. I loved when she talked about how the tools used to given to us by those oppressing help us overcome the issue. It is only serving their superiority complex. We must use our own tools to overcome oppression. And I agreed so much.
Uses of Anger – Can I get an amen to this whole essay? It was about women responding to racism, and how racism is not an issue black people need to solve. It’s not their problem. It’s a problem to those who enact and enable it to happen. It really was about how anger can be channelled and used for good as well, which made me think of Children of Blood and Bone.
This review was originally posted on Olivia's Catastrophe:
https://oliviascatastrophe.com/2019/0... -
“Revolution is not a one-time event”
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''Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses...''
It's a short collection of 5 excellent essays. -
though only a tiny essay collection, this one packs a fierce and impactful punch, largely focusing on feminism, racism, and sexuality. lorde places an emphasis on intersectionalism, particularly through sharing insights from her life as a woman of colour, a lesbian, and a mother - and how all of these have an impact on her feminism. one of the biggest takeaways is lorde’s argument that progress cannot happen unless we recognise, understand, and support each other’s differences in experience, along with the reminder that “revolution is not a one-time event”.
other standout quotes:
“i am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. and i am not free as long as one person or colour remains chained. nor is any one of you.”
“within each of us there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust.”
everyone should read this. -
I can’t recommend Audre Lorde strongly enough😌
So glad she has been included in this collection because she should be much more well-known than she is -
i need to read everything audre lorde has ever written, this was brilliant
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I mean. What is there to say. Should be compulsary reading for everyone. Yeah.
(I will not rate this. Because that feels like a toddler with her first crayons attempting to compliment Van Gogh.) -
A collection of powerful speeches Lorde made in the late 70s and early 80s on racism, poetry and feminism, lasering in on issues surrounding Black women. Lorde was a brilliant pioneer whose insights inspired a generation of writers and activists - each piece is relevant today.
Penguin Modern Classics
#1 - Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr.
#2 - Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber by Allen Ginsberg
#3 - The Breakthrough by Daphne Du Maurier
#4 - The Custard Heart by Dorothy Parker
#5 - Three Japanese Short Stories (3 authors)
#6 - The Veiled Woman by Anais Nin
#7 - Notes on Nationalism by George Orwell
#8 - Food by Gertrude Stein
#9 - The Three Electroknights by Stanislaw Lem
#10 - The Great Hunger by Patrick Kavanagh
#11 - The Legend of the Sleepers by Danilo Kis
#12 - The Black Ball by Ralph Ellison
#13 - Till September Petronella by Jean Rhys
#14 - Investigations of a Dog by Franz Kafka
#15 - Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady by Clarice Lispector
#16 - An Advertisement for Toothpaste by Ryszard Kapuscinski
#17 - Create Dangerously by Albert Camus
#18 - The Vigilante by John Steinbeck
#19 - I Have More Souls than One by Fernando Pessoa
#20 - The Missing Girl by Shirlely Jackson
#21 - Gazdanov & Others
#22 - The Distance of the Moon by Italo Calvino
#23 - The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House by Audre Lord -
"If I participate, knowingly or otherwise, in my sister's oppression and she calls me on it, to answer her anger with my own only blankets the substance of our exchange with reaction. It wastes energy."
"What woman here is so enamoured of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman's face?"
I haven't read enough intersectional texts (anyone who wants to recommend any, do comment), and this short series of essays only brought into focus the social media culture of debating our differences without seeing them through as possibilities of change. What is the point of debating our personal oppressions and priveleges and calling others out when we cannot use these for change? Can't wait to read more of Lorde. -
Audre Lorde:
Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to address each other's difference with respect.
Terry Pratchett:But here's some advice, boy. Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions.
Really makes you think, huh?
This is five essays by Audre Lorde, ranging in topic from poetry to racism, but really all overlapping.POETRY IS NOT A LUXURY (1985) - 4/5
"The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless [...]. For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives."
This is a really beautiful essay—quite short, but almost poetry itself.USES OF THE EROTIC (1978) - 2/5
"The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling. [...] I find more and more women-identified women brave enough to risk sharing the erotic's electrical charge without having to look away, and without distorting the enormously powerful and creative nature of that exchange. Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama."
I agree with the basic argument of this essay (that women's eroticism has been suppressed and shunned when it's not centred around performing for men), but I don't necessarily agree with her on the statement that the pornographic and erotic are mutually exclusive—the definition of pornography and erotica has varied such over time; you'd really have to narrow down that frame of reference. I also got the sense that Lorde is one of those people who thinks that sex without love is somehow cheaper than sex within in a mutually loving relationship (i.e., fucking your long-term partner is automatically "better" than one-night stands), and I didn't care for that at all.THE MASTER'S TOOLS WILL NEVER DISMANTLE THE MASTER'S HOUSE (1984) - 5/5
"Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support."
This is my favourite argument against violence.THE USES OF ANGER: WOMEN RESPONDING TO RACISM (1981) - 2/5
"Any discussion among women about racism must include the recognition and the use of anger. This discussion must be direct and creative because it is crucial. We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us nor seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty; we must be quite serious about the choice of this topic and the angers entwined within it because, rest assured, our opponents are quite serious about their hatred of us and of what we are trying to do here. [...] This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change."
This is an essay which is really trapped in time, and should be viewed as a product of its time. Of course much of what Lorde says in this essay is unfortunately still relevant, but I think two things—her assertion that "the anger of Black women" is not that which "launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth," and her inflexible division between "white" and "people of colour" (I personally loathe the term person of colour and will never identify as it; I think the use of the dichotomy between "white" and "POC" is simplistic and furthers white supremacist ideals by painting the world as a struggle between those who are white and those who are not, when the reality is much more complicated)—are particularly outdated.LEARNING FROM THE 60s (1982) - 3/5
"As Black people, if there is one thing we can learn from the 60s, it is how infinitely complex any move for liberation must be. For we must move against not only those forces which dehumanize us from the outside, but also against those oppressive values which we have been forced to take into ourselves. Through examining the combination of our triumphs and errors, we can examine the dangers of an incomplete vision. Not to condemn that vision but to alter it, construct templates for possible futures, and focus our rage for change upon our enemies rather than upon each other. In the 1960s, the awakened anger of the Black community was often expressed, not vertically against the corruption of power and true sources of control over our lives, but horizontally toward those closest to us who mirrored our own impotence. [...] A small and vocal part of the Black community lost sight of the fact that unity does not mean unanimity—Black people are not some standardly digestible quantity. In order to work together we do not have to become a mix of indistinguishable particles [...]. Unity implies the coming together of elements which are, to begin with, varied and diverse in their particular natures. Our persistence in examining the tensions within diversity encourages growth toward our common goal. So often we either ignore the past or romanticize it, render the reason for unity useless or mythic. We forget that the necessary ingredient needed to make the past work for the future is our energy in the present, metabolizing one into the other. Continuity does not happen automatically, nor is it a passive process."
I really like this essay. I think it's very important to be able to listen to someone, to say "I hear you," and then to accept that you still have a different opinion from them. Lorde describes how she didn't personally care for Malcolm X and his activism prior to his death, in part because of his policies and in part of his movement's treatment of women; similarly, there's a lot of Audre Lorde's writing that I disagree with, although I recognise her importance to the history of feminism and antiracist action. "The answer to cold is heat, the answer to hunger is food. But there is no simple monolithic solution to racism, to sexism, to homophobia," Lorde says, in this essay. "There is only the conscious focusing within each of my days to move against them." I thought that was well put. -
I adore Audre Lorde, and this small collection reminds me why. Although this initially took me a little bit longer to get into, since I have not read theory in well over a year, parts of this came back to me; whilst dense at times and loaded with some heavy, theoretical ideas, Lorde's writing drew me in and I found myself nodding along to so much in this. So much of what Lorde writes remains true to this day and her judgement and criticisms are as sharp and insightful now as they were when they were first enunciated. I particularly love her insight into what it is like as a WOC, a lesbian and a mother and the way that she touches upon and begins to articulate the idea of intersectionality. I could never hope to match Lorde's eloquence when it comes to feminism but I love falling into Lorde's work and finding the words to justify its existence and why it is necessary.
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One of the most thought-provoking book i've ever read.
RTC. -
In a similar way to James Baldwin's Notes from a Native Son which I read last year, I started reading the first essay in this collection with a sinking feeling that I just didn't have the mental chops to take it all in - I have subsequently been told by friends who have also read Audre Lorde that having to read sentences three times is normal ;) As with the Baldwin though, either the essays became easier to read or I just got accustomed to the writing style and I found myself more and more engaged as they went on to the point that it felt like there was more highlighted text than that left bare!
As such there is way too much in these five short essays to go into detail but they are powerfully and passionately written and utterly relevant to today. Audre Lorde was very aware that feminism was leaving black women behind and that they didn't need guilt or anger against them because of this but listening and for their voices to be heard. She was aware that division is a tool of further oppression because if we are so busy hating one another we can't look to the top where the real problems are. She looks at someone like Malcolm X, how his vision changed and how it could be capitalized on in the 1980's, how putting passion, 'the erotic' and creativity back into life after having it suppressed would empower black people and how as a black, lesbian female her fight to be heard had to be fought on three fronts. There is so much more in this little book but needless to say you should go out and read it for yourself. -
It's astonishing the impact a tiny volume of 50 pages can have. Every intellectual, aspiring or abiding, who ever had the idea of going into academia to effect just and lasting change should read this. On this question, Audre Lorde makes her stance abundantly clear:
"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those who still define the master's house as their only source of support."
As an intellectual, I find this endlessly profound. Lorde is not telling me to stop being an intellectual. Rather, her essays are a poignant reminder that academia is and always will be a bourgeois institution. No amount of decolonization, equity, diversity, and inclusion can change this material and historical fact. To effect genuine change, intellectuals must look and go beyond the academy—to the streets, to the toiling masses. There is no other way. -
fantastic essay collection! i didn't know about lorde's work, but i'll look for more stuff from her for sure.
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"Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to address each other's difference with respect."
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This is a collection of five essays by Audre Lorde. All of the essays were powerful, but my favorite was "Learning from the 1960s." It stresses the need for people to work together to create social change, which is a message that a lot of people need to hear these days.
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Classic case of "It's not you, it's me". I couldn't get into the essays, I felt that there were too many ideas and no clear point so I was lost most of the time.
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5 starts for writing
5 starts for content
and a freaking billion starts for blowing my mind!! -
This book should be read by everyone, and I mean everyone. It's so important, it holds such important arguments, and it's on the topic of racism, homophobia, sexism and ableism from the 1960's to the 1990's.
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Wow.
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Not an easy read for me but I loved it.
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Here is my full review:
http://icthusbookcorner.com/2021/02/0... -
This collection of 'soaring, urgent essays on the power of women, poetry and anger' was my first taste of Audre Lorde's writing. The majority of the essays collected here were first given as conference papers between 1978 and 1982. The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House includes the titular work, as well as 'Poetry is Not a Luxury', 'Uses of the Erotic', 'Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism', and 'Learning From the 1960s'. Throughout, Lorde writes with confidence and intelligence. The 23rd Penguin Modern is an accessible book, which explores feminism and the issues which it poses for minority women, and those whose identify as anything other than heterosexual. Lorde weaves in elements of black history and lesbianism. Each of these essays is thought-provoking, and I would definitely like to read more of her work in the near future.
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A couple of essays that are worth while.
They are concentrated on subjects concerning feminism and racism. Perhaps this description of mine niches them too much.
I lack this author`s power at rendering subects that may seem to concern just the minority as a real problem that has to worry the majority, too. She points the cracks in the society not to wedge them into valleys, but to invite the readers into finding a solution that goes to mend them.
Her call to unity is polished by the assurance that unity does not mean uniformity, it does not mean losing one`s individual traits.
“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”
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This was my first time reading Audre Lorde, and this collection of excerpts from different essays is a perfect glimpse to her writing world, with each sentence sharp, insightful and thought provoking. Recommended to those who wants to read about feminism, anti racist politics and intersectionality.
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This is a really nice introduction piece!
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A powerful collection of essays that dive deep into the actualities of black feminism, racism and sexuality. Audre Lorde writes with passion and it was such a pleasure to read and educate myself more about topics that are important to our society and future.
“I was one of the ones who didn’t really hear Malcom’s voice until it was amplified by death”. -
Interesting short collection of essays that makes a very good introduction to the style and ideas of Lorde. I will be searching more of hers.
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Some short essays were better than others and interested me more, which explains the 4 stars. There were some very interesting ideas in here, especially on intersectionality. I definitely want to try and read more by Audre Lorde, even though I was already struggling with some of these essays.
