Multiplicity and Definition as Metaphor

"There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself--whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc.--because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else. But once you do that, then you've lost because then you become acquired or bought by that particular essence of yourself, and you've denied yourself all of the energy that it takes to keep all those others in jail. Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat. You know how fighting fish do it? They blow bubbles and in each one of those bubbles is an egg and they float the egg up to the surface. They keep this whole heavy nest of eggs floating, and they're constantly repairing it. It's as if they live in both elements. That's something that we have to do, too, in our own lives--keep it all afloat. It's possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we'll make it. But the question is a matter of the survival and the teaching. That's what our work comes down to. No matter where we key into it, it's the same work, just different pieces of ourselves doing it."
Hammond, Carla M. "Audre Lorde: Interview." Denver Quarterly 16.1 (1981): 10-27.

I love this. In an earlier conversation today I questioned the manufacturing of hierarchies of the heart that create a sort of trench warfare mentality. Who creates the decision to love X, Y, or Z only and exclusively as opposed to trying to nurture a sustainable center within yourself that loves equally and with equity? Is this even possible to truly defy categories of differentiation, particularly when "love" is involved? Can you see in your child, the face of any child and all children, even those that have hurt yours or caused yours to suffer? Can you see in your partner or spouse, the love of any and all humanity, extending well beyond the personal
confines of your home, your ideology, your morality and yes, the politics of your bedroom?
Think about how love changes when the person you are with admits cheating on you? Are you still able to love that person in the same way as you did when you didn't know? How too, could you "relate" to another who doesn't have anything in common with you, other than the fact that they are a human being? Where then shall you form your common language? Can you imagine a time in which you learn to harness the power of the words used against you, used to divide and conquer you and rather than reacting, act to reclaim them for the empowerment and validation of all? Just imagine how different things might be.