Adrienne Rich — Hunger

(-for Audre Lorde) 1. A fogged hill-scene on an enormous continent, intimacy rigged with terrors, a sequence of blurs the Chinese painter's ink-stick planned, a scene of desolation comforted by two human figures recklessly exposed, leaning together in a sticklike boat in the foreground. Maybe we look like this, I don't know. I'm wondering whether we even have what we think we have-- lighted windows signifying shelter, a film of domesticity over fragile roofs. I know I'm partly somewhere else-- huts strung across a drought-stretched land not mine, dried breasts, mine and not mine, a mother watching my children shrink with hunger. I live in my Western skin, my Western vision, torn and flung to what I can't control or even fathom. Quantify suffering, you could rule the world. 2. They *can* rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order. Is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide, if a black lesbian dies, if a white prostitute dies, if a woman genius starves herself to feed others, self-hatred battening on her body? Something that kills us or leaves us half-alive is raging under the name of an "act of god" in Chad, in Niger, in teh Upper Volta-- yes, that male god that acts on us and on our children, that male State that acts on us and on our children till our brains are blunted by malnutritiou, yet sharpened by the passion for survival, our powers expended daily on the struggle to hand a kind of life on to our children, to change reality for our lovers even in a single trembling drop of water. 3. We can look at each other through both our lifetimes like those two figures in the sticklike boat flung together in the Chinese ink-scene; even our intimacies are rigged with terror. Quantify suffering? My guilt at least is open, I stand convicted by all my convictions-- you, too. We shrink from touching our power, we shrink away, we starve ourselves and each otehr, we're scared shitless of what it could be to take and use our love, hose it on a city, on a world, to wield and guide its spray, destroying poisons, parasites, rats, viruses-- like the terrible mothers we long and dread to be. 4. The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free. I choke on the taste of bread in North America but the taste of hunger in North America is poisoning me. Yes, I'm alive to write these words, to leaf through Kollwitz's women huddling the stricken children into their stricken arms the "mothers" drained of milk, the "survivors" driven to self-abortion, self-starvation, to a vision bitter, concrete, and wordless. I'm alive to want more than life, want it for others starving and unborn, to name the deprivations boring into my will, my affections, into the brains of daughters, sisters, lovers caught in the crossfire of terrorists of the mind. In the black mirror of the subway window hangs my own face, hollow with anger and desire. Swathed in exhaustion, on the trampled newsprint, a woman shields a dead child from the camera. The passion to be inscribes her body. Until we find each other, we are alone.