Re-visioning
5 books from back then for right now
In her 1971 essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision,” Adrienne Rich writes about living through an “awakening of the dead” that is affecting “the lives of millions of women, even those who don’t know it yet.” She writes that this era of awakening “is also affecting the lives of men, even those who deny its claims upon them,” and predicts that arguments will continue about whether our “oppressive class system is responsible for the oppressive nature of male/female relationship, or whether, in fact, patriarchy… is the original model of oppression on which all others are based.”
The point of the essay, however, is to encourage the practice of looking back in order to look forward— the critical work of re-visioning old texts with a new direction and focus. “Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves,” she writes.
“We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us,” Rich says.
She writes about “the challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography to be explored” but also “the difficult and dangerous walking on the ice, as we try to find language and images for a consciousness we are just coming into.” Sound familiar?
The other day, I spoke with a trusted colleague who said aloud something I’ve been thinking about nearly every day for the past decade: we often think we’re having new arguments, but in fact, so many of the conversations and disagreements we are having today have been had before.
Right now, we’re all so busy wracking our brain for answers, it can be easy to forget that the answers have been with us a very long time. We just haven’t listened carefully enough, or together, or read them with our new direction in mind.
In this spirit, here are 5 books I’m revisiting to make sense of the now. These are all theoretical texts, but next week I’ll share literature and maybe we’ll do art books and/or poetry next. I’d love for you all to share your own recommendations, too. I think this might be exactly what we need right now (and perhaps we’ll get some good gift ideas too).