The Magic Circle: Self-Care as an Act of Political Warfare
Audre Lorde’s mother told her of a spiced island named Carriacou just off the coast of Grenada where she had grown up; an island of powerful women who loved one another because all the men had left to go sea-faring; an island whose mysterious power emanated, to young Audre in cold winter Harlem, from the nutmeg, cinnamon, guava jelly, vanilla bean and cocoa that arrived from there in a tin every Christmas.
"Carriacou which was not listed in the index of the Goode's School Atlas nor in the Junior Americana World Gazette nor appeared on any map that I could find, and so when I hunted for the magic place during geography lessons or in free library time, I never found it, and came to believe my mother's geography was a fantasy or crazy… But underneath it all as I was growing up, home was still a sweet place somewhere else which they had not managed to capture yet on paper, nor to throttle and bind up between the pages of a schoolbook. It was our own, my truly private paradise of blugoe and breadfruit hanging from the trees, of nutmeg and lime and sapadilla, of tonka beans and red and yellow Paradise Plums.” Zami (1982).
This heady mixture of forgotten history, fantasy and sensuality would become for Audre Lorde the definition of home; she who “grew up feeling like an only planet, or some isolated world in a hostile, or at best, unfriendly, firmament” was shown early on by her mother the magic doorway into a realm out of time.
I think this is as good a definition of home as you are liable to find. Home as the pleasure-ego, as they say in my field, where a magic circle has been made to separate everything pleasurable from everything terrible. This happens automatically and unconsciously and at a very early age—in which pleasure becomes the ego, and everything unpleasurable becomes the world—but it forms a limit that persists in the act of homemaking. In this regard home is a ritual space—whether you know you are performing a ritual or not. You perform an act of practical magic every time you come home and shut the front door. To light candles and smudge yourself in sweetgrass only aids the ritual.
Audre Lorde has famously described this ritual as self-care. Self-care is basically a bad word these days and we have come a long way since ten years ago when Audre’s notion that self-care is an act of political warfare blew up on handbags and the internet. But the magic circle is less Goop than voodoo, less self-indulgence than self-defense. It is a mode of self-preservation and psychic-survival, a ritual means to ward off the psychological oppression of the dominating culture at large.
If, for example, the repressive state apparatus means to instill fear and despair in your heart with the aim that you would cower, give-up, or go insane, then to practice the ritual art of the magic circle is to give yourself and your family space to dream, where for a moment you are invulnerable to all the ambient oppression. In this private way you remain undefeated, ensconced on a tropical island that is made more from fantasy, dreams and enchantment than from any possessions or architecture.
Audre and her mother, 1946
The Great Beauty, 2020-2023, Chris Ofili
