The Magic Circle: Self-Care as an act of Political Warfare
Audre Lorde’s mother told her of a magic 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 Audre in cold winter Harlem, from the nutmeg, cinnamon, guava jelly, vanilla bean and cocoa that arrived from there neatly placed 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 very definition of home; she who “grew up feeling like an only planet, or some isolated world in a hostile, or at best, unfriendly, firmament” learned early on from her mother the magic spell to create a space for herself and in herself.
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 unpleasurable. This happens automatically and at a very young age, it is the magic circle of the defensive ego after all, but likewise it is a particular kind of magic that can be learned and praticed. Home is a ritual space—whether you know you are performing a ritual or not. To know the ritual is to perfect it.
It is a ritual that is otherwise known in Audre Lorde’s cosmogony, as self-care. Self-care is almost a dirty word these days and we have come along way since ten years ago when Audre’s notion that self-care is an act of political warfare blew up in the memespace. But this is less goop than grimoir, less self indulgence than self-defense. It is a mode of self-preservation and survival, a ritual means to ward off the psychological oppression of the dominant 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 significant others, space where, for a moment, you are invulnerable to all the ambient psychic-oppression increasing by the minute. In this private way you remain undefeated, ensconced on a tropical island that is made more from fantasy, sensuality and enchantment than from any possessions or architecture.
The Great Beauty, 2020-2023, Chris Ofili
