Okay, so like everyone else I have Feelings about Flint’s freedom in the darkness speech, and I think I’m finally gonna try to put some of it into words.
I remember the first time I watched it I was just - so incredibly moved, and it resonated so deeply in me… but I also felt like I recognized this? Like it was beautiful but also familiar, as though I already “knew” this and it was just being brought to my attention again.
A couple months ago I finally realized why.
Black Sails is incredible, and I think part of the reason this speech is so powerful to me is because of the ways it relates to Black Feminist theory, specifically Audre Lorde’s essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury” in the book Sister Outsider.
The essay talks about how darkness is not only not bad, but the source of power and possibility. How, through poetry, we can name the feelings and experiences that are within us and which resist the dominant systems and ideologies that oppress marginalized groups. How that which is not valued by european consciousness is what can be most valuable in that resistance.
These are some of the specific lines from Lorde’s essay and Flint’s speech that I feel were really deeply tied together (emphasis mine):
“These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.” (Lorde)
“Because in the darkness, there be dragons.
But it isn’t true.
We can prove that it isn’t true.
In the dark, there is discovery, there is possibility.” (Black Sails)
“[Poetry] is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” (Lorde)
“In the dark, there is discovery, there is possibility.
There is freedom in the dark, once someone has illuminated it.” (Black Sails)
This next section is long but I feel like really matches the speech in a lot of ways, so I broke it into three sections with the matching Black Sails sections underneath (emphasis mine):
“For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men.
“They paint the world full of shadows, and then tell their children to stay close to the light.
Their light. Their reasons, their judgments.
But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power.
Because in the darkness, there be dragons.
But it isn’t true.
We can prove that it isn’t true.
They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare.” (Lorde)
In the dark, there is discovery, there is possibility.
There is freedom in the dark, once someone has illuminated it.” (Black Sails)
I just - when I first read this essay several years ago I remember feeling like I didn’t fully understand it, and yet being deeply moved by it, a visceral feeling in the bottom of my chest. Flint’s speech moved me in much the same way. We owe so much to Black Feminism, and although I doubt Jonathan Steinberg and Robert Levine were thinking of Audre Lorde when they wrote the speech, I find the connections between them really meaningful.
I didn’t find a way to connect this to Flint’s speech, but I think of this quote from “Poetry is Not a Luxury” a lot, and so I’ll leave it here (emphasis mine):
“The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.” (Lorde)
You can read the essay here (I know it’s a genius.com link but I couldn’t find anything else that was accessible without some kind of university credentials).
I also wrote a short post on Audre Lorde and this essay for this feminist research instagram account.
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