English · Chapter 44
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Power and Politics is a Language Development unit near the end of the NEB Grade 12 Compulsory English textbook. Its theme is power: who holds it, how it is gained and kept, how it is used and how it is abused. The unit stretches the ordinary meaning of politics beyond parties and parliaments to the politics of everyday relations, including the power that men hold over women, that one race holds over another, and that a dominant group can hold even inside a movement for equality. Around this theme the unit offers a reading text with comprehension work, vocabulary on authority and inequality, a grammar focus, a speaking and listening task, and a piece of argumentative writing.
The reading text of this unit is Audre Lorde's "An Open Letter to Mary Daly" (1979). Lorde was an African American poet, essayist and feminist. Mary Daly was a white radical feminist philosopher whose book Gyn/Ecology Lorde had read with great expectation. The letter is Lorde's response to that book, and it is a text about power inside a movement that claimed to fight power.
Lorde begins warmly. She thanks Daly for sending the book and says she has read it with care, recognising in it much that she agrees with. But she then explains why the book troubled her. When Daly writes about the strength and creativity of women, she draws only on European goddess images and European traditions. The goddesses of Africa, such as Afrekete, Yemanje, Oyo and Mawulisa, never appear as sources of female power. African women enter the book only as victims, in the discussion of genital mutilation, in a section on how women are harmed. Lorde argues that this pattern is not accidental. It repeats an old habit of white thought: non-European women are seen as suffering bodies, never as thinkers, mothers of culture or bearers of wisdom.