Yet another person, I think, finding Audre Lorde intense and beautiful and amazing and reading it and saying hell yes, this and this and this…

I think this will just be a long old collection of quotes. Because they are amazing, and you can never have too many quotes, right? This is my own treasure to delve back into when I need some anger or some love or some wisdom. But it is also yours. Audre Lorde’s gift to us. These will resonate with me the rest of my days, and I hope to think through many of them more deeply through my writing over time.

Because everything she says about breaking silence, both the necessity and the fear and the vulnerability, it’s all true.

From ‘The transformation of Silence into Language and Action’

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. (40)

And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger…We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters are wasted, while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we still be no less afraid.  (42)

The fact that we are here and that I speak these words us an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of these differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken. (44)

From ‘Poetry is not a Luxury’

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has different bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are — until the poem — nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding. (36)

Some important definitions from ‘Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving’:

Racism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance.

Sexism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one sex and thereby the right to dominance.

Heterosexism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one pattern of loving and thereby its right to dominance.

Homophobia: The fear of feelings of love for members of one’s own sex and therefore the hatred of those feelings in others.

The above forms of human blindness stem from the same root — an inability to recognize the notion of difference as a dynamic human force, one which is enriching rather than threatening to the defined self, when there are shared goals. (45)

For it is through the coming together of self-actualized individuals, female and male, that any real advance can be made. The old sexual power relationships based on a dominant/subordinate model between unequals has not served us as a people, nor as individuals. (46)

From ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’:

The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference. (56)

(How fucking lovely this is as a way to understand the erotic.)

From ‘An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich’

Audre:…And I remember trying when I was in high school not to think in poems. Isaw the way other people thought, and it was an amazement to me — step by step, not in bubbles up from chaos that you had to anchor with words… (83)

Audre:.. When I wrote something that finally had it, I would say it aloud and it would come alive, become real. It would start repeating itself and I’d know, that’s struck, that’s true. Like a bell. Something struck true. And there the words would be. (88)

Audre: The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot. (98)

ohhhhhh, could I teach like that? If only I could, if only I can…

Audre: Once you live any piece of your vision it opens to you a constant onslaught. Of necessities, of horrors, but of wonders too, of possibilities. … Of wonders, absolute wonders, possibilities, like meteor showers all the time, bombardment, constant connections. (107-108)

From ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’ — a title that says it all really.

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support. (112)

From ‘Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference’

Much of Western European history conditions us to see human differences in simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down, superior/inferior. In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior. Within this society, that group is made up of Black and Third World people, working-class people, older people, and women. (114)

But Black women and our children know the fabric of our lives is stitched with violence and with hatred, that there is no rest. We do not deal with it only on the picket lines, or in dark midnight alleys, or in the places where we dare to verbalize our resistance. For us, increasingly, violence weaves through the daily tissues of our living — in the supermarket, in the classroom, in the elevator, in the clinic and the schoolyard, from the plumber, the baker, the saleswoman, the bus driver, the bank teller, the waitress who does not serve us.

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying. (119)

I love this discourse on violence, acknowledgment that what we face is not all the same. I also love the call out to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

I need to read some more poetry — I have so much poetry to read:

 We have chosen each other
and the edge of each others battles
the war is the same
if we lose
someday women’s blood will congeal
upon a dead planet
if we win
there is no telling
we seek beyond history
for a new and more possible meeting.

From ‘The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism’

I love acknowledging the need for anger, the benefit of anger, the right to anger. Hell yes.

My response to racism is anger

Women responding to racism means women responding to anger; the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation.

My anger is a response to racist attitutudes and to teh actions and presumptions that arise out of those attitudes…I have used learning to express anger for my growth. But for corrective surgery, not guilt. Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures. (124)

We are not here as women examining racism is a political and social vacuum. We operate in the teeth of a system for which racism and sexism are primary, established, and necessary props of profit. (128)

This…being poor teaches you a little of this, but not all of this, not the depth of this. Racism always wielded like a knife cutting away, always cutting whether superficially or deep. So many cuts, so many years…it stops mattering.

Women of Color in america have grown up within a symphony of anger, at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing that when we survive, it is in spite of a world that takes for granted our very existence outside of its service. And I say symphony rather than cacophony because we have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so that they do not tear us apart. We have had to learn to move through them and use them for strength and force and insight within our daily lives. Those of us who did not learn this difficult lesson did not survive. And part of my anger is always libation for my fallen sisters. (129)

The power of anger as a positive force, one that brings transformation

But the strength of women lies in recognizing differences between us as creative, and in standing to those distortions which we inherited without blame, but which are now ours to alter. The angers of women can transform different through insight into power. For anger between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth. (131)

from ‘Learning from the 60s’ (and there is a lot to learn)

MALCOLM X is a distinct shape in a very pivotal period of my life. I stand here now – Black, Lesbian, Feminist – an inheritor of Malcolm and in his tradition, doing my work, and the ghost of his voice through my mouth asks each one of you here tonight: Are you doing yours? (134)

As Black people, if there is one thing we can learn from the 60s, it is how infinitely complex any move for liberation must be. For we must move against not only those forces which dehumanize us from the outside, but also against those oppressive values which we have been forced to take into ourselves. Through examining the combination of our triumphs and errors, we can examine the dangers of an incomplete vision. Not to condemn that vision but to alter it, construct templates for possible futures, and focus our rage for change upon our enemies rather than upon each other. In the 1960s, the awakened anger of the Black community was often expressed, not vertically against the corruption of power and true sources of control over our lives, but horizontally toward those closest to us who mirrored our own impotence. (135)

And this and again this:

You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness. (142)

From ‘Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger’

There is a distinction I am beginning to make in my living between pain and suffering. Pain is an event, an experience that must be recognized, named, and then used in some way in order for the experience to change, to be transformed into something else, strength or knowledge or action.

Suffering on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain. (171)

So much wisdom here, I could do a post on each. Maybe I will.