Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems

by Audre Lorde

From The Guardian. Oct. 4, 2017. R.O. Kwon

"Lorde seems prophetic, perhaps alive right now, writing in and about the US of 2017 in which a misogynist with white supremacist followers is president. But she was born in 1934, published her first book of poetry in 1968, and died in 1992. Black, lesbian and feminist; the child of immigrant parents; poet and essayist, writer and activist, Lorde knew about harbouring multitudes. Political antagonists tried, for instance, to discredit her among black students by announcing her sexuality, and she decided: “The only way you can head people off from using who you are against you is to be honest and open first, to talk about yourself before they talk about you.” Over and over again, in the essays, speeches and poems collected in Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Lorde emphasises how important it is to speak up. To give witness: “What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?” '

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Feminism, Essays, Race, Politics, Queer

229 pages, Paperback

First published October 2, 2017

About the author

Audre Lorde was a revolutionary Black feminist. Lorde's poetry was published very regularly during the 1960s — in Langston Hughes' 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in several foreign anthologies; and in black literary magazines. During this time, she was politically active in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements. Her first volume of poetry, The First Cities (1968), was published by the Poet's Press and edited by Diane di Prima, a former classmate and friend from Hunter College High School. Dudley Randall, a poet and critic, asserted in his review of the book that Lorde "does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit, in the bone."

Her second volume, Cables to Rage (1970), which was mainly written during her tenure at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, addressed themes of love, betrayal, childbirth and the complexities of raising children. It is particularly noteworthy for the poem "Martha", in which Lorde poetically confirms her homosexuality: "[W]e shall love each other here if ever at all." Later books continued her political aims in lesbian and gay rights, and feminism. In 1980, together with Barbara Smith and Cherríe Moraga, she co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher for women of colour. Lorde was State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992.

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Reviews

[leynes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Instead of talking about the things I liked and disliked about Lorde’s essays and poetry, I thought it would be much more valuable and useful to share five things that Lorde has taught me.

I - Your Silence Will Not Protect You!
Lorde’s approach to activism and transforming one’s silence into language and action deeply impressed me. Speaking out and speaking up are common themes when it comes to feminism and activism, however, Lorde’s take on the matter is unique, since she doesn’t base her arguments on the target state (= speaking out), she starts with the actual state (= our current silence).

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

Whatever the costs of speaking out, the costs of not speaking out will always be too high: as Lorde reminds us, racism and sexism take lives. Immediately, Ta-Nehisi’s words come to mind: racism is a visceral experience, it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth.

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. […] And it is never without fear - of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgement, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death.

When it comes to speaking out, Lorde just tells it how it is. Speaking out is not easy, will never be easy. It is risky and dangerous and fucking scary, but so is living in silence. So, let’s all boss up and try to create some change with the means at our disposal: our voices.

II - Take No One’s Shit!
Lorde really wasn’t fucking around when it came to letting out her anger and calling other people out on their bullshit. I admire her bravery in the face of adversity and that she didn’t shy away from addressing how white-washed a lot of the feminist conventions/panels were that she was invited to attend. She never failed to address the lack of Black female speakers and attendees.

III - The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House!
Audre Lorde’s much quoted sentence is a reminder that feminism is both a dismantling project and a building project. We have to make our own tools if we are to bring that house down. Not to use the master’s tools, to build with our own hands, is how we learn not to reproduce the same old of canons that render white men the originators of knowledge.

In Lorde’s hands, the destructive project of dismantling structures of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy is at the same time a creative project.

It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. 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.

As Malcolm stressed, we are not responsible for our oppression, but we must be responsible for our own liberation.

IV - You Are Not Alone!
It may feel as if you’re shouting into the void, but you’re actually joining a chorus. There are things we have to say again and again, because no matter how often we say them, there will always be an effort to cover them up. Just like Lorde said: There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.

V - Say My Name!
Audre Lorde teaches us that introducing ourselves matters; naming yourself, saying who you are, making clear your values, concerns, and commitments, matters. Audre Lorde: writer, activist, poet, mother, warrior, lesbian, black, woman, feminist, socialist, teacher, librarian. You will learn things about Audre Lorde from Aurde Lorde. She always took the risk of naming herself and of asserting her existence in a world that made her existence difficult.


Audre Lorde is a remarkable woman. I don’t agree with everything she had to say, but there is so much that I can learn from her. I will always appreciate and admire her strength, her resilience, her bravery when it came to speaking out and standing up for herself and her people when no one else would.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know I will return to this over and over. My copy is littered with colourful tabs. I could quote pretty much the whole book. This is powerful, essential reading.

It makes me so angry and heartbroken that Lorde's writing (all of it - poetry and prose) is still so relevant and necessary in 2018. By this measure, it feels like we really haven't progressed much at all since the 70s and 80s when she published these pieces.
---
"I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own."

"Woman of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of colour to educate white women - in the face of tremendous resistance - as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought."

"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 why they are dying."

"Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in uncomfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them go hungry to bed at night."

[Cherisa B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stunning voice.

From the essay Scratching the Surface, simple yet powerful truth.

The distortion of relationship which says “I disagree with you, so I must destroy you” leaves us as Black people with basically uncreative victories, defeated in any common struggle. This jugular vein psychology is based on the fallacy that your assertion or affirmation of self is an attack upon my self - or that my defining myself will somehow find prevent or retard your self-definition.

[Arya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do not pretend to convenient beliefs
even when they are righteous
you will never be able to defend your city
while shouting


Why are we not given Audre Lorde to read, she should be on all the reading lists. I could read her forever. This collection brings together several essays and poems Lorde wrote throughout her life, exploring identity, race, gender, sexuality, and the hope for a continuous and persistent revolution. There is no way to convey exactly the response Lorde elicits through her writing - the only option is to read her for yourself and feel . In the interest of promoting her work, however, I will run you through a few of my favourite, most thought-provoking instances (if only I could list them all, but I’d end up writing out the entire book lol)


In ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’, Lorde talks about the vilification of female sexuality, the suppression of eroticism within us all, as well as its bastardisation into its fundamental opposite, pornography. She writes:

The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticised sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic’ which is a ‘direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling’ ... ‘sensation without feeling

We must learn once again to trust our non-rational power, she insists, and examine the depth of feeling within ourselves rather than in the service of men.

In ‘Love Poem’, she writes:
Speak earth and bless me with what is richest
make sky flow honey out of my hips
rigid as mountains
spread over a valley
carved out by the mouth of rain.


She becomes more vulnerable and visceral and angry still (and anger, she reminds us, is useful where hatred is not) when she writes on race and homophobia. These are standout works among her very best: ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, ‘The Uses of Anger: Responding to Racism’ and ‘Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred and Anger’.

She writes about intersectionality (before the term was even coined), white feminism, challenging the idea, the fear and the excuse that ‘to talk about divisions is to create them’. Bullshit, she says, and she’s absolutely right. She asks a question which I think is particularly relevant today:

how come you haven’t educated yourselves about Black women and the differences between us - white and Black - when it is key to our survival as a movement?

The answer is usually something along the lines of ‘I didn’t know who to ask’ and ‘I didn’t know where to look’. Look here. Look to Audre Lorde, and the plethora of easily accessible sources we have today (Google exists!!) I have to stop now or I’ll just keep going, so I’ll leave you one of my favourite lines and my reiteration that you must read her work:

there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love

[natàlia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This felt incredibly healing, inspiring and powerful. A book to which I will go back several times. A borrowed home.

[Artemis Crescent · Rating 5 out of 5]

You need this in your life. Right now.

One of the most well-written, thought-provoking, passionate, solid and vital voices I have read in a long time. It is heavy reading, but trust me when I say that you will not want to miss a single word.

Every page of Audre Lorde's essays and poems is quotable. Everything collected in 'Your Silence Will Not Protect You' speaks so many truths today, and they were written in the '70s and '80s. Lorde says go straight to hell with your angry black woman stereotype - something needs to be done now. To change the patriarchal white supremacist heterosexist classist system in America, never to return using a new name.

Because in reality, nothing much has changed since the '70s. Black people, queer people, women, black women and other women of colour are still widely being treated as second class citizens, and their lives are even put in danger in insidious, toxic, suffocating, barely-invisible ways, just for existing. Replace the guns that white cops use to kill black people in the 20th and 21st centuries with whips that were used on slaves: the system does keep finding ways to preserve itself.

We are not yet free.

We can't let this go on any further. Lasting progress must be made, for literally everyone's survival. Speak up, let your voice be heard. Use your anger - your passion for justice - to your advantage. For the white supremacist heterosexist classist patriarchy wants you to suffer and die whether you are passive and silent or not.

'Your Silence Will Not Protect You' talks about intersectional feminism - it's one of the first works to discuss it - and how feminism without it is self-defeating and helping the patriarchy. It goes into great detail the dangers of internalized misogyny, especially among black women, and how powerful and natural and goddess-like sisterhood is. It's a power for affecting change in society, so no wonder the patriarchy is scared to death of it and so will try everything to pit women against themselves; thus the origin of the myth that all women are natural enemies and rivals for one another, and hate each other as much as men do.

Lorde's essays are about women supporting women, as well as self-care, expressing emotions and the dangers of suppressing them, raising feminist sons, male fragility, white fragility or the "white guilt" excuse, undoing the patriarchal system without using its methods ('The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House'), among other topics.

Above all, 'Your Silence Will Not Protect You' is about how important it is for humanity to work together, to love one another indiscriminately, healthily, in order to achieve universal freedom. No more class, race, sex, and sexuality divides, for everyone is equal.

While Audre Lorde doesn't mention trans people, and this is the only lacking feature in this collection, I appreciate that she mentions the Jewish community a couple of times. As a black lesbian mother of the '60s, '70s and 80's, every day was a dangerous risk for her, especially in speaking out in public, but she never gave up.

As brave and massively inspiring as Lorde was, she was only trying to survive in a society that hated her existence. She used her anger creatively, by writing poetry, essays and speeches. She will not be denied her freedom to exist in America.

Notable additions in Lorde's writing include: that narcissism doesn't come from self-love, but self-hatred. That is very interesting. That what is "erotic" is much more positive than we give it credit for (meditation, confidence and self-esteem in body, mind and spirit voila 'Women Who Run with the Wolves'). And that there is a difference between pain and suffering. There is much you can learn from this amazing, revolutionary, unapologetic black lesbian feminist.

If you have never heard of the late great Audre Lorde until now, read 'Your Silence Will Not Protect You' as soon as possible. Decades later, it can still enrich and save lives. The essays could have been written yesterday, they are that timely.

Some of the fountains of quotes from this fantastic woman:



“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. When I live through pain without recognizing it self-consciously, I rob myself of the power that can come from using that pain, the power to fuel some movement beyond it. I condemn myself to reliving that pain over and over and over whenever something close triggers it. And that is suffering, a seemingly inescapable cycle.”


“As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibility of it within themselves. So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters.”


“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 systematised oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the space of the dehumanised inferior.”


“I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.

I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.

Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end."


“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”


“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”


“Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.”


“There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”


“Revolution is not a one time event.”


“Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.”


“Without community, there is no liberation.”



Read more to find out more. We all need the wisdom of Lorde's passionate, FEELING words.

Final Score: 5/5

[Aly Lauck · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.”

Powerful reminder to keep advocating and speaking out for the marginalized and at-risk population.

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Audre Lorde - come si autodefiniva - era una donna nera, lesbica, socialista, madre, guerriera, poeta. Nel nostro mondo, qualunque di questi attributi bastava a isolarla, emarginarla, opprimerla. Prima ancora che il termine intersezionalità venisse coniato, Lorde parlava già di come le battaglie di chi, non essendo maschio bianco etero occidentale di classe agiata, in qualche modo si intersechino, e rivoltarci l'un* contro l'altr* non fa che il gioco del sistema capitalista patriarcale bianco suprematista.

Questa raccolta presenta alcune delle poesie e dei saggi più illuminanti (e fulminanti) dell'autrice: fra i temi più intensamente sentiti (perché vissuti) ci sono l'urgenza da parte del subalterno/oppresso di avere una voce propria, di parlarsi e non essere parlato e categorizzato dall'oppressore, per rendere visibile attraverso la parola la propria realtà; ma anche e soprattutto l'urgenza di instaurare una vera sorellanza tra donne nere, doppiamente alterizzate, la cui solidarietà interna è costantemente minacciata e impedita da conflitti intestini tra le due appartenenze di genere e razzializzazione.

Lorde non fa filosofia in senso stretto, ma le sue riflessioni svelano mondi. Non si tratta neanche di elevare il personale all'universale, quanto piuttosto di illuminare qualcosa che va a conficcarsi dritto dritto lì dove riponiamo la coscienza e le strutture cognitive che ci aiutano a dare senso al mondo, e le scuote come fossero canne di bambù.

Fortemente necessaria.

[Bookish Bethany · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Revolution is not a one time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest oppertunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses [...] it is learning to address each other's differences with respect"

Everyone should read this book. It seethes with power, anger, love, the fight against oppression. Lorde emphasizes the fight towards a better future of togetherness that does not ignore the brutalities of the past or the brutalities against black women by white men who call them 'holy mothers' or powerhouses and forget their own place in history. This book shakes all preconceptions, Audre Lorde is one of the most important teachers to have emerged from America. She still teaches - through her poetry, her essays, her small memoirs. Wow.

In this collection of essays, talks and poetry no-one is held unaccountable. She speaks of the real horrors black people, specifically black women, faced in a system that treated them as expendable, unworthy and less than their white counterparts (of course, this is happening in the present tense too). Lorde speaks of the people that refuse to 'see colour' and therefore trivialize the suffering of POC who have been used and marginalised. Refusing to see colour silences the pain of those who have suffered. She handles everything with magnificent understanding and a righteous anger (highlighting the difference bt. anger and violence): sexual assault, raising children alone in a hostile environment, being homosexual in a world that benefits and pushes heterosexuality for economic and supposed moral gain.

This is a book for all. Lorde is an incredible teacher, she teaches us to harness our creativity and the 'erotic' within us (the erotic not simply meaning a woman's capacity to seduce but an inner fire that compells us to brilliance - a fire we are taught to suppress). I have always loved her poetry, and the way she makes poetry accessible and I love that she is a teacher - she is a great inspiration.

[Jes · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s no one like Audre Lorde, living or dead. I read so much in the six years of my PhD program but there’s no doubt in my mind that her essays have had the most transformative & lasting influence on my life—my writing, my teaching, my sense of self, my relationships with others. I return to her again and again. Yesterday I finished an Alice Walker collection and in one of the essays Walker asks the reader to ask themselves, “What is my practice? What is steering this boat that is my fragile human life?” And as I thought about it, I realized that reading Lorde (and rereading her, teaching her, writing with her, talking to her in my head, reading her again) is one of my practices, one that steers the boat that is my fragile human life.

Also: as a book-object this edition is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever owned. The cover image on here isn’t actually the one I have. But anyway sometimes I just hold it in my hands and look at it. It’s so lovely.

[Declan Fry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seminal essays here, the themes of which continue to pose hard questions and challenges for intersectional politics and progressive activism generally. They were also pivotal in shaping academic dialogues around organising and acknowledgement of difference (think Spivak’s concept of strategic essentialism) that still resonate today. Put simply, these are forceful, memorable essays, powerfully written.

The poetry I could take or leave, frankly; though I appreciated Lorde’s own interpretation of what it means to her in ‘Poetry is not a Luxury’. Tellingly, I found this engagement with the meaning of her poetry far more compelling than the poetry itself - Lorde’s greatest asset is her ability to articulate thoughts through essay and polemic.

Perhaps my favourite piece among these is ‘Uses of Anger’. It remains highly relevant (by contrast, pieces like ‘Scratching the Surface’, though still topical, felt more limited in scope).

The other great addition here was two excellent introductions by Reni Eddo-Lodge and Sara Ahmed.

[Antonia Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

the poetry helped me to swim through the waves of tears smashing against my bed and my naked body

[Daniel Sevitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well curated collection of academic essays and transcripts of talks given by Audre Lorde in the 70s and 80s. There is an absolute clarity of self here which stands out even in this modern era of Me-ness. Lorde is certain of her identity and it enables her to scrutinize and skewer those that debase it. She repeatedly asserts herself as black, female lesbian calling attention to the ways each of these identities is marginalized separately and in aggregate. She was also a mother of a black daughter and a black son. She was the partner of a white woman. She inhabits all these identities and explores the ways they inform her experience.

She is tremendously wise on the ways the patriarchy sets groups up in opposition to each other to dilute their power and their rage. She also owns her anger and artfully articulates how it fuels her without undermining her.

I thought this would be more of a record of a time gone by. I was unprepared for how vital Lorde's voice would feel today. Very readable, very relevant

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Honestly wanted to savor this for days but somehow ended up finishing it in a couple of hours. Having first read “Zami,” I had yet to experience Lorde’s more concrete thoughts put together in a collection like this, and my expectations were far exceeded. I definitely found this a little more accessible as well. Highly recommend!!!

[Duarte Cabral]

Já andava a precisar dum murro no estômago deste género há algum tempo. A voz de Lorde é incomparável, nunca li alguém como ela. Ensaio e poesia e discurso equalizados sob a forma de luta, de vida.

[Mia Wolf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Been meaning to read more of Audre’s work since reading Zami (an all time fave) and of course it did not disappoint ☺️☺️

[henar · Rating 4 out of 5]

The way Lorde expresses herself is poetry even in the section of essays (which was my favorite part). I think anyone who considers themselves a feminist (even more as westerners) would benefit from reading her.

She often talks about "us" where white woman aren't part of which is one of her great values: it reminds you of the groups you aren't part of and the role you hold as the "norm". At the same time, her voice holds you in the experiences that are shared (and it's so special to find someone that simultaneously touches gender, blackness, queerness and more).

It might be the book I've underlined most, and each quote is so valuable... Have not shut up about her since I started reading, and it's not stopping anytime soon. It gave me hope for any crisis, and if that can't convince someone to read her, I don't know what will.

[Victoria Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

favourite essays were Women Redefining Difference and The Uses of Anger: Responding to Racism. also enjoyed reading and annotating some of the poems, favourites were Love Poem and A Litany for Survival.

[Lucy Timmins]

Excellent and challenging volume of essays.

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even if her shackles are different from my own.”

[Emmaby Barton Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

god i love lorde so much. so excited to dive into her other works which i’ve finally gotten my hands on

idk why i put this off for so long (i was scared lol) but so cool seeing how much easier i find it to understand her work now compared to when i first read her - so satisfying and rewarding to see my progress and understanding develop!! i am sure there’s still lots i’m missing haha but i get more from them each time i read them i feel like.

some key themes that kept popping up - silence, anger, solidarity, difference is good, fighting horizontally is a distraction that benefits the oppressor, must address internalised unconscious biases and racism sexism etc.

some of my favourite pieces:
- the transformation of silence into language and action. the time will pass anyway. you will experience pain and fear either way. silence is a survival strategy but it has never protected you so you should speak anyway. what do you have to lose?
- poetry is not a luxury. poetry is feelings and ideas. fives rise to possibilities and actions. who benefits from making poetry seem a luxury? there are no new ideas - but these ideas are always silenced and oppressed. so we must find new ways of voicing these ideas and turning them into action.
- uses of the erotic: the erotic as power. the erotic shows us what we can have. and then we don’t settle for less. “once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavours bring us closest to that fullness.” “that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible…. for once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives we begins to demand from ourselves and from our life pursuits that they feel in accordance with the joy which we know ourselves to be capable of… not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”
- a conversation between audre lorde and adrienne rich. “i’m not going to be more vulnerable by putting weapons of silence in my enemies’ hands.”
- the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. “difference must not be merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between within our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”
- age, race, class and sex: women redefining difference. poetry is a more accessible form of literature for many. “by ignoring the past, we are encouraged to repeat its mistakes… if the younger members of a community view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess… this gives rise to a historical amnesia.”
- the use of anger: women responding to racism. the importance of anger and uselessness of guilt. “my fear of anger taught me nothing.” “guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures”
- learning from the 1960s. “we do not have to romanticise our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present” “to refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. do not be mislead into passivity either by false security or by despair” “nothing neutralises creativity quicker than tokenism” “we cannot afford to do our enemies’ work by destroying each other” “we are not responsible for our oppression, but we must be responsible for our own liberation”
- eye to eye: black women, hatred and anger “i have lived through it all already, and survived” ignoring our feelings and pain may be easier, but it won’t fix things. and paying attention to it can’t hurt anymore than it already did. “i can afford to look at myself directly, risk the pain of experiencing who i am not, and learn to savour the sweetness of who i am. i can make friends with all the different pieces of me, liked and disliked.” “we have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us”
- good mirrors are not cheap. “it is a waste of time hating a mirror / or its reflection / instead of stopping the hand / that makes glass with distortions”
- a litany for survival. “and when we speak we are afraid / our words will not be heard / nor welcome / but when we are silent / we are still afraid / so it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive”
- outlines. “we print code names upon the scars / over each other’s resolutions / our weaknesses no longer hateful… we meet each other knowing / in a landscape / the rest of our lives / attempts to understand”

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

A key text for anyone interested in gender, race and sexuality, written with the use of beautiful expressions whose sentiments still ring entirely true to this day.

Audre Lorde’s essays touched my heart multiple times and I have found new favourites in her poems (e.g. Equinox).

It is a true talent to mix non fiction with such mastery of literary language and I often envisioned the author performing her pieces in front of groups of women, feeling envious of anyone who had the privilege to be in the presence of such passion and intelligence.


Some quotes:

“And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognise our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in pertinence to our lives” (5)

“And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor afterlife” (26)

“Frequently, when speaking with men and white women, I am reminded of how difficult and time-consuming it is to have to reinvent the pencil every time you want to send a message” (52)

“Within each of us there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust” (125)

“And survival is the greatest gift of love. Sometimes for Black mothers, it is the only gift possible, and tenderness gets lost. My mother bore me into life as if etching an angry message into marble” (138)

“Even if our words taste sharp as the edge of a lost woman’s voice, we are speaking” (147)

And so many more.

[Lucie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This essential book collects many of Lorde’s powerful and passionate essays and poems together for the first time.

As I was reading this I would often go back and re read essays after finishing them to try and soak everything in. Whilst these essays and poems were written in the 70’s and 80’s, they could have easily been written in the 2000’s, that’s how tragically little has changed in the state of racial injustice.

Lorde was one of the first to speak about intersectional feminism and some of my favourite quotes from this book came from those essays: “ As Women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation...”
“It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the masters tools will never dismantle the masters house.”

I encourage everyone to read this book.

[Lauren Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-written and unapologetic. It was an interesting and rewarding experience to add these insights to the ideas put forward by other authors I have been reading lately—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rebecca Solnit, Gloria Steinem—and see how certain parts echo and contradict. Sometimes the collection circles a bit, with certain essays presenting the same ideas in more or less the same words, though this is nevertheless meaningful. The most relevant elements for me were those about fear and power. We can all take note.

[Lu · Rating 5 out of 5]

"In this treacherous sea
even the act of turning
is almost fatally difficult
coming around full face
into a diving storm
putting an end to running
before the wind"

Lorde writes pain and anger as powerful tools of reconstruction, points directly at you and tells you as "a Black woman warrior poet doing my work--come to ask you, are you doing yours?". And yet, in spite of all the guilt and pain it may provoke, it lands hopeful and inspiring. Poetically crafted yet substantially essential for theoretical progress I do not know who convinced her she could not write prose.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't realise what a huge gap in my intersectional feminist reading I had left by not reading this book sooner. A truly foundational text, that does not shy away from the harsh realities of the system under which specifically Black women (and more specifically Black lesbian women) live, but also drives towards a better future unapologetically. Lyrical, accessible, powerful, brilliant. Essential reading, and beautifully put together by Silver Press.

[Sioned Heal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone should know about Audre Lorde!

Her exploration of passion, anger, love, racism and sexism has sparked a strength inside of me and, most importantly, an insight into the strength, courage, pain, beauty, struggle, reality of being black and female in the western world.

She gracefully analyses the depths and damage of social conditioning in each of us. Demanding, clearly and thoughtfully, a change (personal and political) that is still so relevant today!

What a privilege it has been to read her words.

[Drea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this collection of essays and poems felt like someone trusting me with their diary and allowing me to read their deepest joys lives and fears.

A book that will stay with me for a long time.

[Gabriella Niles-Ewen · Rating 4 out of 5]

“a woman wrings her hands beneath the weight of agonies remembered.”

[Justyna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Audre Lorde's writing has forever altered my brain chemistry

[Rocher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Audre Lorde's work deserves all the stars.