Isme

“Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.”
― Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978

“In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.”
― Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978

“My own luck was being born white and middle-class into a house full of books, with a father who encouraged me to read and write. So for about twenty years I wrote for a particular man, who criticized and praised me and made me feel I was indeed "special." The obverse side of this, of course, was that I tried for a long time to please him, or rather, not to displease him. And then of course there were other men - writers, teachers - the Man, who was not a terror or a dream but a literary master and a master in other ways less easy to acknowledge. And there were all those poems about women, written by men: it seemed to be a given that men wrote poems and women frequently inhabited them. These women were almost always beautiful, but threatened with the loss of beauty, the loss of youth - the fate worse than death. Or, they were beautiful and died young, like Lucy and Lenore. Or, the woman was like Maud Gonne, cruel and disastrously mistaken, and the poem reproached her because she had refused to become a luxury for the poet.”
― Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978

“if you unquestioningly accept one piece of the culture that despises and fears you, you are vulnerable to other pieces.”
― Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978