- "Our feelings need voice in order to be recognized, respected, and of use."
- "What does it mean to claim for ourselves a sense of wholeness and visibility when the world insists on us being hidden or disguised?"
- "May these words serve as encouragement for other women to speak and to act out of our experiences..., for silence has never brought us anything of worth."
- "I could die of difference, or live- myriad selves."
- "The terrible thing is that nothing goes past me these days, nothing. Each horror remains like a steel vise in my flesh, another magnet to the flame. Buster has joined the rolecall of useless wasteful deaths of young Black people; in the gallery today everywhere ugly images of women offering up distorted bodies for whatever fantasy passes in the name of male art. Gargoyles of pleasure. Beautiful laughing Buster, shot down in a hallway for ninety cents. Shall I unlearn that tongue in which my curse is written?"
- "But I must tend my body with at least as much care as I tend the compost, particularly now when it seems so beside the point. Is this pain and despair that surround me a result of cancer, or has it just been released by cancer? I feel so unequal to what I always handled before."
- "If I can look directly at my life and my death without flinching, I know there is nothing they can ever do to me again. I must be content to see how really little I can do and still do it with an open heart."
- "I don't like being strong, but do I have a choice? It hurts when even my sisters look at me in the street with cold and silent eyes. I am defined as other in every group I'm a part of. The outsider, both strength and weakness. Yet without community, there is certainly no liberation, no future, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between me and my oppression."
- "There must be some way to integrate death into living, neither ignoring it nor giving in to it."
- "I am 46 years living today, and very pleased to be alive, very glad and very happy. Fear and pain and despair do not disappear. They only become slowly less and less important. Although sometimes I still long for a simple orderly life with a hunger sharp as that sudden vegetarian hunger for meat."
- "Some days, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief."
- "I am learning to live beyond fear by living through it, and in the process learning to turn fury at my own limitations into some more creative energy. I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on an ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side. When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less important whether or not I am unafraid."
- "I had to remind myself that I had lived through it all already. I had known the pain, and survived it. It only remained for me to give it voice, to share it for use, that the pain not be wasted."
- "How do I give voice to my quests so that other women can take what they need from my experience?"
- really interesting idea - that pain should not be felt and left alone/in the past, but that since pain has been felt, the experience ought to be put to use to help others however possible
- "I have found that battling despair does not mean closing my eyes to the enormity of the tasks of effecting change, nor ignoring the strength and the barbarity of the forces aligned against us. It means teaching, surviving and fighting with the most important resource I have, myself, and taking joy in that battle. It means, for me, recognizing the enemy outside and the enemy within, and knowing that my work is part of a continuum of women's work, of reclaiming this earth and our power, and knowing that this work did not begin with my birth nor will it end with my death. And it means knowing that within this continuum, my life and my love and my work has particular power and meaning relative to others."
- i am not a beginning or an end, i am a link in a chain!!! there is joy to be found in the shared links and battles that connect us to each other!!!
- lorde's idea of taking joy and pride in being a part of everything in some small way is fascinating - often it feels like there is no "pride" to be had in being somewhere in the middle, not the one to get the recognition or fame of being the inventor or the one to finish some great work
- "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. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect."
- "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? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself, a Black woman warrior poet doing my work, come to ask you, are you doing yours?"
- "For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call America, we have to learn this first and most vital lesson - that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever 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 will still be no less afraid."
- "And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them, and examine them in their pertinence to our lives."
- "I'm so tired of this. I want to be the person I used to be, the real me. I feel sometimes that it's all a dream, and surely I'm about to wake up now."
- "Whatever the message is, may I survive the delivery of it. Is letting go a process or a price? What am I paying for, not seeing sooner? Learning at the edge? Letting go of something precious but no longer needed?"
- "Off and on I kept thinking, I have cancer. I'm a Black lesbian feminist poet, how am I going to do this now? Where are the models for what I'm supposed to be in this situation. But there were none. This is it, Audre. You're on your own."
- "Somehow I always knew this would be the final outcome, for it never did seem like a finished business for me. This year between was like a hiatus, an interregnum in a battle within which I could so easily be a casualty, since I certainly was a warrior. And in that brief time the sun shone and the birds sang, and I wrote important words and have loved richly and been loved in return. And if a lifetime of furies is the cause of this death in my right breast, there is still nothing that I've never been able to accept before that I would accept now in order to keep my breast. It was a 12 month reprieve in which I could come to accept the emotional fact/truths I came to see first in those horrendous weeks last year before the biopsy. If I do what I need to do because I want to do it, it will matter less when death comes, because it will have been an ally that spurred me on."
aug 26 2023 ∞
sep 15 2023 +
