Soak In The Brilliance of the Great Visionary Audre Lorde
Quotes and Dedications From and About Audre Lorde.
"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. The speaking profits me beyond any other effect.
My silences had not protected me.
Your silence will not protect you. . ..
�We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us."
"The fact that we are here, and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us.
For it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.
And there are so many silences to be broken."
Audre Lorde (The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action - Sister Outsider).
"We cannot continue to evade each other on the deepest levels because we fear each other's angers, nor continue to believe that respect means never looking directly nor with openness into another black woman's eyes."
The Edge of Each Other's Battles: The Vision of Audre Lorde
"In 1970, the Black Panthers were being murdered in Chicago . . . "
"If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into people's fantasies for me and eaten alive."
It's Only Love
by Ganessa James
Audre Lorde Project Fundraiser
"I don't feel like being strong, but do I have a choice? It hurts even when my sisters look at me in the street with cold and silent eyes."
"Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men"
"Anger is loaded with information and energy."
"Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences. . . .that are as total and as destructive as any imposed racism."
"I do not have to win in order to know my dreams are valid, I only have to believe in a process of which I am a part."
"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 (or Black people) who still define the master's house as their only source of support." (parenthetical mine).
"To me, writing a poem is no different than moving in the sunlight against a woman I love"
"If I can look directly at my life and death without flinching, I know there is nothing they can ever do to me again."
The Life and Work of Audre Lorde Trailer
(Forgive the filmakers' overemphasized logo inside of the imagery of the trailer).
"The energies I gain from my work help me neutralize those implanted forces of negativity and self-destructiveness that is White America's way of making sure I keep whatever is powerful and creative within me unavailable, ineffective, and non-threatening."
"Anger is loaded with information and energy." - Audre Lorde
"When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid"
"Mother, loosen my tongue or adorn me with a lighter burden." - Audre Lorde
"In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear - fear of contempt, of censure, of some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live.
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."
"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, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.
But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist."
"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, the love of Black women for each other."
On Same Gender Love, Audre Lorde said, "I can't really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing, why not enjoy it too?"
"Every woman I have ever known has made a lasting impression on my soul."
"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 dehumanized inferior.
Within this society, that group is made up of Black and Third World people, working-class people, older people, and women.�
"The idea that the oppressed should teach the oppressors their mistakes is only a repetition of racist patriarchal thought.
It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish.
It is learning how to take our differences and make them our strengths.�
"Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women."
"When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar."
"For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid.
It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bonds, sodomizes our daughters and our earth.
It is not the anger of Black women which corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all unless we meet it with what we have, our power to examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will live and work . . . "
"As Black people, we cannot begin our dialogue by denying the oppressive nature of male privilege.
And if Black males choose to assume that privilege, for whatever reason, raping, brutalizing, and killing women, then we cannot ignore Black male oppression.
One oppression does not justify another."
"Peace on Earth: Christmas, 1989"
by Audre Lorde
the rockets red glare where
all these brown children
running scrambling around the globe
flames through the rubble
bombs bursting in air
Panama Nablus Gaza
tear gas clouding the Natal sun.
THIS IS A GIFT FROM THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED
STATES OF AMERICA
quick cut
the crackling Yule log
in an iron grate.
"You once said to me, 'Essex, no one comes from their consciousness fully developed.'
In that statement you summed up, for me, the daily task of being accountable to ourselves and to one another, truthful and honest, and of course open to change."
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.
As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate.
But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals.
As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion. - Audre Lorde
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