| Title | : | Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0995716226 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780995716223 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 229 |
| Publication | : | First published October 2, 2017 |
"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?” '
Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems Reviews
-
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. -
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." -
i can’t wait to read extensive feminist essays and texts to my future children when they are babies and have no choice but to listen to me
-
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. -
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 -
This felt incredibly healing, inspiring and powerful. A book to which I will go back several times. A borrowed home.
-
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 -
"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. -
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. -
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. -
the poetry helped me to swim through the waves of tears smashing against my bed and my naked body
-
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 -
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. -
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.
-
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.
-
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. -
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. -
10/10 full of super informative bangers
-
"For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily 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."
-
Audre Lord was the first feminist author I ever read who explained the theory of "The Other" in terms that made practical sense.
As a young and idealistic woman, I ran into radical feminism and did not find it to my liking. The thought of disavowing half of the world, (men), because they were inherently unable to understand a peaceful approach to life seemed unfair.
However, in my zeal to embrace my sisters, and to recover my self-respect and dignity after being abused at the hands of the Patriarchy, I tried to walk the walk for awhile.
Audre Lord spelled something clearly out: that as long as either sex viewed the other sex as an opponent, no peace was to be had. And the same for skin color, age, ability, etc.
I have never forgotten the power her words carried to my young heart and hope that the succession of idealistic young people will be able to read her with fresh eyes and ears. -
Audre’s writing transcends time and space, her winged words finding their way straight into your heart, elevating you until your spirit soars. Hers is wisdom to live by, to fight by, and to share, as far and wide as you possibly can. A most valued sisterhood.
"The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct 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."
and
"As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny, and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to losen their control over us. /.../ As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualisation of meaningful action.
Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors." -
A collection of essays and speeches by the great Audre Lorde. Although mostly written in the 60s and 70s, so many of her assertions ring true today. Her influence is felt still in movements such as Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name. She is so insightful about things such as racism, homophobia, anger, struggle, difference, and I love that this volume included some of her poetry too, which is incredibly powerful.
“Survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with 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 strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” p91
It was a good companion piece to 'Why I'm no Longer Talking To White People About Race', and I think more eloquent and complex. Her examination in particular of white women, guilt, and privilege resonates now. -
Lorde described herself as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet." She published her first work in 1968 and died 1992. "Your Silence Will Not Protect You" is a collection on her essays and poetry. This is such an educational read about intersectional feminism and the experience of being a black lesbian, and a lesbian mother.
This is a book teaching us about being silenced, about oppression, about hatred and violence against women, about raising children in a world of racism and sexism. It's also a book about fighting back, about being angry and why the anger is justified.
A lot of Lordes essays talks about being "the other" and really goes well with the idea of checking your privilege. As she writes a lot of the time she felt like she had to choose one struggle, either feminist or black or lesbian. But she experienced them all and it all affected her in different ways.
As a white woman you still will have it easier than a women of color. As a black man your will still have it easier than a black women. And not becoming a part of the system that oppresses you by oppressing someone with more struggle is a problem she raises.
"One opression does not justify another" -
Worth reading. A powerful, eye opening book.
-
'my silences had not protected me. your silences will not protect you. but for every real word spoken, for every attempt i had ever made to speak those truths for which i am still seeking, i had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. and it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinise the essentials of my living.'
an absolutely essential collection of writing - still painfully relevant, real & true. i'm glad i got to exist in the same world - however broken and dumb it may be - as audre lorde. -
Omg!! What an absolute masterpiece of a collection!
And such a gift to have read as my introduction to Audre Lorde’s writing...
I had to pause and breathe out after certain sentences because of how well written and how on point they were.
I love when writers make me say out loud to myself “godamnit that’s so fucking good! I love their words !” And I probably said that on each essay I read in this book.
Even just at the preface and intro I was thinking that thanks to Reni Eddo-Lodge and Sara Ahmed’s talent.
Amazing collection and amazing way to discover this gem of a writer!! -
I feel compelled to explain how this collection of poetry and essays made me feel. The way Audre writes about the depiction of racism, sexism and prejudice in the mid-late 20th century is beautiful, harrowing and impossibly sad. The imagery she uses at points is particularly gruesome and made me feel sick to my stomach. Not an easy read, but definitely an important one. I'll be thinking about this book for a long time.
-
“One thing has always kept me going—and it’s not really courage or bravery, unless that’s what courage or bravery is made of—is that sense that there are so many ways in which I’m vulnerable and cannot help but be vulnerable."
O sea, WOW. Creo que todo el mundo debería leer a Audre Lorde, pero sobre todo esta edición con introducción de Sara Ahmed y prefacio de Reni Eddo-Lodge, vamos, el Dream Team por excelencia.
