Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I wade through summer ghosts betrayed by vision hers and my own becoming dragonfish to survive the horrors we are living with tortured lungs adapting to breathe blood. A woman measures her life’s damage my eyes are caves, chunks of etched rock tied to the ghost of a black boy whistling crying and frightened her tow-headed children cluster like little mirrors of despair their father’s hands upon them and soundlessly a woman begins to weep. [1981] A Poem For Women In Rage A killing summer heat wraps up the city emptied of all who are not bound to stay a black woman waits for a white woman leans against the railing in the Upper Westside street at intermission the distant sounds of Broadway dim to lulling until I can hear the voice of sparrows like a promise I await the woman I love our slice of time a place beyond the city’s pain. In the corner phonebooth a woman glassed in by reflections of the street between us her white face dangles a tapestry of disasters seen through a veneer of order her mouth drawn like an ill-used roadmap to eyes without core, a bottled heart impeccable credentials of old pain. The veneer cracks open hate launches through the glaze into my afternoon our eyes touch like hot wire and the street snaps into nightmare a woman with white eyes is clutching a bottle of Fleischmann’s gin is fumbling at her waistband is pulling a butcher knife from her ragged pants her hand arcs backward “You Black Bitch!” the heavy blade spins out toward me slow motion years of fury surge upward like a wall I do not hear it clatter to the pavement at my feet. A gear of ancient nightmare churns swift in familiar dread and silence but this time I am awake, released I smile. Now. This time is my turn. I bend to the knife my ears blood-drumming across the street my lover’s voice the only moving sound within white heat “Don’t touch it!” I straighten, weaken, then start down again hungry for resolution simple as anger and so close at hand my fingers reach for the familiar blade the known grip of wood against my palm I have held it to the whetstone a thousand nights for this escorting fury through my sleep like a cherished friend to wake in the stink of rage beside the sleep-white face of love The keen steel of a dreamt knife sparks honed from the whetted edge with a tortured shriek between my lover’s voice and the grey spinning a choice of pain or fury slashing across judgment like a crimson scar I could open her up to my anger with a point sharpened upon love. In the deathland my lover’s voice fades like the roar of a train derailed on the other side of a river every white woman’s face I love and distrust is upon it eating green grapes from a paper bag

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  With Carnival week nearing, in Paris, more than a century ago, the Count de Morny invited to a fancy ball at his house “une noble dame que la Russie a prêtée cet hiver à la France” (as reported by Henrys in the Gazette du Palais section of the Illustration, 1859, p. 251). This was Nina, Baroness von Korff, whom I have already mentioned; the eldest of her five daughters, Maria (1842–1926), was to marry in September of the same year, 1859, Dmitri Nikolaevich Nabokov (1827–1904), a friend of the family who was also in Paris at the time. In view of the ball, the lady ordered for Maria and Olga, flower-girl costumes, at two hundred and twenty francs each. Their cost, according to the glib Illustration reporter, represented six hundred and forty-three days “de nourriture, de loyer et d’entretien du père Crépin [food, rent and footwear],” which sounds odd. When the costumes were ready, Mme de Korff found them “trop décolletés” and refused to take them. The dressmaker sent her huissier (warrant officer), upon which there was a bad row, and my good great-grandmother (she was beautiful, passionate and, I am sorry to say, far less austere in her private morals than it would appear from her attitude toward low necklines) sued the dressmaker for damages. She contended that the demoiselles de magasin who brought the dresses were “des péronnelles [saucy hussies]” who, in answer to her objecting that the dresses were cut too low for gentlewomen to wear, “se sont permis d’exposer des théories égalitaires du plus mauvais goût [dared to flaunt democratic ideas in the worst of taste]”; she said that it had been too late to have other fancy dresses made and that her daughters had not gone to the ball; she accused the huissier and his acolytes of sprawling on soft chairs while inviting the ladies to take hard ones; she also complained, furiously and bitterly, that the huissier had actually threatened to jail Monsieur Dmitri Nabokoff, “Conseiller d’État, homme sage et plein de mesure [a sedate, self-contained man]” only because the said gentleman had attempted to throw the huissier out of the window. It was not much of a case but the dressmaker lost it. She took back her dresses, refunded their cost and in addition paid a thousand francs to the plaintiff; on the other hand, the bill presented in 1791 to Christina by her carriage maker, a matter of five thousand nine hundred forty-four livres, had never been paid at all.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I was left to write my angry letter to the president of the united states all by myself, although my father did promise I could type it out on the office typewriter next week, after I showed it to him in my copybook diary. The waitress was white, and the counter was white, and the ice cream I never ate in Washington, D.C. that summer I left childhood was white, and the white heat and the white pavement and the white stone monuments of my first Washington summer made me sick to my stomach for the whole rest of that trip and it wasn’t much of a graduation present after all . POETR Y fro m The First Cities (1968) For Genevieve, Miriam, Clem, no more words For Marian, Neal, Ed, different ones. Difference and Survival An Address at Hunter College T o those of you who sit here a little bemused and I hope very proud, I speak to you as a poet whose role is always to encourage the intimacy of scrutiny. For I believe that as each one of us learns to bear that intimacy those worse fears which rule our lives and shape our silences begin to lose their power over us. Last week I asked a number of you if you felt different in any way and each one of you said very quickly and in a similar tone, “Oh no, of course not, I don’t consider myself different from anybody else.” I think it is not by accident that each of you heard my question as “Are you better than . . .” Yet each of you is sitting here now because in some particular way and time, in some particular place and for whatever reason, you dared to excel, to set yourself apart. And that makes you in this particular place and time, different. It is that difference that I urge you to affirm and to explore lest it someday be used against you and against me. It is within our differences that we are both most powerful and most vulnerable, and some of the most difficult tasks of our lives are the claiming of differences and learning to use those differences for bridges rather than as barriers between us. In a profit economy which needs groups of outsiders as surplus people, we are programmed to respond to difference in one of three ways: to ignore it by denying the testament of our own senses, “Oh, I never noticed.” Or if that is not possible, then we try to neutralize it in one of two ways. If the difference has been defined for us in our introductory courses as good, meaning useful in preserving the status quo, in perpetuating the myth of sameness, then we try to copy it. If the difference is defined as bad, that is revolutionary or threatening, then we try to destroy it. But we have few patterns for relating across differences as equals.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  It wants racism to be accepted as an immutable given in the fabric of your existence, like evening time or the common cold. So we are working in a context of opposition and threat, the cause of which is certainly not the angers which lie between us, but rather that virulent hatred leveled against all women, people of Color, lesbians and gay men, poor people—against all of us who are seeking to examine the particulars of our lives as we resist our oppressions, moving toward coalition and effective action. Any discussion among women about racism must include the recognition and the use of anger. This discussion must be direct and creative because it is crucial. We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us nor seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty; we must be quite serious about the choice of this topic and the angers entwined within it because, rest assured, our opponents are quite serious about their hatred of us and of what we are trying to do here. And while we scrutinize the often painful face of each other’s anger, please remember that it is not our anger which makes me caution you to lock your doors at night and not to wander the streets of Hartford alone. It is the hatred which lurks in those streets, that urge to destroy us all if we truly work for change rather than merely indulge in academic rhetoric. This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change. But our time is getting shorter. We have been raised to view any difference other than sex as a reason for destruction, and for Black women and white women to face each other’s angers without denial or immobility or silence or guilt is in itself a heretical and generative idea. It implies peers meeting upon a common basis to examine difference, and to alter those distortions which history has created around our difference. For it is those distortions which separate us. And we must ask ourselves: Who profits from all this? Women of Color in america have grown up within a symphony of anger, at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing that when we survive, it is in spite of a world that takes for granted our lack of humanness, and which hates our very existence outside of its service. And I say symphony rather than cacophony because we have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so that they do not tear us apart. We have had to learn to move through them and use them for strength and force and insight within our daily lives. Those of us who did not learn this difficult lesson did not survive. And part of my anger is always libation for my fallen sisters.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  despair offerings of the 8 A.M. News reminding us we are still at war and not with each other “give us 22 minutes and we will give you the world . . .” and still we dare to say we are committed sometimes without relish. Ten blocks down the street a cross is burning we are a Black woman and a white woman with two Black children you talk with our next-door neighbors I register for a shotgun we secure the tender perennials against an early frost reconstructing a future we fuel from our living​different precisions In the next room a canvas chair whispers beneath your weight a breath of you between laundered towels the flinty places that do not give. V Your face upon my shoulder a crescent of freckle over bone what we share​illuminates what we do not the rest is a burden of history we challenge bearing each bitter piece to the light we hone ourselves upon each other’s courage loving as we cross the mined bridge​fury tuned like a Geiger counter to the softest place. One straight light hair on the washbasin’s rim difference intimate as a borrowed scarf the children arrogant as mirrors our pillows’ mingled scent this grain of our particular days keeps a fine sharp edge to which I cling like a banner in a choice of winds seeking an emotional language in which to abbreviate time. I trace the curve of your jaw with a lover’s finger knowing the hardest battle is only the first how to do what we need for our living with honor and in love we have chosen each other and the edge of each other’s battles the war is the same if we lose someday women’s blood will congeal upon a dead planet if we win there is no telling. Equal Opportunity The american deputy assistant secretary of defense for Equal Opportunity and safety is a home girl. Blindness slashes our tapestry to shreds. The moss-green military tailoring sets off her color beautifully she says “when I stand up to speak in uniform you can believe everyone takes notice!” Superimposed skull-like across her trim square shoulders dioxin-smear the stench of napalm upon growing cabbage the chug and thud of Corsairs in the foreground advance like a blush across her cheeks up the unpaved road outside Grenville, Grenada An M–16 bayonet gleams slashing away the wooden latch of a one-room slat house in Soubise mopping up​weapons search​pockets of resistance Imelda​young​Black​in a tattered headcloth standing to one side on her left foot takes notice one wrist behind her hip the other palm-up beneath her chin​watching armed men in moss-green jumpsuits turn out her shack watching​mashed-up nutmeg trees the trampled cocoa pods graceless broken stalks of almost ripe banana her sister has been missing now ten days Beside the shattered waterpipe downroad Granny Lou’s consolations If it was only kill they’d wanted to kill we many more would have died look at Lebanon

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Sometimes I have the eeriest feeling that I’m living some macabre soap opera. And too besides, it’s being recorded in vivid living color. If so, I hope it’ll be useful someday for something, if only for some other Black sister’s afternoon entertainment when her real life gets to be too much. It’ll sure beat As the World Turns. At least there will be real Black people in this one, and maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll get to drag the story on interminably for twenty or thirty years like the TV soaps, until the writer dies of old age or the audience loses interest—which is another way of saying they no longer need to discharge the tensions in their lives that lie behind that particular story. November 6, 1986 New York City Black mother goddess, salt dragon of chaos, Seboulisa, Mawu. Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away. Women who have asked me to set these stories down are asking me for my air to breathe, to use in their future, are courting me back to my life as a warrior. Some offer me their bodies, some their enduring patience, some a separate fire, and still others, only a naked need whose face is all too familiar. It is the need to give voice to the complexities of living with cancer, outside of the tissue-thin assurance that they “got it all,” or that the changes we have wrought in our lives will insure that cancer never reoccurs. And it is a need to give voice to living with cancer outside of that numbing acceptance of death as a resignation waiting after fury and before despair. There is nothing I cannot use somehow in my living and my work, even if I would never have chosen it on my own, even if I am livid with fury at having to choose. Not only did nobody ever say it would be easy, nobody ever said what faces the challenges would wear. The point is to do as much as I can of what I came to do before they nickel and dime me to death. Racism. Cancer. In both cases, to win the aggressor must conquer, but the resisters need only survive. How do I define that survival and on whose terms?

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  The first people who interviewed me in white coats from behind a computer were only interested in my health-care benefits and proposed method of payment. Those crucial facts determined what kind of plastic ID card I would be given, and without a plastic ID card, no one at all was allowed upstairs to see any doctor, as I was told by the uniformed, pistoled guards at all the stairwells. From the moment I was ushered into the doctor’s office and he saw my x-rays, he proceeded to infantilize me with an obviously well-practiced technique. When I told him I was having second thoughts about a liver biopsy, he glanced at my chart. Racism and sexism joined hands across his table as he saw I taught at a university. “Well, you look like an intelligent girl,” he said, staring at my one breast all the time he was speaking. “Not to have this biopsy immediately is like sticking your head in the sand.” Then he went on to say that he would not be responsible when I wound up one day screaming in agony in the corner of his office! I asked this specialist in liver tumors about the dangers of a liver biopsy spreading an existing malignancy, or even encouraging it in a borderline tumor. He dismissed my concerns with a wave of his hand, saying, instead of answering, that I really did not have any other sensible choice. I would like to think that this doctor was sincerely motivated by a desire for me to seek what he truly believed to be the only remedy for my sickening body, but my faith in that scenario is considerably diminished by his $250 consultation fee and his subsequent medical report to my own doctor containing numerous supposedly clinical observations of obese abdomen and remaining pendulous breast. In any event, I can thank him for the fierce shard lancing through my terror that shrieked there must be some other way, this doesn’t feel right to me. If this is cancer and they cut me open to find out, what is stopping that intrusive action from spreading the cancer, or turning a questionable mass into an active malignancy? All I was asking for was the reassurance of a realistic answer to my real questions, and that was not forthcoming. I made up my mind that if I was going to die in agony on somebody’s office floor, it certainly wasn’t going to be his! I needed information, and pored over books on the liver in Barnes & Noble’s medical textbook section on Fifth Avenue for hours. I learned, among other things, that the liver is the largest, most complex, and most generous organ in the human body. But that did not help me very much.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  this policeman said in his own defense “I didn’t notice the size nor nothing else only the color”. And there are tapes to prove that, too. Today that 37 year old white man with 13 years of police forcing was set free by eleven white men who said they were satisfied justice had been done and one Black Woman who said “They convinced me” meaning they had dragged her 4’10" Black Woman’s frame over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval until she let go the first real power she ever had and lined her own womb with cement to make a graveyard for our children. I have not been able to touch the destruction within me. But unless I learn to use the difference between poetry and rhetoric my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire and one day I will take my teenaged plug and connect it to the nearest socket raping an 85 year old white woman who is somebody’s mother and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed a greek chorus will be singing in 3/4 time “Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.” Solstice We forgot to water the plantain shoots when our houses were full of borrowed meat and our stomachs with the gift of strangers who laugh now as they pass us because our land is barren the farms are choked with stunted rows of straw and with our nightmares of juicy brown yams that cannot fill us. The roofs of our houses rot from last winter’s water but our drinking pots are broken we have used them to mourn the death of old lovers the next rain will wash our footprints away and our children have married beneath them. Our skins are empty. They have been vacated by the spirits who are angered by our reluctance to feed them in baskets of straw made from sleep grass and the droppings of civets they have been hidden away by our mothers who are waiting for us at the river. My skin is tightening soon I shall shed it like a monitor lizard like remembered comfort at the new moons rising I will eat the last signs of my weakness remove the scars of old childhood wars and dare to enter the forest whistling like a snake that had fed the chameleon for changes I shall be forever. May I never remember reasons for my spirit’s safety may I never forget the warning of my woman’s flesh weeping at the new moon may I never lose that terror which keeps me brave may I owe nothing that I cannot repay. Scar This is a simple poem. For the mothers sisters daughters girls I have never been for the women who clean the Staten Island Ferry for the sleek witches who burn me at midnight in effigy because I eat at their tables

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Despite our recent economic gains, Black women are still the lowest paid group in the nation by sex and race. This gives some idea of the inequity from which we started. In Staples’ own words, Black women in 1979 only “ threaten to overtake black men” [italics mine] by the “next century” in education, occupation, and income. In other words, the inequity is self-evident; but how is it justifiable? Black feminists speak as women because we are women and do not need others to speak for us. It is for Black men to speak up and tell us why and how their manhood is so threatened that Black women should be the prime targets of their justifiable rage. What correct analysis of this capitalist dragon within which we live can legitimize the rape of Black women by Black men? At least Black feminists and other Black women have begun this much-needed dialogue, however bitter our words. At least we are not mowing down our brothers in the street, or bludgeoning them to death with hammers. Yet. We recognize the fallacies of separatist solutions. Staples pleads his cause by saying capitalism has left the Black man only his penis for fulfillment, and a “curious rage.” Is this rage any more legitimate than the rage of Black women? And why are Black women supposed to absorb that male rage in silence? Why isn’t that male rage turned upon those forces which limit his fulfillment, namely capitalism? Staples sees in Ntozake Shange’s play For Colored Girls “a collective appetite for black male blood.” Yet it is my female children and my Black sisters who lie bleeding all around me, victims of the appetites of our brothers. Into what theoretical analysis would Staples fit Patricia Cowan? She answered an ad in Detroit for a Black actress to audition in a play called Hammer . As she acted out an argument scene, watched by the playwright’s brother and her four-year-old son, the Black male playwright picked up a sledgehammer and bludgeoned her to death. Will Staples’ “compassion for misguided black men” bring this young mother back, or make her senseless death more acceptable? Black men’s feelings of cancellation, their grievances, and their fear of vulnerability must be talked about, but not by Black women when it is at the expense of our own “curious rage.” If this society ascribes roles to Black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it Black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, or is it society that needs changing? And why should Black men accept these roles as correct ones, or anything other than a narcotic promise encouraging acceptance of other facets of their own oppression?

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  It has served me as fire in the ice zone of uncomprehending eyes of white women who see in my experience and the experience of my people only new reasons for fear or guilt. And my anger is no excuse for not dealing with your blindness, no reason to withdraw from the results of your own actions. When women of Color speak out of the anger that laces so many of our contacts with white women, we are often told that we are “creating a mood of hopelessness,” “preventing white women from getting past guilt,” or “standing in the way of trusting communication and action.” All these quotes come directly from letters to me from members of this organization within the last two years. One woman wrote, “Because you are Black and Lesbian, you seem to speak with the moral authority of suffering.” Yes, I am Black and Lesbian, and what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority. There is a difference. To turn aside from the anger of Black women with excuses or the pretexts of intimidation is to award no one power—it is merely another way of preserving racial blindness, the power of unaddressed privilege, unbreached, intact. Guilt is only another form of objectification. Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity. Black women are expected to use our anger only in the service of other people’s salvation or learning. But that time is over. My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I’m going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity. What woman here is so enamoured of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman’s face? What woman’s terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I am a lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly because I work in a university. If their full bellies make me fail to recognize my commonality with a woman of Color whose children do not eat because she cannot find work, or who has no children because her insides are rotted from home abortions and sterilization; if I fail to recognize the lesbian who chooses not to have children, the woman who remains closeted because her homophobic community is her only life support, the woman who chooses silence instead of another death, the woman who is terrified lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or for further separation. I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you. I speak here as a woman of Color who is not bent upon destruction, but upon survival. No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman. I have suckled the wolf’s lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter. We are not goddesses or matriarchs or edifices of divine forgiveness; we are not fiery fingers of judgment or instruments of flagellation; we are women forced back always upon our woman’s power. We have learned to use anger as we have learned to use the dead flesh of animals, and bruised, battered, and changing, we have survived and grown and, in Angela Wilson’s words, we are moving on. With or without uncolored women. We use whatever strengths we have fought for, including anger, to help define and fashion a world where all our sisters can grow, where our children can love, and where the power of touching and meeting another woman’s difference and wonder will eventually transcend the need for destruction.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  They are seen wearing blue jeans, camouflage, cowboy hats, and Bubba caps, all in an effort to come across as ordinary people. But presidents and other national politicians are anything but ordinary people after they are elected. Disguising that fact is the real camouflage that distorts the actual class nature of state power. The theatrical performances of politicians who profess to speak for an “American people” do nothing to highlight the history of poverty. The tenant farmer with his mule and plow is not a romantic image to retain in historic memory. But that individual is as much our history as any war that was fought and any election that was hotly contested. The tenant and his shack should remain with us as an enduring symbol of social stasis. The underclass exists even when they don’t rise to the level of making trouble, fomenting rebellions, joining in riots, or fleeing the ranks of the Confederacy and hiding out in swamps, where they create an underground economy. Those who do not disappear into the wilderness are present in towns and cities and along paved and unpaved roads in every state. Seeing the poor, whether it is in the photographs of a Walker Evans or a Dorothea Lange, or in comical form on “reality TV,” we have to wonder how such people exist amid plenty. As she cast her eyes upon southern trailer trash in the middle of World War II, the Washington Post columnist Agnes Meyer asked, “Is this America?” Yes, it is America. It is an essential part of American history. So too is the backlash that occurs when attempts are made to improve the conditions of the poor. Whether it is New Deal polices or LBJ’s welfare programs or Obama-era health care reform, along with any effort to address inequality and poverty comes a harsh and seemingly inevitable reaction. Angry citizens lash out: they perceive government bending over backward to help the poor (implied or stated: undeserving) and they accuse bureaucrats of wasteful spending that steals from hardworking men and women. This was Nixon’s class-inflected appeal, which his campaign staff packaged for the “Silent Majority.” In the larger scheme of things, the modern complaint against state intervention echoes the old English fear of social leveling, which was said to encourage the unproductive. In its later incarnation, government assistance is said to undermine the American dream. Wait. Undermine whose American dream? Class defines how real people live. They don’t live the myth. They don’t live the dream. Politics is always about more than what is stated, or what looms before the eye. Even when it’s denied, politicians engage in class issues. The Civil War was a struggle to shore up both a racial and a class hierarchy. The Confederacy was afraid that poor whites would be drawn in by Union appeals and would vote to end slavery—because slavery was principally a reflection of the wealthy planters’ self-interest.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  warm your childblained fingers as you count coins in the Manhattan snow or is it only Linda who dreams of home? [image file=image_rsrc6HF.jpg] When my mother’s first-born crys for milk in the brutal city winter do the faces of your other daughters dim like the image of the treeferned yard where a dark girl first cooked for you and her ash heap still smells curry? III Did the secret of my sisters steal your tongue like I stole money from your midnight pockets stubborn and quaking as you threaten to shoot me if I am the one? the naked lightbulbs in our kitchen ceiling glint off your service revolver as you load​whispering. Did two little dark girls in Grenada dart like flying fish between your averred eyes and my pajamaless body our last adolescent summer eavesdropped orations to your shaving mirror our most intense conversations were you practicing how to tell me of my twin sisters​abandoned as you had been abandoned by another Black woman seeking her fortune​Grenada​Barbados Panama​Grenada. New York City. IV You bought old books at auction for my unlanguaged world gave me your idols​Marcus Garvey​Citizen Kane and morsels from your dinner plate when I was seven. I owe you my Dahomeyan jaw the free high school for gifted girls no one else thought I should attend and the darkness that we share. Our deepest bonds remain the mirror and the gun. V An elderly Black judge known for his way with women visits this island where I live shakes my hand, smiling “I knew your father,” he says “quite a man!” Smiles again. I flinch at his raised eyebrow. A long-gone woman’s voice lashes out at me​in parting “You will never be satisfied until you have the whole world in your bed!” Now I am older than you were when you died overwork and silence exploding in your brain. You are gradually receding from my face. Who were you outside the 23rd Psalm? Knowing so little how did I become so much like you? Your hunger for rectitude blossoms into rage the hot tears of mourning never shed for you before your twisted measurements the agony of denial the power of unshared secrets. [January 23–September 10, 1992] jessehelms I am a Black woman writing my way to the future off a garbage scow knit from moral fiber stuck together with jessehelms’ come​where Art is a dirty word scrawled on the wall of Bilbo’s memorial outhouse and obscenity is catching even I’d like to hear you scream ream out your pussy with my dildo called Nicaragua ram Grenada up your fighole till Panama runs out of you like Savimbi aflame. But you prefer to do it on the senate floor amid a sackful of paper pricks keeping time to a 195 million dollar military band safe-sex dripping from your tongue into avid senatorial ears. Later you’ll get yours behind the senate toilets where they’re waiting for you jessehelms those white boys with their pendulous rules

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  But no, it was a Black woman, in the Caribbean, telling me I wasn’t acceptable as a tourist in her country—not because of what I do, not even because of who I am, but because of how I wear my hair. I felt chilled to the bone. By this time the young white pilot had come in to see why the flight was being delayed. “What do you mean, because of her HAIR?” Finally an immigration supervisor came, asking me to fill out another entry card. “Why can’t I go on to Virgin Gorda,” I began. “I’ve been there before. And what’s wrong with my hair? It’s not unhealthy, it’s not unsanitary, it’s not immoral, and it certainly is not unnatural!” The supervisor looked at my well-groomed ear-length locks. “Are you a Rasta?” he asked. And then it finally dawned on me what this was all about. He didn’t ask me if I was a murderer. He didn’t ask me if I was a drug dealer, or a racist, or if I was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Instead, he asked me if I was a follower of the Rastafarian religion. Some see locks and they see revolution. Because Rastafarians smoke marijuana as a religious rite, some see locks and automatically see drug peddlers. But the people who are pushing drugs throughout the Caribbean do not wear locks; they wear three-piece suits, carry attaché cases and diplomatic pouches, and usually have no trouble at all passing through Immigration. I stared at this earnest young Black man for a moment. Suddenly my hair became very political. Waves of horror washed over me. How many forms of religious persecution are we now going to visit upon each other as Black people in the name of our public safety? And suppose I was a Rastafarian? What then? Why did that automatically mean I could not vacation in Virgin Gorda? Did it make my tourist dollars unusable? What if he had asked me if I were a Jew? A Quaker? A Protestant? A Catholic? What have we learned from the bloody pages of history and are we really doomed to repeat these mistakes? There was an ache in my heart. I wanted to say, “What does it matter if I am a Rasta or not?” But I saw our bags sitting out in the sun, and the pilot walking slowly back to his plane. Deep in my heart I thought— it is always the same question: where do we begin to take a stand? But I turned away. “No, I’m not a Rastafarian,” I said.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for the Humanities conference a year ago, with the understanding that I would be commenting upon papers dealing with the role of difference within the lives of american women: difference of race, sexuality, class, and age. The absence of these considerations weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political. It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians. And yet, I stand here as a Black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of Black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable. To read this program is to assume that lesbian and Black women have nothing to say about existentialism, the erotic, women’s culture and silence, developing feminist theory, or heterosexuality and power. And what does it mean in personal and political terms when even the two Black women who did present here were literally found at the last hour? What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable. The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of Third World women leaves a serious gap within this conference and within the papers presented here. For example, in a paper on material relationships between women, I was conscious of an either/or model of nurturing which totally dismissed my knowledge as a Black lesbian. In this paper there was no examination of mutuality between women, no systems of shared support, no interdependence as exists between lesbians and women-identified women. Yet it is only in the patriarchal model of nurturance that women “who attempt to emancipate themselves pay perhaps too high a price for the results,” as this paper states. For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection which is so feared by a patriarchal world. Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women. Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be , not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is a difference between the passive be and the active being . Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  But no amount of understanding the roots of Black woman-hating will bring back Patricia Cowan, nor mute her family’s loss. Pain is very visceral, particularly to the people who are hurting. As the poet Mary McAnally said, “Pain teaches us to take our fingers OUT the fucking fire.” * If the problems of Black women are only derivatives of a larger contradiction between capital and labor, then so is racism, and both must be fought by all of us. The capitalist structure is a many-headed monster. I might add here that in no socialist country that I have visited have I found an absence of racism or of sexism, so the eradication of both of these diseases seems to involve more than the abolition of capitalism as an institution. No reasonable Black man can possibly condone the rape and slaughter of Black women by Black men as a fitting response to capitalist oppression. And destruction of Black women by Black men clearly cuts across all class lines. Whatever the “structural underpinnings” (Staples) for sexism in the Black community may be, it is obviously Black women who are bearing the brunt of that sexism, and so it is in our best interest to abolish it. We invite our Black brothers to join us, since ultimately that abolition is in their best interests also. For Black men are also diminished by a sexism which robs them of meaningful connections to Black women and our struggles. Since it is Black women who are being abused, however, and since it is our female blood that is being shed, it is for Black women to decide whether or not sexism in the Black community is pathological. And we do not approach that discussion theoretically. Those “creative relationships” which Staples speaks about within the Black community are almost invariably those which operate to the benefit of Black males, given the Black male/female ratio and the implied power balance within a supply and demand situation. Polygamy is seen as “creative,” but a lesbian relationship is not. This is much the same as how the “creative relationships” between master and slave were always those benefiting the master. The results of woman-hating in the Black community are tragedies which diminish all Black people. These acts must be seen in the context of a systematic devaluation of Black women within this society. It is within this context that we become approved and acceptable targets for Black male rage, so acceptable that even a Black male social scientist condones and excuses this depersonalizing abuse. This abuse is no longer acceptable to Black women in the name of solidarity, nor of Black liberation. Any dialogue between Black women and Black men must begin there, no matter where it ends . * “The Myth of the Black Matriarchy” by Robert Staples in The Black Scholar , vol.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Croix is 5:00 p.m. this evening.” By this time my friend, who wears her hair in braided extensions, tried to come to my aid. “What’s wrong with her hair,” she asked, “and what about mine?” “Yours is all right,” she was told. “That’s just a hairstyle.” “But mine is just a hairstyle too,” I protested, still not believing this was happening to me. I had traveled freely all over the world; now, in a Caribbean country, a Black woman was telling me I could not enter her land because of how I wore my hair? “There is a law on our books,” she said. “You can’t come in here looking LIKE THAT.” I touched my natural locks, of which I was so proud. A year ago I had decided to stop cutting my hair and to grow locks as a personal style statement, much the same as I had worn a natural afro for most of my adult life. I remembered an Essence magazine cover story in the early 80s that had inspired one of my most popular poems— Is Your Hair Still Political? “You can’t be serious,” I said. “Then why didn’t I know about this before? Where is it written in any of your tourist information that Black women are only allowed to wear our hair in certain styles in your country? And why do we have to?” Her smile was gone by now. “It’s been a law for over five years,” she snapped. And I realized she was very serious when I saw our bags being taken off the plane, and it preparing to go on without us. “But how was I supposed to know that?” I protested, visions of our holiday feast defrosting on the tarmac, our friends from New York wondering where we were, our hostess at the airport waiting in vain to drive us to our rented house by the sea. “I’ve read I can’t bring drugs into the British Virgin Islands. I’ve read I can’t seek employment in the British Virgin Islands. I’ve read about everything else I can’t do in the British Virgin Islands, but how are Black tourists supposed to know we can’t wear locks if we visit the British Virgin Islands? Or don’t you want Black tourists?” By now I was outraged. Even with the hot sun outside and the dark face before me, I was confused for a moment as to where I was. Nazi Germany? Fascist Spain? Racist South Africa? One of those places where for so many decades white people had excluded Black people because of how they LOOKED?

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  And the worst of it all is that the highest function of man has been degraded by foul words so that it is almost impossible to write the body’s hymn of joy as it should be written. The poets have been almost as guilty in this respect as the priests: Aristophanes and Rabelais are ribald, dirty: Boccaccio cynical while Ovid leers cold-bloodedly and Zola like Chaucer finds it difficult to suit language to his desires. Walt Whitman is better though often merely commonplace. The Bible is the best of all; but not frank enough even in the noble Song of Solomon which now and then by sheer imagination manages to convey the ineffable! We are beginning to reject Puritanism and its unspeakable, brainless pruderies; but Catholicism is just as bad. Go to the Vatican Gallery and the great Church of St. Peter in Rome and you will find the fairest figures of ancient art clothed in painted tin, as if the most essential organs of the body were disgusting and had to be concealed. I say the body is beautiful and must be lifted and dignified by our reverence: I love the body more than any Pagan of them all and I love the soul and her aspirations as well; for me the body and the soul are alike beautiful, all dedicate to Love and her worship. I have no divided allegiance and what I preach today amid the scorn and hatred of men will be universally accepted tomorrow; for in my vision, too, a thousand years are as one day. We must unite the soul of Paganism, the love of beauty and art and literature with the soul of Christianity and its human lovingkindness in a new synthesis which shall include all the sweet and gentle and noble impulses in us. What we all need is more of the spirit of Jesus: we must learn at length with Shakespeare: “Pardon’s the word for all!” I want to set this Pagan-Christian ideal before men as the highest and most human too. Now one word to my own people and their peculiar shortcomings. Anglo-Saxon domineering combativeness is the greatest danger to Humanity in the world today. Americans are proud of having blotted out the red Indian and stolen his possessions and of burning and torturing negroes in the sacred name of equality. At all costs we must get rid of our hypocrisies and falsehoods and see ourselves as we are—a domineering race, vengeful and brutal, as exemplified in Haiti; we must study the inevitable effects of our soulless, brainless selfishness as shown in the world-war.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  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 bombs, 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; our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support our choices. We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond objectification and beyond guilt . * One poem from this series is included in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1978), pp. 105–108. † This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, New York, 1984), first published in 1981. ‡ From “For Each of You,” first published in From A Land Where Other People Live (Broadside Press, Detroit, 1973), and collected in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1982), p. 42. Martha I Martha this is a catalog of days passing before you looked again. Someday you will browse and order them at will, or in your necessities. I have taken a house at the Jersey shore this summer. It is not my house. Today the lightning bugs came. On the first day you were dead. With each breath the skin of your face moved falling in like crumpled muslin. We scraped together the smashed image of flesh preparing a memory. No words. No words. On the eighth day you startled the doctors speaking from your deathplace to reassure us that you were trying. Martha these are replacement days should you ever need them given for those you once demanded and never found. May this trip be rewarding; no one can fault you again Martha for answering necessity too well and the gods who honor hard work will keep this second coming free from that lack of choice which hindered your first journey to this Tarot house. They said no hope no dreaming accept this case of flesh as evidence of life without fire and wrapped you in an electric blanket kept ten degrees below life.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “I don’t need no company. I done had enough company to last me the rest of my life.” He walked to the window and stood there, his back to Vivaldo. “How I hate them—all those white sons of bitches out there. They’re trying to kill me, you think I don’t know? They got the world on a string, man, the miserable white cock suckers, and they tying that string around my neck, they killing me.” He turned into the room again; he did not look at Vivaldo. “Sometimes I lie here and I listen—just listen. They out there, scuffling, making that change, they think it’s going to last forever. Sometimes I lie here and listen, listen for a bomb, man, to fall on this city and make all that noise stop. I listen to hear them moan, I want them to bleed and choke, I want to hear them crying, man, for somebody to come help them. They’ll cry a long time before I come down there.” He paused, his eyes glittering with tears and with hate. “It’s going to happen one of these days, it’s got to happen. I sure would like to see it.” He walked back to the window. “Sometimes I listen to those boats on the river—I listen to those whistles—and I think wouldn’t it be nice to get on a boat again and go someplace away from all these nowhere people, where a man could be treated like a man.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and then suddenly brought his fist down on the window sill. “You got to fight with the landlord because the landlord’s white! You got to fight with the elevator boy because the motherfucker’s white. Any bum on the Bowery can shit all over you because maybe he can’t hear, can’t see, can’t walk, can’t fuck—but he’s whiter!” “Rufus. Rufus. What about——” He wanted to say, What about me, Rufus? I’m white. He said, “Rufus, not everybody’s like that.” “No? That’s news to me.” “Leona loves you—” “She loves the colored folks so much,” said Rufus, “sometimes I just can’t stand it. You know all that chick knows about me? The only thing she knows?” He put his hand on his sex, brutally, as though he would tear it out, and seemed pleased to see Vivaldo wince. He sat down on the bed again. “That’s all.” “I think you’re out of your mind,” said Vivaldo. But fear drained his voice of conviction. “But she’s the only chick in the world for me,” Rufus added, after a moment, “ain’t that a bitch?” “You’re destroying that girl. Is that what you want?” “She’s destroying me, too,” said Rufus. “Well. Is that what you want?” “What do two people want from each other,” asked Rufus, “when they get together? Do you know?” “Well, they don’t want to drive each other crazy, man. I know that.”