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

  Why weren’t other women of Color found to participate in this conference? Why were two phone calls to me considered a consultation? Am I the only possible source of names of Black feminists? And although the Black panelist’s paper ends on an important and powerful connection of love between women, what about interracial cooperation between feminists who don’t love each other? In academic feminist circles, the answer to these questions is often, “We did not know who to ask.” But that is the same evasion of responsibility, the same cop-out, that keeps Black women’s art out of women’s exhibitions, Black women’s work out of most feminist publications except for the occasional “Special Third World Women’s Issue,” and Black women’s texts off your reading lists. But as Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, white feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the past ten years, how come you haven’t also educated yourselves about Black women and the differences between us—white and Black—when it is key to our survival as a movement? Women 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 Color 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. Simone de Beauvoir once said: “It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting.” Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears . Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices . Sexism An American Disease in Blackface B lack feminism is not white feminism in blackface. Black women have particular and legitimate issues which affect our lives as Black women, and addressing those issues does not make us any less Black. To attempt to open dialogue between Black women and Black men by attacking Black feminists seems shortsighted and self-defeating. Yet this is what Robert Staples, Black sociologist, has done in The Black Scholar .

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

  As soon as I began to take note of things, I remarked that Lizzie no longer came near my room. One day I asked my sister what had become of her. To my astonishment my sister broke out in passionate dislike of her: “while you were lying unconscious”, she cried, “and the doctor was taking your pulse every few minutes, evidently frightened: he asked me could he get a prescription made up at once: he wanted to inject morphia, he said, to stop or check the racing of your heart. He wrote the prescription and I sent Lizzie with it and told her to be as quick as she could for your life might depend on it. When she didn’t come back in ten minutes, I got the Doctor to write it out again and sent Father with it. He brought it back in double-quick time. Hours passed and Lizzie didn’t return: she had gone out before ten and didn’t get back till it was almost one. I asked her where she had been? Why she hadn’t got back sooner? She replied coolly that she had been listening to the Band. I was so shocked and angry I wouldn’t keep her another moment. I sent her away at once. Think of it! I have no patience with such heartless brutes!” Lizzie’s callousness seemed to me even stranger than it seemed to my sister. I have often noticed that girls are less considerate of others than even boys, unless their affections are engaged, but I certainly thought I had half won Lizzie at least! However, the fact is so peculiar that I insert it here for what it may be worth. During my convalescence which lasted three months, Molly went for a visit to some friends: at the time I regretted it; now looking back I have no doubt she went away to free herself from an engagement she thought ill-advised. Missing her I went about with her younger, prettier sister Kathleen who was more sensuous and more affectionate than Molly. A little later, Molly went to Dresden to stay with an elder married sister: thence she wrote to me to set her free and I consented as a matter of course very willingly. Indeed I had already more real affection for Kathleen than Molly had ever called to life in me. As I got strong again I came to know a young Oxford man who professed to be astonished at my knowledge of literature and one day he came to me with the news that Grant Allen, the writer, had thrown up his job as Professor of Literature at Brighton College: “why should you not apply for it: it’s about two hundred pounds a year and they can do no worse than refuse you.”

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

  “You forget”, he went on, “that I had trained myself in the other road of silence: it is difficult for me even now to express myself”, and he went on with bitterness in voice and accent: “They drove me to silence: if you knew what I endured before I got my first step as lieutenant. If it hadn’t been that I was determined to marry your mother, I could never have swallowed the countless humiliations of my brainless superiors! What would have happened to you I saw as in a glass. You were extraordinarily quick, impulsive and high-tempered: don’t you know that brains and energy and will-power are hated by all the wastrels and in this world they are everywhere in the vast majority. Some lieutenant or captain would have taken an instantaneous dislike to you that would have grown on every manifestation of your superiority: he would have laid traps for you of insubordination and insolence probably for months and then in some port where he was powerful, he would have brought you before a court-martial and you would have been dismissed from the Navy in disgrace and perhaps your whole life ruined. The British Navy is the worst place in the world for genius.” That scene began my reconciliation with my father; one more experience completed it. I got wet through on one of our walks and next day had lumbago; I went to a pleasant Welsh doctor I had become acquainted with and he gave me a bottle of belladonna mixture for external use: “I have not got a proper poison bottle”, he added, “and I’ve no business to give you this” (it is forbidden to dispense poisons in Great Britain save in rough octagonal bottles which betray the nature of their contents to the touch). “I’ll not drink it”, I said laughing. “Well, if you do”, he said, “don’t send for me, for there’s more than enough here to kill a dozen men!” I took the bottle and curiously enough, we talked belladonna and its effects for some minutes. Richards, (that was his name) promised to send me a black draught the same evening and he assured me that my lumbago would soon be cured and he was right: but the cure was not effected as he thought it would be.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  The duke, however, missed her, and asked his wife, with a countenance of feigned good-humour, where the damsel was. The duchess, who supposed that he knew the truth, told it him without reserve. He pre- tended to be sorry for this, and said there was no need for her to do so, that he meant her no harm, and that the duchess had better make her come back, for it did no good to have a talk made about such matters. The duchess told him that if the poor girl had been so unfor- tunate as to incur his displeasure, it was better that she should abstain from appearing in his presence for some time ; but he would not be so put off, but insisted on her return. The duchess made known the duke's pleasure to the damsel ; but the latter was not satisfied, and begged her mistress would excuse her from running such a risk, knowing as she did that her husband the duke was not so ready to grant forgiveness. The duchess, however, pledged her life and honour that no harm should happen to her ; and the damsel, who felt sure that her mistress loved her, and would for no consideration deceive her, trusted to her promise, believing that the duke would never violate a promise made by his wife on her life and honour, and she returned to court. As soon as the duke was aware of this, he entered his wife's chamber ; and the moment he set eyes upon the poor damsel, he ordered his gentlemen to arrest her, and take her to prison. The duchess, who had induced her to quit her asylum Stxfhday.l QUEEN OF NAVARRE. 429 upon the faith of her word, was filled with horror, and throwing herself at her husband's feet, besought him, for his own honour and that of his house, not to do such an act. But no supplications she could make, no argu- ments she could urge, had power to soften his hard heart, or turn him from his stubborn purpose to be re- venged. Without answering his wife a word, he abruptly- quitted the room, and without form of justice, forgetting God and the honour of his house, this cruel duke had the poor girl hanged.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  To excel is considered a positive difference, and so you will be encouraged to think of yourselves as the elite. To be poor, or of Color, or female, or homosexual, or old is considered negative, and so these people are encouraged to think of themselves as surplus. Each of these imposed definitions has a place not in human growth and progress, but in human separation, for they represent the dehumanization of difference. And certainly there are very real differences between us, of race, sex, age, sexuality, class, vision. But it is not the differences between us that tear us apart, destroying the commonalities we share. Rather, it is our refusal to examine the distortions which arise from their misnaming, and from the illegitimate usage of those differences which can be made when we do not claim them nor define them for ourselves. Racism. The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance. Ageism. Heterosexism. Elitism. These are some of the distortions created around human differences, all serving the purpose of further separation. It is a lifetime pursuit for each one of us to extract these distortions from our living at the same time as we recognize, reclaim, and define the differences upon which they are imposed, and explore what these differences can teach us about the future we must all share. And we do not have forever. The distortions are endemic in our society, and so we pour energy needed for exposing difference into pretending these differences do not exist, thereby encouraging false and treacherous connections. Or we pretend the differences are insurmountable barriers, which encourages a voluntary isolation. Either way, we do not develop tools for using our differences as springboards for creative change within our lives. Often, we do not even speak of human difference, which is a comparison of attributes best evaluated by their possible effect and illumination within our lives. Instead, we speak of deviance, which is a judgment upon the relationship between the attribute and some long-fixed and established construct. Somewhere on the edge of all our consciousness there is what I call the mythical norm, which each of us knows within our hearts is “not me.” In this society, that norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure. It is within this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside. Those of us who stand outside that power, for any reason, often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that quality to be the primary reason for all oppression. We forget those other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be acting out within our daily lives. For unacknowledged difference robs all of us of each other’s energy and creative insight, and creates a false hierarchy.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Her accomplishments tend to be diminished. The introducer might laugh awkwardly, rushing through whatever impoverished remarks they have prepared. Rarely do they do the necessary research to offer any sense of whom they are introducing. The black woman is spoken of in terms of anecdote rather than accomplishment. She is referred to as sassy on Twitter, maybe, or as a lover of bacon, random tidbits bearing no relation to the reasons why she is in that professional setting. Whenever this happens to me or I witness it happening to another black woman, I turn to Audre Lorde. I wonder how Lorde would respond to such a micro-aggression because in her prescient writings she demonstrated, time and again, a remarkable and necessary ability to stand up for herself, her intellectual prowess and that of all black women, with power and grace. She recognized the importance of speaking up because silence would not protect her or anyone. She recognized that there would never be a perfect time to speak up because, “while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.” In 1979, for example, Audre Lorde wrote a letter to Mary Daly, and when Daly did not respond to her missive Lorde made her entreaty an open letter. Lorde was primarily concerned with the erasure of black women in Daly’s Gyn/Ecology , a manifesto urging women toward a more radical feminism. In her open letter, Lorde wrote, “So the question arises in my mind, Mary, do you ever really read the work of Black women? Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us? This is not a rhetorical question.” The letter is both gracious and incisive. What Lorde is really demanding of Daly and white feminists more broadly is for them to seriously engage with and acknowledge black women’s intellectual labor. In the thirty years since Lorde wrote that open letter, black women have continued to implore white women to recognize and engage with their intellectual contributions and the material realities of their lives. They have asked white women to acknowledge that, as Lorde also wrote in her open letter to Daly, “The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences.” One of the hallmarks of Lorde’s prose and poetry is her willingness to recognize, acknowledge, and honor the lived realities of women—not only those who share her subject position but also those who do not. Her thinking always embodied what we now know as intersectionality and did so long before intersectionality became a defining feature of contemporary feminism in word if not in deed.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Of unleashing the damned gall where hatred swims like a tadpole waiting to swell into the arms of war? And what does that war teach when the bruised leavings jump an insurmountable wall where the glorious Berlin chestnuts and orange poppies hide detection wires that spray bullets which kill? My poems are filled with blood these days because the future is so bloody. When the blood of four-year-old children runs unremarked through the alleys of Soweto, how can I pretend that sweetness is anything more than armor and ammunition in an ongoing war? I am saving my life by using my life in the service of what must be done. Tonight as I listened to the ANC speakers from South Africa at the Third World People’s Center here, I was filled with a sense of self answering necessity, of commitment as a survival weapon. Our battles are inseparable. Every person I have ever been must be actively enlisted in those battles, as well as in the battle to save my life. June 9, 1984 Berlin At the poetry reading in Zurich this weekend, I found it so much easier to discuss racism than to talk about The Cancer Journals. Chemical plants between Zurich and Basel have been implicated in a definite rise in breast cancer in this region, and women wanted to discuss this. I talked as honestly as I could, but it was really hard. Their questions presume a clarity I no longer have. It was great to have Gloria there to help field all those questions about racism. For the first time in europe, I felt I was not alone but answering as one of a group of Black women—not just Audre Lorde! I am cultivating every iota of my energies to do battle with the possibility of liver cancer. At the same time, I am discovering how furious and resistant some pieces of me are, as well as how terrified. In this loneliest of places, I examine every decision I make within the light of what I’ve learned about myself and that self-destructiveness implanted inside of me by racism and sexism and the circumstances of my life as a Black woman. Mother why were we armed to fight with cloud wreathed swords and javelins of dust? Survival isn’t some theory operating in a vacuum. It’s a matter of my everyday living and making decisions. How do I hold faith with sun in a sunless place? It is so hard not to counter this despair with a refusal to see. But I have to stay open and filtering no matter what’s coming at me, because that arms me in a particularly Black woman’s way. When I’m open, I’m also less despairing.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  But that gospel was under attack as well. It was a struggle which had to come and a battle which had to be fought. There were Jews who had accepted Christianity; but they believed that all God's promises and gifts were for Jews alone and that no Gentile could be admitted to these precious privileges. They therefore believed that Christianity was for Jews and Jews alone. If Christianity was God's greatest gift to men and women, that was all the more reason that only Jews should be allowed to enjoy it. In a way, that was inevitable. There were some Jews who arrogantly believed in the idea of the chosen people. They could say the most terrible things: `God loves only Israel of all the nations he has made.' `God will judge Israel with one measure and the Gentiles with another.' `The best of the snakes crush; the best of the Gentiles kill.' `God created the Gentiles to be fuel for the fires of Hell.' This was the spirit which made the law lay it down that it was illegal to help a Gentile mother in giving birth, for that would only be to bring another Gentile into the world. When these particular Jews saw Paul bringing the gospel to the despised Gentiles, they were appalled and infuriated. The Law There was a way out of this. If Gentiles wanted to become Christians, let them become Jews first. What did that mean? It meant that they must be circumcised and take on the whole burden of the law. That, for Paul, was the opposite of all that Christianity meant. It meant that a person's salvation was dependent on the ability to keep the law and could be won by an individual's unaided efforts, whereas, to Paul, salvation was entirely a thing of grace. He believed that no one could ever earn the favour of God. All that anyone could do was accept the love God offered by making an act of faith and appealing to God's mercy. A Jew would go to God saying: `Look! Here is my circumcision. Here are my good deeds. Give me the salvation I have earned.' Paul would say, as A. M. Toplady's great hymn `Rock of Ages' expresses it so well: [image file=img/page0146_0000.svg] For him, the essential point was not what we could do for God, but what God had done for us.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  As I looked over the record and searched my memory, I was surer than ever that the James’s quarrels had more passion than content. They were not fighting over infidelity—which was apparently old hat—so much as wanting to hurt each other. Each heatedly denied the other’s accusations. Yet, like so many divorcing couples, they fought savagely, as the children looked on helplessly or ran away and hid. As happens in many families, there was no disagreement around child custody or visiting. Mrs. James would have done anything to irritate her husband, including making him take the kids—as long as that is what he did not want. Anger Doesn’t End with DivorceTHE MARRIAGE WAS dissolved amid rising chaos within the family. The parents’ fury at each other did not subside over the years that followed, although it was never fought out in the courts. This is a familiar situation for those of us who work with divorcing couples. Contrary to what most people think (including attorneys and judges), the vast majority of divorcing parents do not drag their conflicts into the courtroom. The 10 to 15 percent of couples who do fight in court consume the lion’s share of our attention but they do not represent the norm.1 Most parents negotiate a divorce settlement, decide on custody arrangements, and go their separate ways. Unfortunately, many of them stay intensely angry with one another. In our study, a third of the couples were fighting at the same high pitch ten years after their divorce was final. Their enduring anger stemmed from continued feelings of hurt and humiliation fueled by new complaints (child support is too burdensome or too little) and jealousy over new, often younger partners. The notion that divorce ends the intense love/hate relationship of the marriage is another myth of our times. Like many divorced people, Karen’s mother frequently called her ex-husband and got into shouting matches. As a result, the children were exposed to the hurt and anger that led to the breakup throughout their growing up years. Millions of children today experience the same unrelenting drama of longing and anger that refuses to die.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Wait a minute, I said. I need to feel this thing out and see what’s going on inside myself first, I said, needing some time to absorb the shock, time to assay the situation and not act out of panic. Not one of them said, I can respect that, but don’t take too long about it. Instead, that simple claim to my body’s own processes elicited such an attack response from a reputable Specialist In Liver Tumors that my deepest—if not necessarily most useful—suspicions were totally aroused. What that doctor could have said to me that I would have heard was, “You have a serious condition going on in your body and whatever you do about it you must not ignore it or delay deciding how you are going to deal with it because it will not go away no matter what you think it is.” Acknowledging my responsibility for my own body. Instead, what he said to me was, “If you do not do exactly what I tell you to do right now without questions you are going to die a horrible death.” In exactly those words. I felt the battle lines being drawn up within my own body. I saw this specialist in liver tumors at a leading cancer hospital in New York City, where I had been referred as an outpatient by my own doctor. 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!

• 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?