Hope

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 Sister Outsider (1984)

  Audre: What I was defending was something that needed defense. And this moved it out of “I’m defending Ed because I want to live with him.” It was, “I’m defending this relationship because we have a right to examine it and try it.” So there’s the northern Black poet making contact with these young southern Black people who are not saying, “This is what we need you for,” but were telling me by who they were what they needed from me. In the poem “Black Studies”* a lot of that starts coming through. Tougaloo laid the foundation for that poem, that knowledge born five years later. My students needed my perception, yet my perception of their need was different from what they were saying. What they were saying aloud was, “We need strong Black people,” but what they were also saying was that their ideas of what strong was had come from our oppressors and didn’t jibe with their feelings at all. It was through poetry that we began to deal with these things — formally. I knew nothing. Adrienne, I had never read a book about poetry! I picked up one day a book by Karl Shapiro, a little thin white book. I opened it and something he said made sense. “Poetry doesn’t sell Cadillacs.” It was the first time I’d ever talked about writing; always before I’d listened — part of my being inarticulate, inscrutable; I didn’t understand in terms of verbalization, and if I did I was too terrified to speak anyway. But at Tougaloo we talked about poetry. And I got the first copies of my book there at Tougaloo. I had never been in this relationship with Black people before. Never. There had been a very uneasy dialogue between me and the Harlem Writers’ Guild where I felt I was tolerated but never really accepted — that I was both crazy and queer but would grow out of it all. Johnny Clarke adopted me because he really loved me, and he’s a kind man. And he taught me wonderful things about Africa. And he said to me, “You are a poet. You are a poet. I don’t understand your poetry but you are a poet, you are.” So I would get this underlining of me. “You’re not doing what you’re supposed to do, but, yes, you can do it and we totally expect you to. You are a bright and shining light. You’re off on a lot of wrong turns — women, the Village, white people, all of this, but you’re young yet. You’ll find your way.” So I would get these double messages, this kind of underlining and rejection at the same time. It reduplicated my family, you see. In my family it was: “You’re a Lorde, so that makes you special and particular above anybody else in the world. But you’re not our kind of Lorde, so when are you going to straighten out and act right?”

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  All of us have had to learn to live or work or coexist with men, from our fathers on. We have recognized and negotiated these differences, even when this recognition only continued the old dominant/subordinate mode of human relationship, where the oppressed must recognize the masters’ difference in order to survive. But our future survival is predicated upon our ability to relate within equality. As women, we must root out internalized patterns of oppression within ourselves if we are to move beyond the most superficial aspects of social change. Now we must recognize differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each others’ difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles. The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference. The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us. The old patterns, no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate progress, still condemn us to cosmetically altered repetitions of the same old exchanges, the same old guilt, hatred, recrimination, lamentation, and suspicion. For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. As Paulo Freire shows so well in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed , * the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships. Change means growth, and growth can be painful. But we sharpen self-definition by exposing the self in work and struggle together with those whom we define as different from ourselves, although sharing the same goals. For Black and white, old and young, lesbian and heterosexual women alike, this can mean new paths to our survival. We have chosen each other and the edge of each others 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 we seek beyond history for a new and more possible meeting . ** * Paper delivered at the Copeland Colloquium, Amherst College, April 1980. * From “Rape: A Radical Analysis, An African-American Perspective” by Kalamu ya Salaam in Black Books Bulletin , vol. 6, no. 4 (1980). * Seabury Press, New York, 1970. ** From “Outlines,” unpublished poem. The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism * Racism . The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance, manifest and implied. Women respond to racism .

• From Between Us

  When we communicate, we should do so in the expectation of finding differences, not only similarities. We should also expect to have to explain our own emotions, as they are neither natural nor universal. When I first presented this idea to a group of scholars a few years back, some responded with distress. How can we ever hope to connect to each other, if our emotions do not even line up? Their response made me aware of the idealism that often hides behind the assumption that emotions are universal. It is not only emotional imperialism that drives the projection of our own emotions onto those of individuals from other cultures. Equally important in a globalized world is the desire to build on emotions for a shared understanding of humanity. There is no need for despair: It is possible to find humanity, even in the absence of universal feelings. It is possible to get familiar with the emotions of people from other cultures. Cultural differences in emotions have a logic: they become understandable once we know what people in these different contexts care about—that is, once we understand their norms, values, and goals. Most importantly, once you understand the emotions of people from other cultural groups, you will realize that your own emotions are not the universal default. Emotions—our own included—are as dependent on our culture as our clothes, our language, and the foods we feed our children. The mosaic of emotional life is too complex to ever fully map in a go-to reference manual and this is certainly not the goal of this book. What I want to convey, instead, is that there is a logic to cultural differences in emotions. We can teach ourselves to expect differences in emotions, and to keep an open mind. By embracing emotional difference, we lay the groundwork for truly bridging cultures and finding common ground. Chapter 2. . . . . . . . . Emotions: MINE or OURS?The Pixar movie Inside Out (released in 2015) casts five emotions—Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger—that live inside the mind of a little girl, Riley Anderson, and compete with each other to guide her actions. The movie is delightful, and delivers several wise lessons. Here I want to focus on its portrayal of emotions themselves: In each person’s mind, the same emotions are hiding, awaiting an opportunity to act in their own typical ways. Each emotion is represented by its own little figurine, their essence, and with a set of fixed properties. Anger, for instance, is a red figurine. Regardless of the situation in which it occurs, and also regardless of the person in whom it manifests itself, anger is the “same thing.” When Riley and her parents are in a heated conversation, a red anger figurine is activated in each of them. Anger is a Platonic essence that gets instantiated in the same way across different individuals and situations.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  The raw energy of Black determination released in the 60s powered changes in Black awareness and self-concepts and expectations. This energy is still being felt in movements for change among women, other peoples of Color, gays, the handicapped — among all the disenfranchised peoples of this society. That is a legacy of the 60s to ourselves and to others. But we must recognize that many of our high expectations of rapid revolutionary change did not in fact occur. And many of the gains that did are even now being dismantled. This is not a reason for despair, nor for rejection of the importance of those years. But we must face with clarity and insight the lessons to be learned from the oversimplification of any struggle for self-awareness and liberation, or we will not rally the force we need to face the multidimensional threats to our survival in the 80s. There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. Malcolm knew this. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew this. Our struggles are particular, but we are not alone. We are not perfect, but we are stronger and wiser than the sum of our errors. Black people have been here before us and survived. We can read their lives like signposts on the road and find, as Bernice Reagon says so poignantly, that each one of us is here because somebody before us did something to make it possible. To learn from their mistakes is not to lessen our debt to them, nor to the hard work of becoming ourselves, and effective. We lose our history so easily, what is not predigested for us by the New York Times, or the Amsterdam News, or Time magazine. Maybe because we do not listen to our poets or to our fools, maybe because we do not listen to our mamas in ourselves. When I hear the deepest truths I speak coming out of my mouth sounding like my mother’s, even remembering how I fought against her, I have to reassess both our relationship as well as the sources of my knowing. Which is not to say that I have to romanticize my mother in order to appreciate what she gave me — Woman, Black. We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present. We do not have to suffer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding. We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is not to lie to ourselves. We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about — survival and growth.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Poetry Is Not a Luxury * T HE QUALITY OF LIGHT by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are — until the poem — nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding. As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us. For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, “beautiful/and tough as chestnut/stanchions against (y)our nightmare of weakness/” ** and of impotence. These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep. When we view living in the european mode only as a problem to be solved, we rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious. But as we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes. At this point in time, I believe that women carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion of these two approaches so necessary for survival, and we come closest to this combination in our poetry. I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight. For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  It was a time of great hope and great expectation; it was also a time of great waste. That is history. We do not need to repeat these mistakes in the 80s. The raw energy of Black determination released in the 60s powered changes in Black awareness and self-concepts and expectations. This energy is still being felt in movements for change among women, other peoples of Color, gays, the handicapped — among all the disenfranchised peoples of this society. That is a legacy of the 60s to ourselves and to others. But we must recognize that many of our high expectations of rapid revolutionary change did not in fact occur. And many of the gains that did are even now being dismantled. This is not a reason for despair, nor for rejection of the importance of those years. But we must face with clarity and insight the lessons to be learned from the oversimplification of any struggle for self-awareness and liberation, or we will not rally the force we need to face the multidimensional threats to our survival in the 80s. There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. Malcolm knew this. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew this. Our struggles are particular, but we are not alone. We are not perfect, but we are stronger and wiser than the sum of our errors. Black people have been here before us and survived. We can read their lives like signposts on the road and find, as Bernice Reagon says so poignantly, that each one of us is here because somebody before us did something to make it possible. To learn from their mistakes is not to lessen our debt to them, nor to the hard work of becoming ourselves, and effective. We lose our history so easily, what is not predigested for us by the New York Times , or the Amsterdam News , or Time magazine. Maybe because we do not listen to our poets or to our fools, maybe because we do not listen to our mamas in ourselves. When I hear the deepest truths I speak coming out of my mouth sounding like my mother’s, even remembering how I fought against her, I have to reassess both our relationship as well as the sources of my knowing. Which is not to say that I have to romanticize my mother in order to appreciate what she gave me — Woman, Black. We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present. We do not have to suffer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Certainly it is no more empowering. And it is empowerment — our strengthening in the service of ourselves and each other, in the service of our work and future — that will be the result of this pursuit. I have to learn to love myself before I can love you or accept your loving. You have to learn to love yourself before you can love me or accept my loving. Know we are worthy of touch before we can reach out for each other. Not cover that sense of worthlessness with “I don’t want you” or “it doesn’t matter” or “white folks feel, Black folks DO.” And these are enormously difficult to accomplish in an environment that consistently encourages nonlove and cover-up, an environment that warns us to be quiet about our need of each other, by defining our dissatisfactions as unanswerable and our necessities as unobtainable. Until now, there has been little that taught us how to be kind to each other. To the rest of the world, yes, but not to ourselves. There have been few external examples of how to treat another Black woman with kindness, deference, tenderness or an appreciative smile in passing, just because she IS; an understanding of each other’s shortcomings because we have been somewhere close to that, ourselves. When last did you compliment another sister, give recognition to her specialness? We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other. But we can practice being gentle with ourselves by being gentle with each other. We can practice being gentle with each other by being gentle with that piece of ourselves that is hardest to hold, by giving more to the brave bruised girlchild within each of us, by expecting a little less from her gargantuan efforts to excel. We can love her in the light as well as in the darkness, quiet her frenzy toward perfection and encourage her attentions toward fulfillment. Maybe then we will come to appreciate more how much she has taught us, and how much she is doing to keep this world revolving toward some livable future. It would be ridiculous to believe that this process is not lengthy and difficult. It is suicidal to believe it is not possible. As we arm ourselves with ourselves and each other, we can stand toe to toe inside that rigorous loving and begin to speak the impossible — or what has always seemed like the impossible — to one another. The first step toward genuine change.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Most likely there will always be women who move with women, women who live with men, men who choose men. I work for a time when women with women, women with men, men with men, all share the work of a world that does not barter bread or self for obedience, nor beauty, nor love. And in that world we will raise our children free to choose how best to fulfill themselves. For we are jointly responsible for the care and raising of the young, since that they be raised is a function, ultimately, of the species. Within that tripartite pattern of relating/existence, the raising of the young will be the joint responsibility of all adults who choose to be associated with children. Obviously, the children raised within each of these three relationships will be different, lending a special savor to that eternal inquiry into how best can we live our lives. Jonathan was three-and-a-half when Frances and I met. He is now fourteen years old. I feel the living perspective that having lesbian parents has brought to Jonathan is a valuable addition to his human sensitivity. Jonathan has had the advantage of growing up within a nonsexist relationship, one in which this society’s pseudo-natural assumptions of ruler/ruled are being challenged. And this is not only because Frances and I are lesbians, for unfortunately there are some lesbians who are still locked into patriarchal patterns of unequal power relationships. These assumptions of power relationships are being questioned because Frances and I, often painfully and with varying degrees of success, attempt to evaluate and measure over and over again our feelings concerning power, our own and others’. And we explore with care those areas concerning how it is used and expressed between us and between us and the children, openly and otherwise. A good part of our biweekly family meetings are devoted to this exploration. As parents, Frances and I have given Jonathan our love, our openness, and our dreams to help form his visions. Most importantly, as the son of lesbians, he has had an invaluable model — not only of a relationship — but of relating. Jonathan is fourteen now. In talking over this paper with him and asking his permission to share some pieces of his life, I asked Jonathan what he felt were the strongest negative and the strongest positive aspects for him in having grown up with lesbian parents. He said the strongest benefit he felt he had gained was that he knew a lot more about people than most other kids his age that he knew, and that he did not have a lot of the hang-ups that some other boys did about men and women. And the most negative aspect he felt, Jonathan said, was the ridicule he got from some kids with straight parents. “You mean, from your peers?”

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Mothering ourselves means learning to love what we have given birth to by giving definition to, learning how to be both kind and demanding in the teeth of failure as well as in the face of success, and not misnaming either. When you come to respect the character of the time you will not have to cover emptyness with pretense . * We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created. As we fear each other less and value each other more, we will come to value recognition within each other’s eyes as well as within our own, and seek a balance between these visions. Mothering. Claiming some power over who we choose to be, and knowing that such power is relative within the realities of our lives. Yet knowing that only through the use of that power can we effectively change those realities. Mothering means the laying to rest of what is weak, timid, and damaged — without despisal — the protection and support of what is useful for survival and change, and our joint explorations of the difference. I recall a beautiful and intricate sculpture from the court of the Queen Mother of Benin, entitled “The Power Of The Hand.” It depicts the Queen Mother, her court women, and her warriors in a circular celebration of the human power to achieve success in practical and material ventures, the ability to make something out of anything. In Dahomey, that power is female. VIII Theorizing about self-worth is ineffective. So is pretending. Women can die in agony who have lived with blank and beautiful faces. I can afford to look at myself directly, risk the pain of experiencing who I am not, and learn to savor the sweetness of who I am. I can make friends with all the different pieces of me, liked and disliked. Admit that I am kinder to my neighbor’s silly husband most days than I am to myself. I can look into the mirror and learn to love the stormy little Black girl who once longed to be white or anything other than who she was, since all she was ever allowed to be was the sum of the color of her skin and the textures of her hair, the shade of her knees and elbows, and those things were clearly not acceptable as human. Learning to love ourselves as Black women goes beyond a simplistic insistence that “Black is beautiful.” It goes beyond and deeper than a surface appreciation of Black beauty, although that is certainly a good beginning. But if the quest to reclaim ourselves and each other remains there, then we risk another superficial measurement of self, one superimposed upon the old one and almost as damaging, since it pauses at the superficial.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  When we view living in the european mode only as a problem to be solved, we rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious. But as we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes. At this point in time, I believe that women carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion of these two approaches so necessary for survival, and we come closest to this combination in our poetry. I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight. For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before. Possibility is neither forever nor instant. It is not easy to sustain belief in its efficacy. We can sometimes work long and hard to establish one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths we are expected to live, only to have that beachhead assaulted or threatened by those canards we have been socialized to fear, or by the withdrawal of those approvals that we have been warned to seek for safety.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  But this does not mean that my responsibility for my son’s education stops at age ten, any more than it does for my daughter’s. However, for each of them, that responsibility does grow less and less as they become more woman and man. Both Beth and Jonathan need to know what they can share and what they cannot, how they are joined and how they are not. And Frances and I, as grown women and lesbians coming more and more into our power, need to relearn the experience that difference does not have to be threatening. When I envision the future, I think of the world I crave for my daughters and my sons. It is thinking for survival of the species — thinking for life. Most likely there will always be women who move with women, women who live with men, men who choose men. I work for a time when women with women, women with men, men with men, all share the work of a world that does not barter bread or self for obedience, nor beauty, nor love. And in that world we will raise our children free to choose how best to fulfill themselves. For we are jointly responsible for the care and raising of the young, since that they be raised is a function, ultimately, of the species. Within that tripartite pattern of relating/existence, the raising of the young will be the joint responsibility of all adults who choose to be associated with children. Obviously, the children raised within each of these three relationships will be different, lending a special savor to that eternal inquiry into how best can we live our lives. Jonathan was three-and-a-half when Frances and I met. He is now fourteen years old. I feel the living perspective that having lesbian parents has brought to Jonathan is a valuable addition to his human sensitivity. Jonathan has had the advantage of growing up within a nonsexist relationship, one in which this society’s pseudo-natural assumptions of ruler/ruled are being challenged. And this is not only because Frances and I are lesbians, for unfortunately there are some lesbians who are still locked into patriarchal patterns of unequal power relationships. These assumptions of power relationships are being questioned because Frances and I, often painfully and with varying degrees of success, attempt to evaluate and measure over and over again our feelings concerning power, our own and others’. And we explore with care those areas concerning how it is used and expressed between us and between us and the children, openly and otherwise. A good part of our biweekly family meetings are devoted to this exploration. As parents, Frances and I have given Jonathan our love, our openness, and our dreams to help form his visions. Most importantly, as the son of lesbians, he has had an invaluable model — not only of a relationship — but of relating.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Unlike push motivations, which require you to face your distress and be made uncomfortable, pull motivations promise potential rewards and benefits. Believable, enticing images of how your life can be more fulfilling are immensely helpful in keeping motivation alive even in the face of adversity. Maggie was willing to consider stepping outside the familiar framework of unfulfilled longing not simply because she feared a life of loneliness but also because she had experienced moments of actual intimacy and was beginning to believe she deserved more of it. Similarly, Ryan was not only pushed by shame about being a prisoner of his taboo impulses, he was also pulled by a genuine desire to feel closer to his girlfriend. ANTIMOTIVATIONSWhen you set out to change an entrenched pattern, sooner or later you will feel inclined to back away from the very changes you seek. Psychologists call this resistance. All kinds of doubts and fears, both conscious and unconscious, can contribute to resistance. What if you fail? What are the implications of success? Could tampering with your eroticism ruin it? Will friends, family members, or sexual partners encourage you, or might they be threatened by what you’re doing? If your sexuality changes will you still recognize yourself? These concerns, along with a host of others, are antimotivators because they prevent you from vigorously pursuing your goals. Antimotivators are as much a part of the change process as your goals and motivations. Because antimotivators are most likely to undermine change when they operate subconsciously, it’s smart to become as aware of them as possible. If you face your fears about change rather than suppress them you will be much better able to address what concerns you. Antimotivators contain crucial information about which courageous acts are called for—and when. YOUR MAP FOR CHANGESuccessful and fulfilling erotic changes involve all three: push motivators, pull motivators, and antimotivators. To boost your awareness, put them all together on one piece of paper so you can see them at a single glance. Write the headline GOALS, and then list your objectives as clearly as you can. Maggie’s Motivational Map Goals: • To be attracted to someone available for a relationship • To only love someone who loves me in return • To develop other turn-ons besides longing • To let myself accept love [image file=image_rsrc3FH.jpg] Next divide the area below your goals into three columns. Label the left column Push Motivators. As specifically as possible, list the reasons that you believe change is necessary. Focus on what concerns you about your eroticism—anything that causes pain or distress. Label the middle column Pull Motivators. Here spell out how you hope to benefit, either immediately or in the long run. Label the right column Antimotivators and list any fears and hesitations that might hold you back.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Some of us made it and some of us were lost to the struggle. It was a time of great hope and great expectation; it was also a time of great waste. That is history. We do not need to repeat these mistakes in the 80s. The raw energy of Black determination released in the 60s powered changes in Black awareness and self-concepts and expectations. This energy is still being felt in movements for change among women, other peoples of Color, gays, the handicapped — among all the disenfranchised peoples of this society. That is a legacy of the 60s to ourselves and to others. But we must recognize that many of our high expectations of rapid revolutionary change did not in fact occur. And many of the gains that did are even now being dismantled. This is not a reason for despair, nor for rejection of the importance of those years. But we must face with clarity and insight the lessons to be learned from the oversimplification of any struggle for self-awareness and liberation, or we will not rally the force we need to face the multidimensional threats to our survival in the 80s. There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. Malcolm knew this. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew this. Our struggles are particular, but we are not alone. We are not perfect, but we are stronger and wiser than the sum of our errors. Black people have been here before us and survived. We can read their lives like signposts on the road and find, as Bernice Reagon says so poignantly, that each one of us is here because somebody before us did something to make it possible. To learn from their mistakes is not to lessen our debt to them, nor to the hard work of becoming ourselves, and effective. We lose our history so easily, what is not predigested for us by the New York Times, or the Amsterdam News, or Time magazine. Maybe because we do not listen to our poets or to our fools, maybe because we do not listen to our mamas in ourselves. When I hear the deepest truths I speak coming out of my mouth sounding like my mother’s, even remembering how I fought against her, I have to reassess both our relationship as well as the sources of my knowing. Which is not to say that I have to romanticize my mother in order to appreciate what she gave me — Woman, Black. We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Women see ourselves diminished or softened by the falsely benign accusations of childishness, of nonuniversality, of changeability, of sensuality. And who asks the question: Am I altering your aura, your ideas, your dreams, or am I merely moving you to temporary and reactive action? And even though the latter is no mean task, it is one that must be seen within the context of a need for true alteration of the very foundations of our lives. The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us — the poet — whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom. However, experience has taught us that action in the now is also necessary, always. Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours? “If you want us to change the world someday, we at least have to live long enough to grow up!” shouts the child. Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves — along with the renewed courage to try them out. And we must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply, and so many of our old ideas disparage. In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only poetry to hint at possibility made real. Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors. For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare. If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core — the fountain — of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt — of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead — while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths. * First published in Chrysalis: A Magazine of Female Culture, no. 3 (1977). ** From “Black Mother Woman,” 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 and Company, New York, 1982) p. 53. The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action * I HAVE COME to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect. I am standing here as a Black lesbian poet, and the meaning of all that waits upon the fact that I am still alive, and might not have been. Less than two months ago I was told by two doctors, one female and one male, that I would have to have breast surgery, and that there was a 60 to 80 percent chance that the tumor was malignant. Between that telling and the actual surgery, there was a three-week period of the agony of an involuntary reorganization of my entire life. The surgery was completed, and the growth was benign. But within those three weeks, I was forced to look upon myself and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has left me still shaken but much stronger. This is a situation faced by many women, by some of you here today. Some of what I experienced during that time has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning the transformation of silence into language and action. In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "If we survey the held of history and ask what feature all great periods of revival, of expansion of the human mind, display in common, we shall find, I think, simply this: that each and all of them have said to the human being, 'The inmost nature of the reality is congenial to powers which you possess.' In what did the emancipating message of primitive Christianity consist, but in the announcement that God recognizes those weak and tender impulses which paganism had so rudely overlooked. Take repentance: the man who can do nothing rightly can at least repent of his failures. But for paganism this faculty of repentance was a pure supernumerary, a straggler too late for the fair. Christianity took it and made it the one power within us which appealed straight to the heart of God. And after the night of the Middle Ages had so long branded with obloquy even the generous impulses of the flesh, and defined the Reality to be such that only slavish natures could commune with it, in what did the Sursum corda! of the Renaissance lie but in the proclamation that the archetype of verity in things laid claim on the widest activity of our whole æsthetic being? What were Luther's mission and Wesley's but appeals to powers which even the meanest of men might carry with them, faith and self-despair, but which were personal, requiring no priestly intermediation, and which brought their owner face to face with God? What caused the wild-fire influence of Rousseau but the assurance he gave that man's nature was in harmony with the nature of things, if only the paralyzing corruptions of custom would stand from between? How did Kant and Fichte, Goethe and Schiller, inspire their time with cheer, except by saying, 'Use all your powers; that is the only obedience which the universe exacts'? And Carlyle with his gospel of Work, of Fact, of Veracity, how does he move us except by saying that the universe imposes no tasks upon us but such as the most humble can perform? Emerson's creed that everything that ever was or will be is here in the enveloping now; that man has but to obey himself—' He who will rest in what he is, is a part of Destiny'—is in like manner nothing but an exorcism of all scepticism as to the pertinency of one's natural faculties."

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  The people here in Tashkent, which is quite close to the Iranian border, are very diverse, and I am impressed by their apparent unity, by the ways in which the Russian and the Asian people seem to be able to function in a multinational atmosphere that requires of them that they get along, whether or not they are each other’s favorite people. And it’s not that there are no individuals who are nationalists, or racists, but that the taking of a state position against nationalism, against racism is what makes it possible for a society like this to function. And of course the next step in that process must be the personal element. I don’t see anyone attempting or even suggesting this phase, however, and that is troublesome, for without this step socialism remains at the mercy of an incomplete vision, imposed from the outside. We have internal desires but outside controls. But at least there is a climate here that seems to encourage those questions. I asked Helen about the Jews, and she was rather evasive, I think, saying only that there were Jews in government. The basic position seems to be one of a presumption of equality, even though there is sometimes a large gap between the expectation and the reality. We visited a film studio and saw several children’s cartoons which handled their themes beautifully, deeply, with great humor, and most notably, without the kind of violence that we have come to associate with cartoons. They were truly delightful.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  We constantly have to be making it, depending on where we are, over and over. Audre: But I do think that we have been taught to think, to codify information in certain old ways, to learn, to understand in certain ways. The possible shapes of what has not been before exist only in that back place, where we keep those unnamed, untamed longings for something different and beyond what is now called possible, and to which our understanding can only build roads, But we have been taught to deny those fruitful areas of ourselves. I personally believe that the Black mother exists more in women; yet she is the name for a humanity that men are not without. But they have taken a position against that piece of themselves, and it is a world position, a position throughout time. And I’ve said this to you before, Adrienne, I feel that we’re evolving. In terms of a species ... Adrienne: That women are evolving ... Audre: That the human race is evolving through women. That it’s not by accident that there are more and more women — this sounds crazy, doesn’t it — women being born, women surviving ... and we’ve got to take that promise of new power seriously, or we’ll make the same mistakes all over again. Unless we learn the lessons of the Black mother in each of us, whether we are Black or not ... I believe this power exists in men also but they choose not to deal with it; which is, as I learned, their right. Hopefully this choice can be affected, but I don’t know. I don’t believe this shift from conquering problems to experiencing life is a one-generational shot or a single investment. I believe it’s a whole signature which you try to set in motion and have some input into. But I’m not saying that women don’t think or analyze. Or that white does not feel. I’m saying that we must never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is ... Adrienne: Sinister ... Audre: Sinister, smelly, erotic, confused, upsetting ... Adrienne: I think we have to keep using and affirming a vocabulary that has been used negatively and perjoratively. And I assume that’s the statement you’re making in that sentence, that you make over and over in your poetry. And it’s nothing as simplistic as saying “Black is beautiful,” either. Audre: There’s nothing beautiful about a black machine.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  It meant twelve-year-old Lyndon Adams of L’Esterre, Carriacou, teaching a seventy-three-year-old woman how to read and write as part of the each-one-teach-one program against functional illiteracy conducted by the Center for Popular Education. This highly successful program enlisted the aid of one of the most brilliant educators of all time, Paulo Friere, head of the World Council of Churches’ literacy program. When the echos of Ocean Venture drifted across the Caribbean from Vieques in 1981, and the stench of the threat of U.S. invasion hung over the hills from Grand Etang to Harvey Vale, Lyndon, one of the youngest teachers in the CPE program, was quoted as saying: “Before the revolution we were not in the light. I will never give up. I rather they kill me dead than I go work for them if they come to take over we land and try to oppress we again.” His seventy-three-year old neighbor and student says: “In L’Esterre now, I find things is plenty better and getting better still. And look how the children developing and doing good! For that boy’s age I find he was doing all right!”21 The american medical student who witnessed the shooting of the first american marine killed landing on Grenada resists the prompting of her TV interviewer. Pockets of foreign resistance. Cubans hiding in the hills. “Oh no, he wasn’t shot by Cubans. It was an old man and his son, firing from their house.” Lyndon Adams and his neighbor are not Cuban. The old man and his son defending their home were not Cubans. They were Grenadians who dared to believe that they could have a right to define themselves and the future of their nation independent of the United States. Grenada is a highly stratified society made up of a large, extremely poor mass of estate workers and small land-holding peasants, a small but growing group of urban service workers, and a tiny well-to-do middle class, civil servants and landed, who traditionally have involved themselves with the economics of import-export rather than the economics of national production. The Bishop government was becoming a successful bridge between these different groups. Problems of color ism and classism are deep, far-reaching, and very complex legacies left from successive colonialisms. Grenadians, rightly so, are highly resistant to any external suggestions of a superficial solution. By bringing the goals of these diverse groups together, the Revolution became even more threatening to the U.S. To the average Grenadian, the United States is a large but dim presence where some dear relative now lives. Until the information campaigns of the PRG, the lack of international news coverage and commentary kept Grenadians largely unaware of the U.S. position in world politics and its history of institutionalized racism and classism. Ronald Reagan was seen as a fatherly movie star unconnected to policies of systematic economic and military oppression of people of Color throughout the developing countries of the world.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters. Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged. As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist. Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support. Poor women and women of Color know there is a difference between the daily manifestations of marital slavery and prostitution because it is our daughters who line 42nd Street. If white american feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color? What is the theory behind racist feminism? In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action. The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower. Why weren’t other women of Color found to participate in this conference?