which are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?

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.

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.

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.

I asked her one question, whether “the men were encouraged to work in the kindergartens to give the children a gentle male figure at an early age”.

Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.

Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm, which each one of us within our hearts knows "that is not me." In america, this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, christian, and financially secure. It is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society. Those of us who stand outside that power often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that to be the primary cause of all oppression, forgetting other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be practising. By and large within the women's movement today, white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class, and age. There is a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist.

Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.

“Don’t trust white people because they mean us no good and don’t trust anyone darker than you because their hearts are as black as their faces. “ (And where did that leave me, the darkest one?)

We had to metabolize such hatred that our cells have learned to live upon it because we had to, or die of it.

The answer to cold is heat, the answer to hunger is food. But there is no simple monolithic solution to racism, to sexism, to homophobia.

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of color remains chained. Nor is any one of you.

Unless one lives and loves in the trenches it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.

It is as hard for our children to believe that we are not omnipotent as it is for us to know it, as parents.

It is not the destiny of black America to repeat white America‘s mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life.

An inability to recognize the notion of difference as a dynamic human force, one which is enriching rather than threatening to the defined self

It is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others

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.

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 sate-house tor that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.

I also am intrigued by idea that there are writers who are paid to be writers and by -bot they survive and they wield considerable power. I am also well aware that if what they write is not acceptable, then it never gets read or it never gets printed. So what's new? But you do have a country there that has the largest reading nonulation in the world, that prints books of poetry in editions of 250,000 copies and those copies sell out in three months. Everywhere you go, even among those miles of cotton being arvested in the Uzbekhi sun, people are reading, and no mat- fer what you may say about censorship, they are still readin. nd thev're reading an awful lot. Some books are pirated from from the West because Russia does not observe International Copyright. In Sarmarkhand, Ernest Gaines' The Autobiograbhy of Miss Jane Pittman was the latest best seller. Now, how many the West because Russia does not observe International Russian novels in translation have you read this past year?

But she talked most movingly of the history of the women of Uzbekistan, a history which deserves more writing about than I can give it here. The ways in which the women of this area, from 1924 on, fought to come out from behind complete veiling, from Moslem cloister to the twentieth century. How they gave their lives to go barefaced, to be able to read. Many of them fought and many of them died very terrible deaths in this battle. killed by their own fathers and brothers.

I spoke in English and she spoke in Russian but I felt very strongly that our hearts spoke the same tongue.

I watched all of this industry pass and it came through to me on that bus ride down to Samarkand that this land was not in- dustrial so much as it was industrious.

Material had been brought down from the Ukraine to sink into the earth to build such buildings because Moscow, unlike New York, is not built upon bedrock. This strikes me as strange, that this city of oversize, imposing stone buildings should not be grounded on bedrock. Its like it re- mains standing on human will.