Audre Lorde

essays and speeches

Sister outsider

Syrina

This is something that I noticed all over: the very old peonle in Russia have a stamp upon them that I hope l can learn and never lose, a matter-offact resilience and sense of their place upon the earth that is very sturdy and reassuring.

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.

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. 

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

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 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?

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.

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.

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

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

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