Audre Lorde

Your Silence Will Not Protect You

Karolina

To grow up metabolising hatred like daily bread means that eventually every human interaction becomes tainted with the negative passion and intensity of its by-products — anger and cruelty.

Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women.

For we have been socialised to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.

Elena Zieser

Jemima Scott

Audre Lorde had a unique way about words—so evocative, deeply cutting. Her intersectional feminism is so ahead of its time, or just showing we sadly haven’t moved the needle enough. 

reading lorde is like coming home, getting ready for a battle full of compassion, care, anger, all the unspoken things, it feels like giving up solitude, yet leaning in to it. 

antonia maria wagner she/they

collections like this one - of works fundamental for understanding contemporary intersectional feminism and understanding black women - are difficult to review. one some levels, suffice it to say that the writing demands to be read and re-read and memorised to the point i was itching to go and by my own copy so i can underline and annotate (how funny that only some books are worthy of this).

on another, i am a white woman audre lorde's work was never for nor about me but i would not have been a whole person without it regardless. in that aspect, lorde is an invaluable voice to be heard and to be listened to. one - a feminist, an activist - cannot truly understand and practise intersectionality if they do not hear the voices that have historically be silent, and uplift them. it is important to recognise our different experiences and not simply close our eyes for them but support our sisters in their unique struggles.

works from lorde's essays that will particularly stick with me, i think, are 'the transformation of silence into language and action', 'poetry is not a luxury', 'uses of the erotic' and 'age, race, class and sex: women redefining difference'. the thought that you must speak up, even if you are afraid of suffering, as you will suffer regardless - that struck me particularly deeply.

as for her poetry, i am a poor poetry reader but i found 'martha', 'a litany for survival', 'afterimages' and 'need' very evocative and impactful.

Your Silence Will Not Protect You

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