You need this in your life. Right now.
One of the most well-written, thought-provoking, passionate, solid and vital voices I have read in a long time. It is heavy reading, but trust me when I say that you will not want to miss a single word.
Every page of Audre Lorde's essays and poems is quotable. Everything collected in 'Your Silence Will Not Protect You' speaks so many truths today, and they were written in the '70s and '80s. Lorde says go straight to hell with your angry black woman stereotype - something needs to be done now. To change the patriarchal white supremacist heterosexist classist system in America, never to return using a new name.
Because in reality, nothing much has changed since the '70s. Black people, queer people, women, black women and other women of colour are still widely being treated as second class citizens, and their lives are even put in danger in insidious, toxic, suffocating, barely-invisible ways, just for existing. Replace the guns that white cops use to kill black people in the 20th and 21st centuries with whips that were used on slaves: the system does keep finding ways to preserve itself.
We are not yet free.
We can't let this go on any further. Lasting progress must be made, for literally everyone's survival. Speak up, let your voice be heard. Use your anger - your passion for justice - to your advantage. For the white supremacist heterosexist classist patriarchy wants you to suffer and die whether you are passive and silent or not.
'Your Silence Will Not Protect You' talks about intersectional feminism - it's one of the first works to discuss it - and how feminism without it is self-defeating and helping the patriarchy. It goes into great detail the dangers of internalized misogyny, especially among black women, and how powerful and natural and goddess-like sisterhood is. It's a power for affecting change in society, so no wonder the patriarchy is scared to death of it and so will try everything to pit women against themselves; thus the origin of the myth that all women are natural enemies and rivals for one another, and hate each other as much as men do.
Lorde's essays are about women supporting women, as well as self-care, expressing emotions and the dangers of suppressing them, raising feminist sons, male fragility, white fragility or the "white guilt" excuse, undoing the patriarchal system without using its methods ('The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House'), among other topics.
Above all, 'Your Silence Will Not Protect You' is about how important it is for humanity to work together, to love one another indiscriminately, healthily, in order to achieve universal freedom. No more class, race, sex, and sexuality divides, for everyone is equal.
While Audre Lorde doesn't mention trans people, and this is the only lacking feature in this collection, I appreciate that she mentions the Jewish community a couple of times. As a black lesbian mother of the '60s, '70s and 80's, every day was a dangerous risk for her, especially in speaking out in public, but she never gave up.
As brave and massively inspiring as Lorde was, she was only trying to survive in a society that hated her existence. She used her anger creatively, by writing poetry, essays and speeches. She will not be denied her freedom to exist in America.
Notable additions in Lorde's writing include: that narcissism doesn't come from self-love, but self-hatred. That is very interesting. That what is "erotic" is much more positive than we give it credit for (meditation, confidence and self-esteem in body, mind and spirit voila 'Women Who Run with the Wolves'). And that there is a difference between pain and suffering. There is much you can learn from this amazing, revolutionary, unapologetic black lesbian feminist.
If you have never heard of the late great Audre Lorde until now, read 'Your Silence Will Not Protect You' as soon as possible. Decades later, it can still enrich and save lives. The essays could have been written yesterday, they are that timely.
Some of the fountains of quotes from this fantastic woman:
“There is a distinction I am beginning to make in my living between pain and suffering. Pain is an event, an experience that must be recognized, named and then used in some way in order for the experience to change, to be transformed into something else, strength or knowledge or action.
Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain. When I live through pain without recognizing it self-consciously, I rob myself of the power that can come from using that pain, the power to fuel some movement beyond it. I condemn myself to reliving that pain over and over and over whenever something close triggers it. And that is suffering, a seemingly inescapable cycle.”
“As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibility of it within themselves. So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters.”
“In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematised oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the space of the dehumanised inferior.”
“I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What 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? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.
I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.
Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end."
“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
“Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.”
“There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
“Revolution is not a one time event.”
“Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.”
“Without community, there is no liberation.”
Read more to find out more. We all need the wisdom of Lorde's passionate, FEELING words.
Final Score: 5/5
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