(1934-1992)
In her own words, Audre Lorde was a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet."
I was going to die, if not sooner than later, whether or not I had ever
spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not
protect you.
What are the words you do not have yet? What do you need to say? 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.
And, of course, I am afraid– you can hear it in my voice– because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of
self-revelation and that always seems fraught with danger. But my
daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said,
“tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain
silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside of you that
wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and
madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will
just up and punch you in the mouth.
Excerpt from "Sister Outsiders: Esssays and Speeches" (1984)
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