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4.59 AVERAGE
4.59 AVERAGE
Good essays. Surprising how so many of them are relevant, decades later.
informative
inspiring
fast-paced
challenging
inspiring
Essential reading! Really brilliantly written, engaging and thoughtful, even humorous at times. It felt urgent and timeless at once. Only slight criticism was I found some of the essays slightly less interesting and some were a little repetitive as the book continued. Nevertheless, a very important book :)
Excellent! I rented this book from the library but I’ll have to buy a copy so I can read it again and again throughout my life.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
What I loved most about this book was how Audre gave zero fucks and called anybody and everybody out. She called out white women, black men, homophobic black women and she pointed all the flaws that are preventing the Black community from organizing as a whole. She spoke honestly and openly about her experiences as a Black queer woman. I enjoyed "Poetry is not a Luxury" because she talked about the importance of feeling. We place high value on logic and reason and often dismiss feelings as inferior but Lorde talks about how liberating it can be to allow ourselves to feel. I also really enjoyed "the Transformation of silence into language and action". she talks about her cancer scare and how that has lead her to be more vocal. She says that her silence won't protect her and she has regretted her silences. A couple of the following essays focus on racism, sexism, tropes of Black women, unbalanced power dynamics within the Black community, and the pressures Black women face. I liked "An Open Letter to Mary Daly" because it speaks to commodification of Black women by white women. white women pick and choose what they want to use black women for and audre calls it for what it is an I respect her bluntness and honesty. I enjoyed "the uses of Anger: women responding to racism" and how she talked about respectability and tone policing, white woman centering themselves, the need for intersectional feminism, the importance of listening, protests, and taking accountability. "Eye to Eye: Black women, hatred, and anger" was interesting because as someone who is not black, this was a fairly new concept to me. She talks about how black women hate each other and how the world so hates black women that they internalize it and turn on each other. "Grenada Revisited: An Interim Report" was also interesting because I am very interested in the Caribbean and Latin America and the role the US has played in destabilizing elections and supporting authoritarian regimes. The essays were sometimes repetive in concept, but interesting nonetheless. I think Lorde writes eloquently and with such passion and urgency that it bears reading even today.