Scan barcode
now_booking's review against another edition
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.5
It feels almost cheeky to give this amazing collection of essays, interviews, conversations, speeches anything less than 5 stars- cheeky in the way that would you rate a story a beloved grandmother tells you about your ancestry and heritage 4 stars? Because essentially, that is what this book is- it is history and politics, economics and geography, we’re called to reflect on sexism and racism, homophobia and heterosexism and above all intersectionality and how all the intersections that breed inequality and injustice are as relevant now as they ever have been. If it’s not 5 stars for me, it’s because sometimes I craved more of the author than her boundaries delivered in this book. This was so excellent that perhaps in the diversity of its composition, I preferred some formats to others- I wanted more than what the scope of this one book promised- I wanted perhaps a book of poems, an autobiography, a book on feminist theory, another on neoliberalism and yet another on history- to know more of this author and her practice and her lived experience. My greed for this book to be more than a patchwork quilt (however gorgeous) of varied content cast me a little adrift at times when reading this.
Every single word in this collection is laden with wisdom- from reminders of the mundane (and even the mundane here is insightful), to the mind-blowingly progressive. My favourite parts were the bits where Audre Lorde speaks of her life and lends us her stories and personal lived experience to illustrate the concepts she’s putting forth. The opening story where she narrates her experiences as a Black lesbian woman in socialist Russia, to the tidbits she drops about learning from practically babyhood the ranking of a dark-skinned Black woman in society, and about what that would mean for her lived experience as an American and moreover a Black feminist and intersectional activist. When in one of her most famous pieces from this collection, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” she calls on us to acknowledge difference rather than fear it, to face intersectionality head on, to lean into the anger of injustice and the discomfort of speaking up and use it to drive change… chills. She’s everyone’s trusted Aunty in this book- the one that calls you out, tells you about yourself when necessary but also always has her arms open and inspires you.
I’m not much of a non-ficition reader typically but this collection was so rich with lessons and insights that are relevant to me as someone who is interested in inequality, but also as someone fearful of getting the fight wrong. This book is part instruction manual for understanding the genotype and phenotype of inequality and injustice in America (and to a lesser extent, globally), and part call you action for how all of us as a society can learn to see and acknowledge things and to do better.
Every single word in this collection is laden with wisdom- from reminders of the mundane (and even the mundane here is insightful), to the mind-blowingly progressive. My favourite parts were the bits where Audre Lorde speaks of her life and lends us her stories and personal lived experience to illustrate the concepts she’s putting forth. The opening story where she narrates her experiences as a Black lesbian woman in socialist Russia, to the tidbits she drops about learning from practically babyhood the ranking of a dark-skinned Black woman in society, and about what that would mean for her lived experience as an American and moreover a Black feminist and intersectional activist. When in one of her most famous pieces from this collection, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” she calls on us to acknowledge difference rather than fear it, to face intersectionality head on, to lean into the anger of injustice and the discomfort of speaking up and use it to drive change… chills. She’s everyone’s trusted Aunty in this book- the one that calls you out, tells you about yourself when necessary but also always has her arms open and inspires you.
I’m not much of a non-ficition reader typically but this collection was so rich with lessons and insights that are relevant to me as someone who is interested in inequality, but also as someone fearful of getting the fight wrong. This book is part instruction manual for understanding the genotype and phenotype of inequality and injustice in America (and to a lesser extent, globally), and part call you action for how all of us as a society can learn to see and acknowledge things and to do better.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Homophobia, Misogyny, Racism, Sexism, Sexual violence, Police brutality, and Lesbophobia
thepassivebookworm's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Hate crime, Homophobia, Misogyny, Racism, and Sexual violence
ceallaighsbooks's review
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
“…while we wait in silence for the final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us… for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.” — from “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”, by Audre Lorde, as published in Sister Outsider
TITLE—Sister Outsider
AUTHOR—Audre Lorde
PUBLISHED—1984
GENRE—essays and speeches
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—queer studies, the Black experience, america, racism, intersectional feminism, socialism
WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
BONUS ELEMENT/S—her travel notes from her trip to Russia made me *so* nostalgic for traveling ❤️
PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Sister Outsider begins with a travel essay Audre Lorde wrote about a 1976 trip to western Asia she took as part of a writers’ conference and ends with another sort of travel essay (or foreign dispatch) regarding the situation in Grenada following the US’s illegal and barbaric invasion of the country in 1983.
Every essay in between covers all sorts of topics and themes relating to art, poetry, feminism, racism, individual identity, progress, the revolution, progressive action, and, of course, philosophy. And it is the overall philosophy of not only this collection of Audre Lorde’s works, but everything I’ve read of hers from her poetry to her biomythography, to various interviews, that makes them all such seminal and vital pieces of not just queer studies, feminism, or antiracism, but of human philosophy in its most general and imperative essence. Basically, Lorde did some *serious* work.
“Poetry is Not a Luxury”, “Uses of the Erotic”, “The Master’s Tools”, and “Eye to Eye” were particularly impactful on me during this first reading but this is definitely going to be a book I reread multiple times (probably a year…😅), continuously revisiting and rereading every essay, and finding and learning new things, and just letting Lorde’s remarkable vision, insight, and wisdom help guide my thoughts and actions towards creating a better world for persons everywhere.
“My history cannot be used to feather my enemies’ arrows then, and that lessens their power over me. Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself.” — from “Eye to Eye”
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
TW // racism, misogyny, poverty, oppression, death
Further Reading—
- Zami, by Audre Lorde
- The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde
- Juliet Takes a Breath, by Gabby Rivera
- The Source of Self Regard, by Toni Morrison
- Hood Feminism, by Mikki Kendall
- Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
My favorite Quotes, and the essays in which they are found…
(These are only some of what I underlined while reading this book because I had to edit them way down to fit in this review 🙈 and I’ve still triple-starred my especial favorites…)
Introduction
***“We have been told that poetry expresses what we feel, and theory states what we know… that one is art… and the other is scholarship… We have been told that poetry has a soul and theory has a mind and that we have to choose between them. The white western patriarchal ordering of things requires that we believe there is an inherent conflict between what we feel and what we think—between poetry and theory. We are easier to control when one part of our selves is split from another…”
“Because it is the work of feminism to make connections, to heal unnecessary divisions, Sister Outsider is a reason for hope.”
I. Notes from a Trip to Russia
***“The people here in Tashkent… are very diverse, and I am impressed by their apparent unity, by the ways in which the Russian and the Asian people seem to be able to function in a multinational atmosphere that requires of them that they get along, whether or not they are each other’s favorite people. And it’s not that there are no individuals who are nationalists, or racists, but that the taking of a state position against nationalism, against racism is what makes it possible of a society like this to function. And of course the next step in that process must be the personal element. I don’t see anyone attempting or even suggesting this phase, however, and that is troublesome, for without this step socialism remains at the mercy of an incomplete vision, imposed from the outside. We have internal desires but outside controls.”
“What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope… basically, when you find people who start from a position where human beings are at the core, as opposed to a position where profit is at the core, the solutions can be very different.”
“If you conquer the bread problem, that gives you at least a chance to look around at the others.”
II. Poetry Is Not a Luxury
***“…poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience…” rather than “…a desperate wish for imagination without insight.”
- i.e. ART (including literature!) WITHOUT PHILOSOPHY
***“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”
III. The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action
***“…while we wait in silence for the final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us… for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.”
IV. Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving
“…an inability to recognize the notion of difference as a dynamic human force, one which is enriching rather than threatening…”
“It is the structure at the top which desires changelessness and which profits from these apparently endless kitchen wars.”
“…the fallacy that your assertion of affirmation of self is an attack upon my self…”
***“Black and white women fight between ourselves over who is the more oppressed, instead of seeing those areas in which our causes are the same. (Of course, this last separation is worsened by the intransigent racism that white women too often fail to, or cannot, address in themselves.)”
V. Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power
“Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.”
***“The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need—the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment.”
“…the erotic—the sensual—those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us…”
***“Beyond the superficial, the considered phase, “It feels right to me,” acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding. And understanding is a handmaiden which can only wait upon, or clarify, that knowledge, deeply born. The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.”
***“And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.”
“In touch with the erotic, I become less wiling to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.”
VI. Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface
***“Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.”
“It is not the destiny of Black america to repeat white america’s mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life.”
VII. An Open Letter to Mary Daly
“The history of white women who are unable to hear Black women’s words, or to maintain dialogue with us, is long and discouraging.”
***“To imply, however, that all women suffer the same oppression simply because we are women is to lose sight of the many varied tools of patriarchy. It is to ignore how those tools are used by women without awareness against each other.”
“The white women with hoods on in Ohio handing out KKK literature on the street may not like what you have to say, but they will shoot me on sight.”
***“The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences.”
VIII. Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist’s Response
“The truest direction comes from inside. I give the most strength to my children by being willing to look within myself, and by being honest with them about what I find there, without expecting a response beyond their years. In this way they begin to learn to look beyond their own fears.”
***“The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself. And the best way I can do this is to be who I am an hope that he will learn from this not how to be me, which is not possible, but how to be himself.”
“…the danger inherent in an incomplete vision.”
IX. An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich
“When you asked how I began writing, I told you how poetry functioned specifically for me from the time I was very young. When someone said to me, “How do you feel?” or “What do you think?” or asked another direct question, I would recite a poem, and somewhere in that poem would be the feeling, the vital piece of information. It might be a line. It might be an image. The poem was my response.”
X. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
“It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians.”
“What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.”
“Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women.”
“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.”
“…descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future…”
“…survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”
“In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action.”
“In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.”
***“Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns.”
XI. Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference
“Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result form our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation.”
“When we speak of a broadly based women’s culture, we need to be aware of the effect of class and economic differences on the supplies available for producing art.”
“We find ourselves having to repeat and relearn the same old lessons over and over that our mothers did because we do not pass on what we have learned, or because we are unable to listen.”
- pretty intense to read THIS line forty years after it was written. 😅😬
“…unless one lives and loves in the trenches it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.”
“My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definition.”
“For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
“…the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships.”
XII. The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism
“I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, “Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.” But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change?
XIV. Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger
***“My history cannot be used to feather my enemies’ arrows then, and that lessens their power over me. Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself.”
“Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does. … anger is a powerful fuel. And true, sometimes it seems that anger alone keeps me alive; it burns with a bright and undiminished flame.”
***“In order to withstand the weather, we had to become stone, and now we bruise ourselves upon the other who is closest.”
“I have to learn to love myself before I can love you or accept your loving.”
XV. Grenada Revisited: An Interim Report
“…this country’s precarious position in the Third World, where the U.S. either ignores or stands upon the wrong side of virtually every single struggle for liberation by oppressed peoples.”
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death, Emotional abuse, Genocide, Homophobia, Misogyny, Racism, Sexism, and Grief
yunziyinz's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
these essays are full of genius. it’s worth it to take them in slowly. the critiques of white feminism are still deeply relevant today. her writing on the transformative power of passion, emotion, love will stay with me for a long time and I know I will be returning to this book regularly.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Child death, Chronic illness, Hate crime, Misogyny, Racial slurs, Racism, Rape, Sexism, and Sexual violence