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A review by kassiani
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
Audiobook & ebook.
QUOTES:
Introduction:
"what about the “conflict” between poetry and theory, between their separate and seemingly incompatible spheres? We have been told that poetry expresses what we feel, and theory states
what we know; that the poet creates out of the heat of the moment, while the theorist’s mode is, of necessity, cool and reasoned; that one is art and therefore experienced “subjectively,” and the other is scholarship, held accountable in the “objective” world of ideas. We have been told that poetry has a soul and theory has a mind and that we have to choose between them."
Poetry is not a luxury:
"THE QUALITY OF LIGHT by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are until the poem — nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding. As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us."
"poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean in order to cover a desperate wish for — imagination without insight."
"Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives."
"sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that dierence so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action"
"The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us the poet whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom."
"our move toward change, there is only poetry to hint at possibility made real."
"For within living structures denied by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive"
"For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths"
The transformation of silence into change and action:
Regret the silences.
"Your silence will not protect you." It is "necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth."
"that we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own."
"For we have been socialized 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"
Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving:
racism, sexism, heterosexism and homophobia: "forms of human blindness stem from the same root - an inability to recognize the notion of dierence as a dynamic human force, one which is enriching rather than threatening to the deyned self, when there are shared goals"
importance of self-definition & self-actualization for liberation. Encouraged horizontal hostility
Uses of the erotic - the erotic as power:
"In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of
power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change" // erotic in women
"The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic"
"The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves"
fear of feeling
"it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical"
"reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing"
"open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy" --> "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"
"Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our
lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe." & sharing
Sexism - an American disease in blackface:
"Is this (black men's) rage any more legitimate than the rage of Black women? And why are Black women supposed to absorb that male rage in silence? Why isn’t that male rage turned upon those forces which limit his fulfillment, namely capitalism?"
"If this society ascribes roles to Black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it Black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, or is it society that needs changing?"
"One tool of the Great-American-Double-Think is to blame the victim for victimization"
"Black women traditionally have had compassion for everybody else except ourselves"
"Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves."
"the Black male consciousness must be raised to the realization that sexism and woman-hating are critically dysfunctional to his liberation as a Black man because they arise out of the same constellation that engenders racism and homophobia"
Man child:
"our sons must become men - such men as we hope our daughters, born and unborn, will be pleased to live among"
teaching how to love and resist at the same time, "the ability to feel strongly and to recognize those feelings is central: how to feel love, how to neither discount fear nor be overwhelmed by it, how to enjoy feeling deeply."
"teaching my son that I do not exist to do his feeling for him. Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly “inferior” capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear" // women seen as moral compasses
"Consider the two western classic myth/models of mother/son relationships: Jocasta/Oedipus, the son who fucks his mother, and Clytemnestra/Orestes, the son who kills his mother"
"societal destruction begins when he is forced to believe that he can only be strong if he doesn’t feel, or if he wins."
"The question of separatism is by no means simple. I am thankful that one of my children is male, since that helps to keep me honest. Every line I write shrieks there are no easy solutions."
"relearn the experience that difference does not have to be threatening"
An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich:
"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."
The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House:
"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."
"Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is a dierence between the passive be and the active being."
"Advocating the mere tolerance of dierence between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Dierence must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic."
"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."
"In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower."
"This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns."
Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redening Difference:
"MUCH OF WESTERN EUROPEAN history conditions us to see human differences in simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down, superior/inferior. 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 systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior."
"Traditionally, in american society, it is the members of oppressed, objectiyed groups who are expected to stretch out and bridge the gap between the actualities of our lives and the consciousness of our oppressor."
"Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them. In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes."
"The oppressors maintain their position and evade responsibility for their own actions"
"Institutionalized rejection of dierence is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people"
"programmed to respond to the human dierences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate."
"The need for unity is often misnamed as a need for homogeneity,"
intersectionality!
"It is not our differences which separate women, but our reluctance to recognize those differences
and to deal eectively with the distortions which have resulted from the ignoring and misnaming of those differences."
The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism:
"We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us nor seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty;"
"Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change."
Learning from the 60s:
malcolm x: "Before he was killed, Malcolm had altered and broadened his opinions concerning the role of women in society and the revolution. He was beginning to speak with increasing respect of the
connection between himself and Martin Luther King, Jr., whose policies of nonviolence appeared to be so opposite to his own. And he began to examine the societal conditions under which alliances
and coalitions must indeed occur. He had also begun to discuss those scars of oppression which lead us to war against ourselves in each other rather than against our enemies."
"There are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we cherish breath and power in our own living"
"we can examine the dangers of an incomplete vision. Not to condemn that vision but to alter it, construct templates for possible futures, and focus our rage for change upon our enemies rather than upon each other."
"But there is no simple monolithic solution to racism, to sexism, to homophobia"
"There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives"
"We lose our history so easily, what is not predigested for us by the New York Times, or the Amsterdam News, or Time magazine. Maybe because we do not listen to our poets or to our fools, maybe because
we do not listen to our mamas in ourselves."
"We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present. We do not
have to suer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding."
"Can any one of us here still afford to believe that eorts to reclaim the future can be private or individual? Can any one here still afford to believe that the pursuit of liberation can be the sole
and particular province of any one particular race, or sex, or age, or religion, or sexuality, or class?"
"Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to address each other’s dierence with respect."
"How important it is not to allow even our leaders to deyne us to ourselves, or to deyne our sources of power to us" -- revolution not just savior figure
"Change is the immediate responsibility of each of us, wherever and however we are standing, in whatever arena we choose."
"What is that internalized and self-destructive barrier that keeps us from moving, that keeps us from coming together?"
"Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don’t mean me) or by despair (there’s nothing we can do"
Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger:
"It is easier to deal with the external manifestations of racism and sexism than it is to deal with the
results of those distortions internalized within our consciousness of ourselves and one another."
Grenada:
"the lies and distortions of secrecy surrounding the invasion of Grenada by the United States on October 25, 1983; the rationalizations which collapse under the weight of facts; the facts that are readily available, even now, from the back pages of the New York Times."
QUOTES:
Introduction:
"what about the “conflict” between poetry and theory, between their separate and seemingly incompatible spheres? We have been told that poetry expresses what we feel, and theory states
what we know; that the poet creates out of the heat of the moment, while the theorist’s mode is, of necessity, cool and reasoned; that one is art and therefore experienced “subjectively,” and the other is scholarship, held accountable in the “objective” world of ideas. We have been told that poetry has a soul and theory has a mind and that we have to choose between them."
Poetry is not a luxury:
"THE QUALITY OF LIGHT by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are until the poem — nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding. As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us."
"poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean in order to cover a desperate wish for — imagination without insight."
"Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives."
"sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that dierence so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action"
"The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us the poet whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom."
"our move toward change, there is only poetry to hint at possibility made real."
"For within living structures denied by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive"
"For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths"
The transformation of silence into change and action:
Regret the silences.
"Your silence will not protect you." It is "necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth."
"that we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own."
"For we have been socialized 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"
Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving:
racism, sexism, heterosexism and homophobia: "forms of human blindness stem from the same root - an inability to recognize the notion of dierence as a dynamic human force, one which is enriching rather than threatening to the deyned self, when there are shared goals"
importance of self-definition & self-actualization for liberation. Encouraged horizontal hostility
Uses of the erotic - the erotic as power:
"In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of
power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change" // erotic in women
"The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic"
"The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves"
fear of feeling
"it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical"
"reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing"
"open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy" --> "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"
"Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our
lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe." & sharing
Sexism - an American disease in blackface:
"Is this (black men's) rage any more legitimate than the rage of Black women? And why are Black women supposed to absorb that male rage in silence? Why isn’t that male rage turned upon those forces which limit his fulfillment, namely capitalism?"
"If this society ascribes roles to Black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it Black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, or is it society that needs changing?"
"One tool of the Great-American-Double-Think is to blame the victim for victimization"
"Black women traditionally have had compassion for everybody else except ourselves"
"Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves."
"the Black male consciousness must be raised to the realization that sexism and woman-hating are critically dysfunctional to his liberation as a Black man because they arise out of the same constellation that engenders racism and homophobia"
Man child:
"our sons must become men - such men as we hope our daughters, born and unborn, will be pleased to live among"
teaching how to love and resist at the same time, "the ability to feel strongly and to recognize those feelings is central: how to feel love, how to neither discount fear nor be overwhelmed by it, how to enjoy feeling deeply."
"teaching my son that I do not exist to do his feeling for him. Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly “inferior” capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear" // women seen as moral compasses
"Consider the two western classic myth/models of mother/son relationships: Jocasta/Oedipus, the son who fucks his mother, and Clytemnestra/Orestes, the son who kills his mother"
"societal destruction begins when he is forced to believe that he can only be strong if he doesn’t feel, or if he wins."
"The question of separatism is by no means simple. I am thankful that one of my children is male, since that helps to keep me honest. Every line I write shrieks there are no easy solutions."
"relearn the experience that difference does not have to be threatening"
An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich:
"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."
The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House:
"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."
"Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is a dierence between the passive be and the active being."
"Advocating the mere tolerance of dierence between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Dierence must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic."
"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."
"In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower."
"This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns."
Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redening Difference:
"MUCH OF WESTERN EUROPEAN history conditions us to see human differences in simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down, superior/inferior. 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 systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior."
"Traditionally, in american society, it is the members of oppressed, objectiyed groups who are expected to stretch out and bridge the gap between the actualities of our lives and the consciousness of our oppressor."
"Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them. In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes."
"The oppressors maintain their position and evade responsibility for their own actions"
"Institutionalized rejection of dierence is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people"
"programmed to respond to the human dierences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate."
"The need for unity is often misnamed as a need for homogeneity,"
intersectionality!
"It is not our differences which separate women, but our reluctance to recognize those differences
and to deal eectively with the distortions which have resulted from the ignoring and misnaming of those differences."
The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism:
"We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us nor seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty;"
"Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change."
Learning from the 60s:
malcolm x: "Before he was killed, Malcolm had altered and broadened his opinions concerning the role of women in society and the revolution. He was beginning to speak with increasing respect of the
connection between himself and Martin Luther King, Jr., whose policies of nonviolence appeared to be so opposite to his own. And he began to examine the societal conditions under which alliances
and coalitions must indeed occur. He had also begun to discuss those scars of oppression which lead us to war against ourselves in each other rather than against our enemies."
"There are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we cherish breath and power in our own living"
"we can examine the dangers of an incomplete vision. Not to condemn that vision but to alter it, construct templates for possible futures, and focus our rage for change upon our enemies rather than upon each other."
"But there is no simple monolithic solution to racism, to sexism, to homophobia"
"There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives"
"We lose our history so easily, what is not predigested for us by the New York Times, or the Amsterdam News, or Time magazine. Maybe because we do not listen to our poets or to our fools, maybe because
we do not listen to our mamas in ourselves."
"We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present. We do not
have to suer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding."
"Can any one of us here still afford to believe that eorts to reclaim the future can be private or individual? Can any one here still afford to believe that the pursuit of liberation can be the sole
and particular province of any one particular race, or sex, or age, or religion, or sexuality, or class?"
"Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to address each other’s dierence with respect."
"How important it is not to allow even our leaders to deyne us to ourselves, or to deyne our sources of power to us" -- revolution not just savior figure
"Change is the immediate responsibility of each of us, wherever and however we are standing, in whatever arena we choose."
"What is that internalized and self-destructive barrier that keeps us from moving, that keeps us from coming together?"
"Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don’t mean me) or by despair (there’s nothing we can do"
Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger:
"It is easier to deal with the external manifestations of racism and sexism than it is to deal with the
results of those distortions internalized within our consciousness of ourselves and one another."
Grenada:
"the lies and distortions of secrecy surrounding the invasion of Grenada by the United States on October 25, 1983; the rationalizations which collapse under the weight of facts; the facts that are readily available, even now, from the back pages of the New York Times."