Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde
Audre Lordewas an African American writer, feminist, womanist, lesbian, and civil rights activist. As a poet, she is best known for technical mastery and emotional expression, particularly in her poems expressing anger and outrage at civil and social injustices she observed throughout her life. Her poems and prose largely dealt with issues related to civil rights, feminism, and the exploration of black female identity. In relation to white feminists in the United States, Lorde famously said, “the master's tools will...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth18 February 1934
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
To face the realities of our lives is not a reason for despair-despair is a tool of your enemies. Facing the realities of our lives gives us motivation for action. For you are not powerless... You know why the hard questions must be asked. It is not altruism, it is self-preservation-survival.
Art is not living. It is the use of living.
There is no Hierarchy of Oppressions
Art is not living. It is a use of living. The artist has the ability to take that living and use it in a certain way, and produce art.
Raising Black children-female and male-in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive.
We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.
The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
We are all in the process of becoming.
What are the words you do not yet have? 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.
...oppression is as American as apple pie...
If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough.
It's a struggle but that's why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.
I am a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.