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bookedbymadeline's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
Thought provoking and eye opening collection of essays/stories! I liked some chapters more than others, the ones I didn’t like mostly because they were difficult to understand at times language-wise and with concepts (such as the use of erotic chapter). There were times where no matter how often I reread the sentences, I couldn’t wrap my head around what was being said.
Most of the essays are from the 80s it seems but they’re still so relevant to today! I think this should be required reading in schools, especially in the US. I learned so much that I did not learn in school about US history and the government’s actions abroad. I marked a lot of pages and passages! I look forward to reading more from Lorde.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Homophobia, Misogyny, Racism, and Violence
Moderate: Colonisation and War
Minor: Cancer
introverted_reads's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Cancer, Racial slurs, Racism, Sexism, Violence, and Murder
Moderate: Hate crime, Infertility, Police brutality, Lesbophobia, Colonisation, and Classism
joensign's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
slow-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Homophobia, Misogyny, Racism, Sexism, Violence, and Lesbophobia
Minor: Cancer
_meganrose's review against another edition
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
A must read. Audre Lorde is beyond talented. Her writing is so powerful, moving, and beautiful. Brought me to tears.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Cancer and Racism
brassnbooks's review against another edition
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.5
Enjoyed the various topics in each piece (especially the last) and how they can go with each other or be separate
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism, Sexism, and Lesbophobia
Moderate: Cancer and Misogyny
rieviolet's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Like any kind of collection, there are always some parts that you like better than other ones but, overall, there is an awful lot to appreciate here and many interesting, challenging and complex reflections to ponder over.
There were a couple of chapters that I didn't much care about and, in places, were also a bit of a struggle to get through (for example "Notes from a Trip to Russia"; "An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich", which was way too long, too much focused on their personal relationship, and also I do not like Adrienne Rich).
I have to admit that some sections were a bit difficult to understand, but that has more to do with me lacking in similar personal experiences and knowledge, than to any fault of the author.
A lot of what Audre Lorde reflected on and wrote about back then still resonates deeply today. I think it will be worth it to read more from the author and then revisit these essays.
There were a couple of chapters that I didn't much care about and, in places, were also a bit of a struggle to get through (for example "Notes from a Trip to Russia"; "An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich", which was way too long, too much focused on their personal relationship, and also I do not like Adrienne Rich).
I have to admit that some sections were a bit difficult to understand, but that has more to do with me lacking in similar personal experiences and knowledge, than to any fault of the author.
A lot of what Audre Lorde reflected on and wrote about back then still resonates deeply today. I think it will be worth it to read more from the author and then revisit these essays.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Hate crime, Racism, and Sexism
Moderate: Bullying, Cancer, Child death, Death, Gun violence, Homophobia, Racial slurs, Violence, Police brutality, Murder, Lesbophobia, Colonisation, and War
Minor: Ableism, Animal cruelty, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexual assault, Torture, Medical content, Medical trauma, and Death of parent
helenaruby's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Hate crime, Misogyny, Racial slurs, Racism, and Sexism
Moderate: Cancer, Homophobia, and Lesbophobia
meganpbell's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.75
Published nearly 40 years ago, this iconic collection of essays, interviews, and speeches by the self-described "black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet" Audre Lorde remains as powerful, impactful, and relevant as ever. Here, in these brilliantly intersectional writings, Lorde confronts sexism, racism, and homophobia, all while inviting us to see the potential for political change in social difference and revelation in the erotic.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Homophobia, Racism, Sexism, and Lesbophobia
Moderate: Racial slurs and Murder
Minor: Cancer, Child death, Death, Sexual violence, Police brutality, Medical trauma, and War
notartgarfunkel's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Hate crime, Homophobia, Misogyny, Racism, and Lesbophobia
Moderate: Cancer, Murder, Colonisation, and War
Minor: Rape and Death of parent
missrosymaplemoth's review against another edition
4.5
P37 For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. 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.
P39 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.
P51 The supposition that one sex needs the other's acquiescence in order to exist prevents both from moving together as self-defined persons toward a common goal.
P57 This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. 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.
P67 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.
P70 The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial bound-
aries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences. Nor do the reservoirs of our ancient power know these boundaries. To deal with one without even alluding to the other is to distort our commonality as well as our difference.
P73 All our children are outriders for a queendom not yet assured.
P78 As a Black woman, I find it necessary to withdraw into all-black groups at times for exactly the same reasons - differences
in stages of development and differences in levels of interaction. Frequently, when speaking with men and white women, I am reminded of how difficult and time-consuming it is to have to reinvent the pencil every time you want to send a message.
P104 But documentation does not help one perceive. At best it only analyzes the perception. At worst, it provides a screen by which to avoid concentrating on the core revelation, following it down to how it feels. Again, knowledge and understanding. They can function in concert, but they don't replace each other.
P112 As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.
P115 Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.
P115 Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending
those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all.
P120 Rape is on the increase, reported and unreported, and rape is not aggressive sexuality, it is sexualized aggression.
P123 The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference. The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us. The old patterns, no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate progress, still condemn us to cosmetically altered repetitions of the same old exchanges, the same old guilt, hatred, recrimination, lamentation, and suspicion.
P130 It is not the anger of other women that will destroy us but our refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger as an important source of empowerment.
P132-133 I am not free while
any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is anyone of you.
P Four hundred years of survival as an endangered species has taught most of us that if we intend to live, we had better become fast learners. Malcolm knew this. We do not have to live the same mistakes
over again if we can look at them, learn from them, and build upon them.
P142 You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.
P39 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.
P51 The supposition that one sex needs the other's acquiescence in order to exist prevents both from moving together as self-defined persons toward a common goal.
P57 This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. 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.
P67 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.
P70 The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial bound-
aries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences. Nor do the reservoirs of our ancient power know these boundaries. To deal with one without even alluding to the other is to distort our commonality as well as our difference.
P73 All our children are outriders for a queendom not yet assured.
P78 As a Black woman, I find it necessary to withdraw into all-black groups at times for exactly the same reasons - differences
in stages of development and differences in levels of interaction. Frequently, when speaking with men and white women, I am reminded of how difficult and time-consuming it is to have to reinvent the pencil every time you want to send a message.
P104 But documentation does not help one perceive. At best it only analyzes the perception. At worst, it provides a screen by which to avoid concentrating on the core revelation, following it down to how it feels. Again, knowledge and understanding. They can function in concert, but they don't replace each other.
P112 As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.
P115 Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.
P115 Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending
those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all.
P120 Rape is on the increase, reported and unreported, and rape is not aggressive sexuality, it is sexualized aggression.
P123 The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference. The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us. The old patterns, no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate progress, still condemn us to cosmetically altered repetitions of the same old exchanges, the same old guilt, hatred, recrimination, lamentation, and suspicion.
P130 It is not the anger of other women that will destroy us but our refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger as an important source of empowerment.
P132-133 I am not free while
any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is anyone of you.
P Four hundred years of survival as an endangered species has taught most of us that if we intend to live, we had better become fast learners. Malcolm knew this. We do not have to live the same mistakes
over again if we can look at them, learn from them, and build upon them.
P142 You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Homophobia, Racism, and Sexism
Moderate: Misogyny and Racial slurs
Minor: Cancer