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annakat27's review against another edition
4.0
Essays and speeches can be a bit harder for me to get into, which is partially why I get it a 4 instead of 5 stars. I really loved reading Zami and I think the change in format was harder for me to embrace. That said, Audre Lorde's writing was compelling and interesting.
lil_nuke23's review against another edition
4.0
read this in grad school and wanted to re-read. Such an amazing voice about issues of racism, sexism, etc. and how women can work together across their racial differences, and how men and women can work together across their gender differences.
monkeelino's review against another edition
4.0
The most striking thing about this collection is how contemporary and relevant it seems (at one point she is speaking of rage over a policeman being acquitted after killing a child---I was reading this passage the day after closing arguments in the Derek Chauvin case; during the trial, itself there were at least two other police lethal shootings of black victims). First published in 1984, the topics and insights feel like they could have been published this month. Lorde finds strength and leverage in the very things her oppressors and critics see as her weakness and flaws. I don't know at what point "intersectionality" became a coined term amongst feminists, much less a major issue, but Lorde had her finger on this pulse from the start.
This volume covers a wide range of topics: journal entries revealing keen insights during observations abroad (namely, Russia and Grenada), the role of poetry, the importance of anger and how it differs from hatred, the necessity to acknowledge difference, Black self-hatred and internal divisions, racism, the power of feeling and the erotic.
What comes across is a mind unflinchingly self-critical, channeling an anger and a spirit towards a more just and diverse world. If her prose resonates this strongly, I can only imagine how her poetry must sing.
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Lorde is also ridiculously quotable....
"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."
"... you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside."
"To the racist, Black people are so powerful that the presence of one can contaminate a whole lineage; to the heterosexist, lesbians are so powerful that the presence of one can contaminate the whole sex."
"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."
"Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves."
"Rationality is not unnecessary. It serves the chaos of knowledge. It serves feeling. It serves to get from this place to that place. But if you don’t honor those places, then the road is meaningless. Too often, that’s what happens with the worship of rationality and that circular, academic, analytic thinking. But ultimately, I don’t see feel/ think as a dichotomy. I see them as a choice of ways and combinations."
"Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic."
"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."
"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."
"The angers of women can transform difference through insight into power. For anger between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth."
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IDEAS/WORDS I LOOKED UP
heterocetera (a portmanteau I assume Lorde originated that I found hilarious) | barrancas | Mithridates | U.S. Invasion of Grenada (granted, I was 8 when this happened, but how have I never read or heard about this?!!)
ellzell's review against another edition
5.0
describes intersectionality before that was even a word. and is able to clearly describe how systems of oppression rely on each other
abeerhoque's review against another edition
5.0
Sister, Outsider is a collection of 15 essays, speeches, and journal entries by the prophet, philosopher, and poet Audre Lorde. I was laid out by this book, so full of urgent yet generous poetic wisdom, and so much of it ahead of its time. Here is a list of the lessons I learned:
1. Differences (in race, sexuality, class, etc) should be welcomed and harnessed for individual power and communal growth, energy and creative insight
2. Feel your feelings because a) this is what makes you free, b) lets you be who you wish, and c) makes life meaningful
3. Transform silence into language and action (=> your silence will not save you)
4. The art of poetry and the erotic kernel of self are deep, real, vital powers available to all
5. Revolution is a process, not an event, and it requires constant vigilance for the possibility of change
6. There is no single-issue struggle (=> everything is intersectional)
7. Use your anger (rather than hatred or guilt) to mindfully catalyze change, and always listen for the substance underneath (versus fragility + tone-policing)
8. Capitalism needs outsiders (surplus) to function (=> the vilification of difference)
9. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (revolution over reform)
10. Black feminism is necessary (for survival, empowerment, and growth)
11. Interdependence, mutuality, and systems of shared support are sources of power
12. Rape can only be stopped if women revolt and men become conscious of their responsibility to fight sexism and misogyny
13. Learn from our past fractures, and acknowledge when we are complicit in subjugation
14. Self-love (tenderness, sweetness, self-acceptance) is the key to empowerment and undoing the long and dark legacy of self-hate within Black women
15. No one is free until everyone is free.
1. Differences (in race, sexuality, class, etc) should be welcomed and harnessed for individual power and communal growth, energy and creative insight
2. Feel your feelings because a) this is what makes you free, b) lets you be who you wish, and c) makes life meaningful
3. Transform silence into language and action (=> your silence will not save you)
4. The art of poetry and the erotic kernel of self are deep, real, vital powers available to all
5. Revolution is a process, not an event, and it requires constant vigilance for the possibility of change
6. There is no single-issue struggle (=> everything is intersectional)
7. Use your anger (rather than hatred or guilt) to mindfully catalyze change, and always listen for the substance underneath (versus fragility + tone-policing)
8. Capitalism needs outsiders (surplus) to function (=> the vilification of difference)
9. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (revolution over reform)
10. Black feminism is necessary (for survival, empowerment, and growth)
11. Interdependence, mutuality, and systems of shared support are sources of power
12. Rape can only be stopped if women revolt and men become conscious of their responsibility to fight sexism and misogyny
13. Learn from our past fractures, and acknowledge when we are complicit in subjugation
14. Self-love (tenderness, sweetness, self-acceptance) is the key to empowerment and undoing the long and dark legacy of self-hate within Black women
15. No one is free until everyone is free.
juushika's review against another edition
5.0
A collection of essays, speeches, letters, and various other pieces from a black lesbian feminist poet. The focus of Lorde's work is intersectionality, and her ability to articulate and insist on these overlaps, to explore the complicated ways that they inform her experience and her feminism, is phenomenal. If her arguments feel familiar, it's because it was her work which helped establish them; but these essays don't feel redundant. She puts complicated concepts into remarkably clear language, is self-possessed and self-interrogative, profoundly compassionate and angry, and refuses reductionism even when exploring gendered and racialized archetypes. If anything, her essays feel too relevant; white feminism is still catching up. This isn't perfect in collection--the tone and format is changeable, the content occasionally overlaps, and the tools by which Lorde defines and insists on her identity won't speak to everyone. But the sum effort is far greater than these quibbles.
Some personal highlights: "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." The interview with Adrienne Rich, which provides useful context about Lorde's life and contains a firm and mutually respectful conversation about the emotional labor that minority individuals are not obligated to perform in these discussions. Compelling, disquieting explorations of intra-community discrimination; "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." Her work to preemptively claim aspects of her identity, that they cannot be weaponized against her. Lorde has a knack for a powerful, quotable line (it makes sense, given her background in poetry); these lines are even better within the context of a complex, passionate argument.
Some personal highlights: "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." The interview with Adrienne Rich, which provides useful context about Lorde's life and contains a firm and mutually respectful conversation about the emotional labor that minority individuals are not obligated to perform in these discussions. Compelling, disquieting explorations of intra-community discrimination; "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." Her work to preemptively claim aspects of her identity, that they cannot be weaponized against her. Lorde has a knack for a powerful, quotable line (it makes sense, given her background in poetry); these lines are even better within the context of a complex, passionate argument.
aabi_w's review against another edition
5.0
If I could rate this 6 stars, I would. This woman has changed my life!!! My favourite works from this text were "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action", "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism", and "Grenada Revisited: An Interim Report". But generally, I love them ALL and would 1000% recommend this to anyone!
merholley's review against another edition
5.0
This was so magical I can’t believe I didn’t mark it when I read it. Required reading. Pure beauty.