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Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde

10 reviews

emath98's review

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challenging emotional hopeful inspiring reflective tense medium-paced

5.0

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scarroll178's review against another edition

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5.0

So well written. Especially loved Uses of the Erotic and The Uses of Anger.

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rieviolet's review against another edition

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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.

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shellroch285's review against another edition

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5.0

I’m so glad I finally took the time to read this! Lorde’s emphasis on finding connections between each other in order to lift each other up and create community was beautiful, and I learned so much about how I need to change my perspective in terms of how we need to change in order to take care of local and national community in the US. This needs to be required reading for any other white person. Recognizing differences as well as seeing them as strengths rather than immediate arguments is also another key point. Her work is incredible <3

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meganpbell's review against another edition

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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.

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thewordsdevourer's review against another edition

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4.25

a work much deserving of its classic status, sister outsider is raw, incisive, deep, and searing; its soul-searching, reclaiming of self and space, and examination into the sinister nooks and crevices of american society in all its -isms and complex intersectionality are cloaked w/ righteous (and relatable) rage, all succinctly yet effectivively articulated in a mix of prose, poems, and interviews, among others, though the last chapter kinda throws me off in its placement and seeming detour from content presented earlier in the book.

not only does lorde get me nodding my head off in vigorous agreement, she also leaves me awed and astounded at times at how insightful and revealing her observations and truth-telling are, and her call to self-awareness and action are inspiring. she's also light years ahead of many others in her understanding and communication of the seemingly seamless blending of race, sex, sexual orientation, class, and other aspects of complex intersectionality, as well as her awareness of her own positionality, resulting in a startlingly non-western-centric work. this is def a book to keep and read then reread.

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apieceofjaaay's review against another edition

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5.0

MUST READ IF YOU WANT TO GET INTO BLACK FEMINISM

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ceallaighsbooks's review against another edition

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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.”

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sonyareadsbooks's review against another edition

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5.0

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greywarens's review against another edition

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4.5

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