The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

by Audre Lorde

guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication;

I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees.

If I speak to you in anger, at least I have spoken to you:

When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar. I have tried to learn my anger’s usefulness to me, as well as its limitations.

One woman wrote, “Because you are Black and Lesbian, you seem to speak with the moral authority of suffering.” Yes, I am Black and Lesbian, and what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority. There is a difference.

Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity. Black women are expected to use our anger only in the service of other people’s salvation or learning.

What woman here is so enamoured of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman’s face?

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 any one of you.

For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth. It is not the anger of Black women which corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all unless we meet it with what we have, our power to examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will live and work; our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support our choices.

But your new kind of hunger makes me chilly like danger for I see you forever retreating shrinking into a stranger in flight— and growing up black and fat I was so sure that skinny was funny or silly but always white.

When the man is busy making niggers it doesn’t matter much what shade you are. If he runs out of one particular color he can always switch to size and when he’s finished off the big ones he’ll just change to sex which is after all where it all began.

we are all children of Eshu god of chance and the unpredictable and we each wear many changes inside of our skin.

I have died too many deaths that were not mine.

So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.

Strong women know the taste of their own hatred I must always be building nests in a windy place I want the safety of oblique numbers that do not include me a beautiful woman with ugly moments secret and patient as the amused and ponderous elephants catering to Hannibal’s ambition as they swayed on their own way home.

I do not want to make a poem I want to make you more and less a part from my self.

my body writes into your flesh the poem you make of me.

I love you flesh into blossom I made you and take you made into me.

I see much better now and my eyes hurt.

What do you mean no no no no you don’t have the right to know how often have we built each other as shelters against the cold and even my daughter knows what you know can hurt you she says her nos and it hurts she says when she talks of liberation she means freedom from that pain she knows what you know can hurt but what you do not know can kill.

your light shines very brightly but I want you to know your darkness also rich and beyond fear.