Circuito UBU - Julho de 2020 ( )

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.

Your silence will not protect you.

If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.

Revolution is not a onetime event.

Our visions begin with our desires.

You read lines like these and you get how it is that Audre Lorde rattled off "warrior poet" like it was just her job descriptions. These are talismans, incantations of power. gave us intersectionality and showed us how a feminist revolutionary (meaning, I guess, roughly, someone whose revolution is based on community/equality/love) faces down cancer (this is a rare and precious thing not only because it extends the political envelope over the disease, something we don't do enough--so many bright lights retreat from the limelight when terminally ill or face it with the clichés or find a venue for a kind of death poem or concluding remarks full of requisite gentleness and joy and then exit--but also, for me, because it closes the gap between her remarkable life and mine, which has benefited from the privilege of remaining ordinary. She shows us that one more tyranny we can face down is the one that says each of us dies alone. Fuck that! She does this, BTW, in A Burst of Light, included in its entirety here, and amazing, but reviewed by me elsewhere--not here) and challenged each of us to value ourselves and each other to go on giving a shit and holding ourselves to a higher standard. (Lest this all sound far too attenuated and nonspecific, she also told us, me, "my" people, white people, again and again, to stop killing black people and to fucking do better. I'm just trying to find my way into her work from me.)

Some of those power formulae up above are in speeches and such included here, and that's great. But take the "collected and unpublished" of the title seriously--basically the last third or more of the book is miscellanea or ephemera or famous women she knew talking about how great she was, and skippable and not really powerful. ( )