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1c264bf
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Each one of us had been starved for love for so long that we wanted to believe that love, once found, was all-powerful. We wanted to believe that it could give word to my inchoate pain and rages; that it could enable Muriel to face the world and get a job; that it could free our writings, cure racism, end homophobia and adolescent acne.
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love
life-pains
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Audre Lorde |
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3675b54
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I wasn't cute or passive enough to be "femme," and I wasn't mean or tough enough to be "butch." I was given a wide berth. Non-conventional people can be dangerous, even in the gay community."
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Audre Lorde |
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a90c02d
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I lost my sister, Gennie, to my silence and her pain and despair, to both our angers and to a world's cruelty that destroys its own young in passing - not even as a rebel gesture or sacrifice or hope for another living of the spirit, but out of not noticing or caring about the destruction. I have never been able to blind myself to that cruelty, which according to one popular definition of mental health, makes me mentally unhealthy.
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Audre Lorde |
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52fcc75
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The Seventh Sense" Women who build nations learn to love men who build nations learn to love children building sand castles by the rising sea"
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Audre Lorde |
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f69b291
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Dark-bright fire lit eyes
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metaphor
brown-eyes
dark-eyes
description
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Audre Lorde |
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2def1c5
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If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core -- the fountain -- of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. (From "Poetry is Not a Luxury")"
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Audre Lorde |
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81eccde
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Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them go hungry to bed at night.
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politics
congress
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Audre Lorde |
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f1a7a88
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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.
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Audre Lorde |
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c139cc7
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The way you get people to testify against themselves is not to have police tactics and oppressive techniques. What you do is build it in so people learn to distrust everything in themselves that has not been sanctioned, to reject what is most creative in themselves to begin with, so you don't even need to stamp it out.
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Audre Lorde |
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b13701f
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As Black people, if there is one thing we can learn from the 60s, it is how infinitely complex any move for liberation must be. For we must move against not only those forces which dehumanize us from the outside, but also against those oppressive values which we have been forced to take into ourselves. Through examining the combination of our triumphs and errors, we can examine the dangers of an incomplete vision. Not to condemn that vision..
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Audre Lorde |
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1c5802e
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may I never lose that terror that keeps me brave
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Audre Lorde |
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98d8f53
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I wish to raise a Black man who will not be destroyed by, nor settle for, those corruptions called by the white fathers who mean his destruction as surely as they mean mine. I wish to raise a Black man who will recognize that the legitimate objects of his hostility are not women, but the particulars of a structure that programs him to fear and despise women as well as his own Black self.
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Audre Lorde |
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aa47627
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To go to bed and to wake up again day afte day besides a woman, to lie in bed with our arms around each other and drift in and out of sleep, to be with each other not as a quick stolen pleasure, nor as a wild treat but like sunlight, day after day in the regualr course of our lives. I was discovering all the ways that love creeps into life when two selves exist closely, when two women meet.
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Audre Lorde |
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500e00c
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What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope.
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honesty
hope
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Audre Lorde |
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6bf7c8c
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see me now your severed daughter laughing our name into echo all the world shall remember
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Audre Lorde |
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e71f512
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I forgot what we were celebrating. Because we were always celebrating something, a new job, a new poem, a new love, a new dream.
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living-life-to-the-fullest
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Audre Lorde |
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c83d87d
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I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic
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Audre Lorde |
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6bdfb49
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Tell them about how 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.
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Audre Lorde |
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94924a6
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We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.
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gratitude
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Audre Lorde |
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29e40a2
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I have found that battling despair does not mean closing my eyes to the enormity of the tasks of effecting change, nor ignoring the strength and the barbarity of the forces aligned against us. It means teaching, surviving and fighting with the most important resource I have, myself, and taking joy in that battle. It means, for me, recognizing the enemy outside, and the enemy within, and knowing that my work is part of a continuum of women's..
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Audre Lorde |
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05d3b74
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The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women.
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Audre Lorde |
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0e705db
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What happens when you narrow your definition to what is convenient, or what is fashionable, or what is expected, is dishonesty by silence.
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Audre Lorde |
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4bd2985
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The cockroach who is dying and the woman who is blind agree
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Audre Lorde |
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ef76878
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The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.
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racism
feminism
intersectionality
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Audre Lorde |
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f858b03
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I am tired of writing memorials to black men whom I was on the brink of knowing weary like fig trees weighted like a crepe myrtle with all the black substance poured into earth before earth is ready to bear. I am tired of holy deaths of the ulcerous illuminations the cerebral accidents the psychology of the oppressed where mental health is the ability to repress knowledge of the world's cruelty.
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Audre Lorde |
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ffc7630
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How are you practicing what you preach--whatever you preach, and who is exactly listening?
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Audre Lorde |
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f17031b
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In the interests of separation, Black women have been taught to view each other as always suspect, heartless competitors for the scarce male, the all-important prize that could legitimize our existence. This dehumanizing denial of self is no less lethal than the dehumanization of racism to which it is so closely allied.
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dehumanization
competition
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Audre Lorde |
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3f3bcbe
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We cannot love 'our people' unless we love each of us ourselves, unless I love each piece of myself, those I wish to keep and those I wish to change--for survival is the ability to encompass difference, to encompass change without destruction.
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Audre Lorde |
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385f4bd
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I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.
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Audre Lorde |
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a84ed3a
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When there is no connection at all between people, then anger is a way of bringing them closer together, of making contact. But when there is a great deal of connectedness that is problematic or threatening or unacknowledged, then anger is a way of keeping people separate, of putting distance between us.
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relationship
connectedness
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Audre Lorde |
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ddf81e5
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places do not change so much as what we seek in them
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Audre Lorde |
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6672982
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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 from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation.
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prejudice
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Audre Lorde |
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a16a3be
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When a people share a common oppression, certain kinds of skills and joint defenses are developed. And if you survive you survive because those skills and defenses have worked. When you come into conflict over other existing differences, there is a vulnerability to each other which is desperate and very deep.
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Audre Lorde |
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eca48eb
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When you read the words of Langston Hughes you are reading the words of a Black Gay man. When you read the words of Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Angelina Weld Grimke, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, you are reading the words of Black Lesbians. When you listen to the life-affirming voices of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, you are hearing Black Lesbian women. When you see the plays and read the words of Lorraine Hansberry, you are reading the words ..
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Audre Lorde |
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5aa755d
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These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.
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Audre Lorde |
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82b557e
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Much of the gay white movement seeks to be included in the american dream and is angered when they do not receive the standard white male privileges, misnamed as "american democracy". Often, white gay men are working to change the system. This is one the reasons why the gay male movement is as white as it is. Black gay men recognize, again by the facts of survival, that being Black, they are not going to be included in the same way."
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Audre Lorde |
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3808cc6
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my body writes into your flesh the poem you make of me. "Recreation"
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Audre Lorde |
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52bb09e
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It has rained for five days running the world is a round puddle of sunless water where small islands are only beginning to cope a young boy in my garden is bailing out water from his flower patch when I ask him why he tells me young seeds that have not seen sun forget and drown easily.
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coping
poem
poetry
black-unicorn
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Audre Lorde |
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68e0dac
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Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to address each other's difference with respect.
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Audre Lorde |
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c8f9abe
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Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years, writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose. As we reclaim our..
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literature
poetry
prose
class
race
gender
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Audre Lorde |
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9e7b41f
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The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are -- until the poem -- nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but..
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hope
life
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Audre Lorde |
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ccc387a
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This kind of action is a prevalent error among oppressed peoples. It is based upon the false notion that there is only a limited and particular amount of freedom that must be divided up between us, with the largest and juiciest pieces of liberty going as spoils to the victor or the stronger. So instead of joining together to fight for more, we quarrel between ourselves for a larger slice of the one pie. Black women fight between ourselves o..
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zero-sum-game
oppression
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Audre Lorde |
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c21fbf0
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For Black women as well as Black men, it is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others -- for their use and to our detriment.
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Audre Lorde |
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b5a548e
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Black men are not so passive that they must have Black women speak for them. Even my fourteen-year-old son knows that. Black men themselves must examine and articulate their own desires and positions and stand by the conclusions thereof. No point is served by a Black male professional who merely whines at the absence of his viewpoint in Black women's work. Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking..
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Audre Lorde |