"For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them feel - of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead - while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths." - Poetry Is Not a Luxury
"And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own. For instance, 'I can't possibly teach Black women's writing - their existence is so different from mine.' Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another, 'She's a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?' Or, 'She's a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?' Or again, 'This woman write of her sons and I have no children.' And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other." - The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action
"If white american feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color? What is the theory behind racist feminism?" - The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House
"If I participate, knowingly or otherwise, in my sister's oppression and she calls me on it, to answer her anger with my own only blankets the substance of our exchange with reaction. It wastes energy. And yes, it is very difficult to stand still and listen to another woman's voice delineate an agony I do not share, or one to which I myself have contributed." - The Uses of Anger
"I am a lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly because I work in a university. If their full bellies make me fail to recognize my commonality with a woman of Color whose children do not eat because she cannot find work, or who has no children because her insides are rotted from home abortions and sterilizations; if I fail to recognize the lesbian who chooses not to have children, the woman who remains closeted because her homophobic community is her only life support, the woman who chooses silence instead of another death, the woman who is terrified lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or for further separation. 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." - The Uses of Anger
"When I say I am a Black feminist, I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as result of my Blackness as well as my womanness, and therefore my struggles on both these fronts are inseparable. When I say I am a Black Lesbian, I mean I am a woman whose primary focus of loving, physical as well as emotional, is directed to women. It does not mean I hate men." - I Am Your Sister
"There was a poster in the 1960s that was very popular: HE'S NOT BLACK, HE'S MY BROTHER! It used to infuriate me because it implied that the two were mutually exclusive - he couldn't be both brother and Black. Well, I do not want to be tolerated, nor misnamed. I want to be recognized.
I am a Black Lesbian, and I am your sister." - I Am Your Sister
"We all have to die at least once. Making that death useful would be winning for me. I wasn't supposed to exist anyway, not in any meaningful way in this fucked-up white boys' world. I want desperately to live, and I'm ready to fight for that living even if I die shortly. Just writing those words down snaps everything I want to do into a neon clarity." - A Burst of Light
"And first off I identified as a Black Feminist Lesbian poet, although it felt unsafe, which is probably why I had to do it. I explained that I identified myself as such because if there was one other Black Feminist Lesbian poet in isolation somewhere within the reach of my voice, I wanted her to know she was not alone." - A Burst of Light
"Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone, who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy." - A Burst of Light
"The first people who interviewed me in white coats from behind a computer were only interested in my health-care benefits and proposed method of payment. Those crucial facts determined what kind of plastic ID card I would be given, and without a plastic ID card, no one at all was allowed upstairs to see any doctor, as I was told by the uniformed, pistoled guards at all the stairwells." - A Burst of Light
"I work, I love, I rest, I see and learn. And I report. These are my givens. Not sureties, but a firm belief that whether or not living them with joy prolongs my life, it certainly enables me to pursue the objectives of that life with a deeper and more efficient clarity." - A Burst of Light
And my favorite poems from the collection in these selected works:
If You Come Softly
Bloodbirth
Martha
On a night of the full moon
The American Cancer Society Or There Is More Than One Way To Skin a Coon
Love Poem
Revolution is One Form of Social Change
Power
Between Ourselves
To the Poet Who Happens to Be Black and the Black Poet Who Happens to Be a Woman
Thaw
The Politics of Addiction
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