I am your sister : collected and unpublished writings of Audre Lorde

by Audre Lorde

Paper Book, 2009

LCC

PS3562.O75 I3

Status

Available

Call number

PS3562.O75 I3

Publication

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2009.

Description

Audre Lorde was not only a famous poet; she was also one of the most important radical black feminists of the past century. Her writings and speeches grappled with an impressive broad list of topics, including sexuality, race, gender, class, disease, the arts, parenting, and resistance, and they have served as a transformative and important foundation for theorists and activists in considering questions of power and social justice. Lorde embraced difference, and at each turn she emphasized the importance of using it to build shared strength among marginalized communities. I Am Your Sister is a collection of Lorde's non-fiction prose, written between 1976 and 1990, and it introduces new perspectives on the depth and range of Lorde's intellectual interests and her commitments to progressive social change. Presented here, for the first time in print, is a major body of Lorde's speeches and essays, along with the complete text of A Burst of Light and Lorde's landmark prose works Sister Outsider and The Cancer Journals. Together, these writings reveal Lorde's commitment to a radical course of thought and action, situating her works within the women's, gay and lesbian, and African American Civil Rights movements. They also place her within a continuum of black feminists, from Sojourner Truth, to Anna Julia Cooper, Amy Jacques Garvey, Lorraine Hansberry, and Patricia Hill Collins. I Am Your Sister concludes with personal reflections from Alice Walker, Gloria Joseph, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, and bell hooks on Lorde's political and social commitments and the indelibility of her writings for all who are committed to a more equitable society.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member MeditationesMartini
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
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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.
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Awards

Lambda Literary Award (Finalist — 2010)
Stonewall Book Award (Honor Book — Non-Fiction — 2010)

Language

Physical description

xv, 280 p.; 24 inches

ISBN

0195341481 / 9780195341485
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