Self-care is not about self-indulgence, it is about self-preservati on.
We are powerful because we have survived.
The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation.
I am my best work – a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.
Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.
But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.
The love expressed between women is particular and powerful because we have had to love in order to live; love has been our survival.
In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.
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.
You cannot use someone else’s fire. You can only use your own. And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it.
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation .
Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded...
It’s possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we’ll make it.
We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.