There is no Hierarchy of Oppressions.
Art is not living. It is a use of living. The artist has the ability to take that living and use it in a certain way, and produce art.
We are all in the process of becoming.
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.
When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn’t matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.
What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman’s face?
Wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs.
What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence.
It’s a struggle but that’s why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.
We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.
Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.
I am a Black Feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my blackness as well as my womaness, and therefore my struggles on both of these fronts are inseparable.
Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.
When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I’m not excluding you from the joining – I’m broadening the joining.
Without community, there is no liberation.
Some words live in my throat breeding like adders. Others know sun seeking like gypsies over my tongue to explode through my lips.
The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us – the poet – whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.
I started writing because I had a need inside of me to create something that was not there.
Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.