What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman’s face?
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.
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.