It’s difficult to talk about double messages without having a twin tongue.
We have the power those who came before us have given us, to move beyond the place where they were standing. We have the trees, and water, and sun, and our children. Malcolm X does not live in the dry texts of his words as we read them; he lives in the energy we generate and use to move along the visions we share with him. We are making the future as well as bonding to survive the enormous pressures of the present, and that is what it means to be a part of history.
There are no new pains.
No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman.
In a paradoxical sense, once I accepted my position as different from the larger society as well as from any single-sub-society – black or gay – I felt I didn’t have to try so hard. To be accepted. To look femme. To be straight. To look straight. To be proper. To look “nice”. To be liked. To be loved. To be approved. What I didn’t realize was how much harder I had to try merely to stay alive, or rather, to stay human. How much stronger a person I became in that trying.
The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us – the poet – whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom.
Each of us is called upon to take a stand. So in these days ahead, as we examine ourselves and each other, our works, our fears, our differences, our sisterhood and survivals, I urge you to tackle what is most difficult for us all, self-scrutiny of our complacencies, the idea that since each of us believes she is on the side of right, she need not examine her position.
There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.
We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.
All of our children are prey. How do we raise them not to prey upon themselves and each other? And this is why we cannot be silent, because our silences will come to testify against us out of the mouths of our children.
However, experience has taught us that action in the now is also necessary, always. Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours? ‘If you want us to change the world someday, we at least have to live long enough to grow up!’ shouts the child.
I heard my old friend Clem’s voice coming back to me through the dimness of thirty years: “I see you coming here trying to make sense where there is no sense. Try just living in it. Respond, alter, see what happens.” I thought of the African way of perceiving life, as experience to be lived rather than as problem to be solved.
Survival is the greatest gift of love.
She taught me that women who want without needing are expensive and sometimes wasteful, but women who need without wanting are dangerous – they suck you in and pretend not to notice.
Yet anger, like guilt, is an incomplete form of human knowledge. More useful than hatred, but still limited. Anger is useful to help clarify our differences, but in the long run, strength that is bred by anger alone is a blind force which cannot create the future. It can only demolish the past. Such strength does not focus upon what lies ahead, but upon what lies behind, upon what created it – hatred. And hatred is a deathwish for the hated, not a lifewish for anything else.
As the light wanes I see what I thought I was anxious to surrender I am only willing to lend.
If this society ascribes roles to Black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it Black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, or is it society that needs changing?
Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity.
We have been sad long enough to make this earth either weep or grow fertile.
I cannot recall the words of my first poem but I remember a promise I made my pen never to leave it lying in somebody else’s blood.