Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.
DeLois lived up the block on 142nd Street and never had her hair done, and all the neighbourhood women sucked their teeth as she walked by. Her crispy hair twinkled in the summer sun as her big proud stomach moved her on down the block while I watched, not caring whether or not she was a poem.
I feel not to be open about who I am in all respects places a certain kind of expectation on me I’m just not into meeting any more.
As a living creature I am part of two kinds of forces- growth and decay, sprouting and withering, living and dying- and at any given moment of our lives, each one of us is actively located somewhere along a continuum between these two forces.
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.
The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.
The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations that we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us.
If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That’s the beginning of social protest.
You are the one that you are looking for.
I am still learning – how to take joy in all the people I am, how to use all my selves in the service of what I believe, how to accept when I fail and rejoice when I succeed.
We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.
Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.
I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do.
Revolution is not a one time event.
Raising Black children-female and male-in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive.
I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer.