We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.
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.
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.