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.
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.
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? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself – a Black woman warrior poet doing my work – come to ask you, are you doing yours?
You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for.
I sit before the typewriter and nothing comes. If feels as if underlining these assaults, lining them up one after the other and looking at them squarely might give them an unbearable power. Yet, I know that the opposite is true-no matter how difficult it may be to look at the realities of our lives, it is there that we will find the strength to change them. And to suppress any truth is to give it power beyond endurance.
The tensions created inside me by the contradictions is another source of energy and learning. I have always known I learn my most lasting lessons about difference by closely attending the ways in which the differences inside me lie down together.
We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared.
The black unicorn was mistaken for a shadow or symbol and taken through a cold country where mist painted mockeries of my fury.