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.
As soon as a challenge was overcome, it creased to be a challenge, becoming the expected and ordinary rather than something I had achieved with difficulty, and could, therefore, be justly proud of. I could not own my own triumphs, nor give myself credit for them.
But it is also true that sometimes we cannot heal ourselves close to the very people from whom we draw strength and light, because they are also closest to the places and tastes and smells that go along with a pattern of living we are trying to rearrange.
And if we do not grow with our children, they cannot learn.
The “generation gap” is an important social tool for any repressive society. If the younger members of a community view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess, they will never be able to join hands and examine the living memory of the community, nor ask the all important question, “Why?” This gives rise to a historical amnesia that keeps us working to invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread.
What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and at, tempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
I am listening to what fear teaches. I will never be gone. I am a scar, a report from the frontlines, a talisman, a resurrection, a rough place on the chin of complacency.
As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.
Mary, do you ever really read the work of Black women? Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us? This is not a rhetorical question.
Mainstream communication does not want women, particularly white women, responding to racism. It wants racism to be accepted as an immutable given in the fabric of existence, like evening time or the common cold.
Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.
This continued blindness between us can only serve the oppressive system within which we live.
And that anger, as we know from our flayed egos of childhood, is armed with a powerful cruelty learned in the bleakness of the too-early battles for survival. ‘You can’t take it, huh!’ The Dozens. A Black game of supposedly friendly rivalry and name calling; in reality, a crucial exercise in learning how to absorb verbal abuse without faltering.
The enormity of our task, to turn the world around. It feels like turning my life around, inside out.
I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I’ll be sending messages on a ouija board, cryptic comments from the other side. When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less important whether or not I am unafraid.
If I can look directly at my life and my death without flinching I know there is nothing they can ever do to me again.
The only answer to death is the heat and confusion of living; the only dependable warmth is the warmth of the blood.
One never really forgets the primary lessons of survival, if one continues to survive.
Growing up Fat Black Female and almost blind in america requires so much surviving that you have to learn from it or die.
Because you are Black and lesbian, you seem to speak with the moral authority of suffering.′ Yes, I am Black and lesbian, and what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority. There is a difference.
My work is to inhabit the silences with which I have lived and fill them with myself until they have the sounds of brightest day and the loudest thunder. And then there will be no room left inside of me for what has been except as memory of sweetness enhancing what can and is to be.