Datasets:

shalinialisha

/

ai-for-all

like 0

Foreword

WITH ITS PARADOXICAL TITLE, Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde’s most

influential book of prose, is ever more trenchant twenty-three years

after its first printing—surpassing even the reputation of her poetry,

which is no minor feat. Were she here among us in the funky U.S.

instead of floating somewhere over the Guinea Coast, Lorde would

still want and have to claim that “outsider” stance. These prose

works, much like her poetry, position her (and us), as Akasha Gloria

Hull said many years ago, “on the line,” refusing the safety of that

inside perimeter. I return to these texts again and always—in these

times of imperial and unnatural acts, like the war in Iraq and the

federal abandonment of the Gulf Coast survivors in the wake of

Hurricane Katrina. Sister is my sister no matter how I may reject her

counsel: “As Black people … we must move against not only those

forces which dehumanize us from the outside, but also against those

oppressive values which we have been forced to take into

ourselves.”1 No matter how angry Sister makes me with her

seemingly easy aphorisms: “For the master’s tools will never dismantle

the master’s house.”2 No matter how much Sister still asks the hard

questions: “Why do Black women reserve a particular voice of fury

and disappointment for each other? Who is it we must destroy when

we attack each other with that tone of predetermined and correct

annihilation?”3

On the shelf with or at the bottom of that stack of other wellmined tomes—The Black Woman: An Anthology; Conditions: Five, The

Black Women’s Issue; Lesbian Fiction; Top Ranking—Sister is never far

from me. I retain several dog-eared, underlined, coffee-splotched

copies of her—at home, at work, on my nightstand—as necessary as

my eyeglasses, my second sight.

A fall semester of teaching my women’s studies seminar never

passes without deploying one of the following texts in theorizing

feminist activism: “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining

Difference,” “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” or “The Uses of Anger:

Women Responding to Racism.” In one paragraph, Lorde can

simultaneously blow away the entire Enlightenment project and use

its tools, too.

In 1990 I quoted myself in “Knowing the Danger and Going There

Anyway,” an article I wrote on Lorde for the Boston feminist

newspaper, Sojourner; I’ll change the sister trope and quote myself

again: “I said that Audre Lorde’s work is ’a neighbor I’ve grown up

with, who can always be counted on for honest talk, to rescue me

when I’ve forgotten the key to my own house, to go with me to a

tenants’ or town meeting, a community festival’.”4 In 1990, Lorde

was still walking among us. Sister Outsider has taken its creator’s

place as that good neighbor. And with this new edition, we will

have our good neighbor and sister for another generation. May

those of us who are Sister Outsider’s old neighbors continue to be

inspired by her luminous writing and may those new neighbors be

newly inspired.

—CHERYL CLARKE

2007

Introduction

WHEN WE BEGAN EDITING Sister Outsider—long after the book had been

conceptualized, a contract signed, and new material written—Audre

Lorde informed me, as we were working one afternoon, that she

doesn’t write theory. “I am a poet,” she said.

Lorde’s stature as a poet is undeniable. And yet there can be no

doubt that Sister Outsider, a collection of essays and speeches drawn

from the past eight years of this Black lesbian feminist’s nonfiction

prose, makes absolutely clear to many what some already knew:

Audre Lorde’s voice is central to the development of contemporary

feminist theory. She is at the cutting edge of consciousness.

The fifteen selections included here, several of them published for

the first time, are essential reading. Whether it is the by now

familiar “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” opening us up to

the potential power in all aspects of our lives implicit in the erotic,

When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion

of the life-force of women; of that creative energy

empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now

reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our

loving, our work, our lives.1

or the recently authored “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and

Anger,” probing the white racist roots of hostility between Black

women,

We are Black women born into a society of entrenched

loathing and contempt for whatever is Black and female. We

are strong and enduring. We are also deeply scarred.2

Lorde’s work expands, deepens, and enriches all of our

understandings of what feminism can be.

But what about the “conflict” between poetry and theory,

between their separate and seemingly incompatible spheres? We

have been told that poetry expresses what we feel, and theory states

what we know; that the poet creates out of the heat of the moment,

while the theorist’s mode is, of necessity, cool and reasoned; that

one is art and therefore experienced “subjectively,” and the other is

scholarship, held accountable in the “objective” world of ideas. We

have been told that poetry has a soul and theory has a mind and

that we have to choose between them.

The white western patriarchal ordering of things requires that we

believe there is an inherent conflict between what we feel and what

we think—between poetry and theory. We are easier to control

when one part of our selves is split from another, fragmented, off

balance. There are other configurations, however, other ways of

experiencing the world, though they are often difficult to name. We

can sense them and seek their articulation. Because it is the work of

feminism to make connections, to heal unnecessary divisions, Sister