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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 |
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