Sublime

Audre Lorde meant it in the 1980s, when she said that “[c]aring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

I HAVE COME to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.

Our schools and colleges, institutions of the patriarchy, generally teach us to listen to people in power, men or women speaking the father tongue; and so they teach us not to listen to the mother tongue, to what the powerless say, poor men, women, children: not to hear that as valid discourse.

Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

There will always be people who are threatened by freedom in another person. Who have something to gain from our bondage.

That’s what we took from Audre Lorde’s words: how do we live, love, suck, fuck, and liberate ourselves? How come we’re not talking about sex or desire anymore in relationship to liberation? And Audre Lorde was all about it, in a positive, consensual, erotic, fully embodied way. With cancer, without cancer, with physical disability, with different w

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.

And self-empowerment is the most deeply political work there is, and the most difficult.

“Their cause must be our cause, too,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”