Sister Outsider Foreword
Years ago, when I was a young Black woman barely recognizable to myself because of the churn of heat and anger just beneath my surface, I found the writings of Audre Lorde. It was the universe, or the ancestors, or intuition that brought Audre Lorde to me, a Black woman, a Black woman writer, and a Black mother. I was in my midtwenties, and had just given birth to a daughter before relocating to Brooklyn, New York. I found a new home in Bed-Stuy and attempted to raise a culturally aware, healthy, and actualized Black girl child. While I sought to understand my place in the world as a working mother, to unlearn the atrocities continually normalized as acts of injustice (see: police brutality, drug addiction as punishable rather than rehabilitative, and a government that refuses to support economically deprived citizens), I realized I was losing my footing (see: self) in this full-time balancing act. And it began to weaken me.
My anger seethed when I was called “girl” by a white man during a meeting with male colleagues. My rage bubbled and spilled when I was called “ghetto” after trying to board a subway with my child (see: audacity of a woman who refuses to let a man force her and her child aside so that he could board the train first). These consistent acts of violence required balm… a healing property. And so, I found Audre Lorde.
Her text was hidden to the average eye (not listed as required reading in my college literature syllabi as often as Gramsci or Foucault). However, it was Lorde who brought me back from the brink of an all-consuming violence when I read essays like “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” and “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” Lorde explained intersectionality, righteous rage, and the responsibility of artists when dismantling destructive ideologies practiced and guised as nationalism.
