Latest / Soul Salon with Ayandastood / 11: essay reading: "on the transformation of silence into language and action" by Audre Lorde

Transcript

11: essay reading: "on the transformation of silence into language and action" by Audre Lorde · Soul Salon with Ayandastood

• 0:00
  Hi, Angels. Welcome back. I know it has been a hot minute literally six months. I feel terrible. I feel awful. I feel like I've abandoned you, but I know that there are so many voices on earth that are keeping you at ease.
• 0:17
  Hopefully, so I trust that because I'm part of this broader community of creators and of speakers and feelers and thinkers that you had a wonderful time. But now I must say, I've returned to the page. And when you leave a creative project behind, I know there's a lot of shame.
• 0:37
  I experience a lot of shame because I said I would do something and then I didn't do it. But that's life. You know, that is life. And I think the goal is to not let the shame overcrowd or preclude the possibility of the return.
• 0:52
  And I really feel an emotional connection to my creative projects, to my podcast, to my TikTok, to my writing now, life changes. I say now, because I don't feel like I'm a writer, but I am writing. So whatever the fuck, okay, per.
• 1:16
  But now because of that emotional connection, when I leave someone behind, it just feels like how day you just leave me forgot to pick me up from school like mom, where the fuck are you?
• 1:32
  With that being said, I want to use this moment to share an essay with you that I go on and on and on about.
• 1:39
  Audrey Lorde essay, the transformation of silence into language and action is like burnt into my brain. It's one of the most important essays like.
• 1:46
  And what I thought is that because these big tech companies have our attention span on such a choke hold, or perhaps that's not a good metaphor, they have such a monopoly over our attention span.
• 2:00
  So with that in mind, I wanted to share this essay with you because it means the world to me, and it's something that I regularly return to.
• 2:10
  And I recently posted a TikTok about it, and quite a few people commented, is there an audio version, which I totally understand, because I also love auditory learning, it's such a joy and a blessing and a gift.
• 2:20
  So I thought, well, there are no rules, I need to read this essay to people so that I can bring Audrey's work to more people.
• 2:28
  Audrey Lorde was a poet and author who used her writing to shine light on her experience of the world as a black lesbian woman and later as a mother and person suffering from cancer.
• 2:40
  A prominent member of the women's and LGBTQ rights movements, her writings called attention to the multifaceted nature of identity and the ways in which people from different walks of life could grow stronger together.
• 2:53
  I was born black and a woman. I am trying to become the strongest person I can become to live the life I have been given and to help affect change toward a livable future for this earth and for my children.
• 3:06
  As a black lesbian feminist socialist poet, mother of two, including one boy and member of an interracial couple, I usually find myself part of some group in which the majority defines me as deviant, difficult, inferior or just plain wrong.
• 3:22
  From my membership in all of these groups, I have learned that oppression and the intolerance of difference come in all shapes and sizes and colors and sexualities and that among those of us who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children, there can be no hierarchies of oppression.
• 3:37
  She also took part in the civil rights, anti war and women's liberation movements. She published lots of anthologies of poems but if you want to read her work, Roxanne Gay has a collection or edited a collection of her works that I think came out literally last year so I'll link to that in the show notes.
• 3:55
  I'm very grateful to be able to join others in really amplifying what she had to say.
• 4:02
  So I'm going to now read this to you. It's called the transformation of silence into language and action.
• 4:11
  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.
• 4:26
  That the speaking profits me beyond any other effect. I am standing here as a black lesbian poet and the meaning of all that waits upon the fact that I am still alive and might not have been.
• 4:42
  Less than two months ago, I was told by two doctors, one female and one male, that I would have to have breast surgery and that there was a 60 to 80% chance that the tumor was malignant.
• 4:56
  Between that telling and the actual surgery, there was a three week period of the agony of an involuntary reorganization of my entire life.
• 5:08
  The surgery was completed and the growth was benign.
• 5:13
  But within those three weeks, I was forced to look upon myself and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has left me still shaken but much stronger.
• 5:27
  This is a situation faced by many women, by some of you here today.
• 5:33
  Some of what I experienced during that time has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning the transformation of silence into language and action.
• 5:47
  In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and emissions became strongly etched in a merciless light and what I most regretted were my silences.
• 6:05
  Of what had I ever been afraid to question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain or death, but we all hurt in so many different ways all the time and pain will either change or end.
• 6:23
  Death on the other hand is the final silence and that might be coming quickly now without regard for whether I had ever spoken what I needed to be said or had only betrayed myself into small silences while I planned some day to speak or waited for someone else's words.
• 6:44
  And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength.
• 7:02
  I was going to die if not sooner than later whether or not I had ever spoken myself my silences had not protected me your silence will not protect you.
• 7:18
  But for every real word spoken for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed bridging our differences.
• 7:38
  And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.
• 7:50
  The women who sustained me through that period were black and white, old and young, lesbian, bisexual and heterosexual and we all shared a war against the tyrannies of silence.
• 8:06
  They all gave me a strength and concern without which I could not have survived intact.
• 8:13
  Within those weeks of acute fear came the knowledge within the war we are all waging with the forces of death, subtle and otherwise conscious or not.
• 8:24
  I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.
• 8:31
  What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own until you will sicken and die of them still in silence?
• 8:49
  Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears because I am woman, because I am black, because I am lesbian, because I am a black woman warrior poet doing my work, come to ask you, are you doing yours?
• 9:09
  And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-rivelation and that always seems fraught with danger.
• 9:21
  But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter and if you don't speak it out one day, it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.
• 9:52
  In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear, fear of contempt, of censure or some judgment or recognition, fear of challenge of annihilation.
• 10:07
  But most of all, I think we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live.
• 10:17
  Within this country, where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion or vision, black women have on one hand always been highly visible and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism.
• 10:37
  Even within the women's movement, we have had to fight and still do for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our blackness.
• 10:49
  For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call America, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson that we were never meant to survive.
• 11:00
  Not as human beings, and neither were most of you here today, black or not.
• 11:07
  And that visibility, which makes us most vulnerable, is that which is also the source of our greatest strength.
• 11:17
  Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.
• 11:23
  We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and ourselves are wasted while our children are distorted and destroyed while our earth is poisoned.
• 11:32
  We can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles and we will still be no less afraid.
• 11:40
  In my house this year we are celebrating the feast of Kwanzaa, the African American festival of harvest which begins the day after Christmas and lasts for seven days.
• 11:51
  There are seven principles of Kwanzaa, one for each day.
• 11:56
  The first principle is Umorja, which means unity, the decision to strive for and maintain unity in self and community.
• 12:07
  The principle for yesterday, the second day, was Kuji Chagulia, self-determination, the decision to define ourselves, name ourselves and speak for ourselves instead of being defined and spoken for by others.
• 12:24
  Today is the third day of Kwanzaa, and the principle for today is Ujima, collective work and responsibility.
• 12:34
  The decision to build and maintain ourselves and our communities together and to recognize and solve our problems together.
• 12:43
  Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us.
• 12:58
  In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation.
• 13:15
  For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it.
• 13:26
  For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us.
• 13:32
  But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding.
• 13:43
  Because in this way alone we can survive by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing that is growth.
• 13:54
  And it is never without fear of visibility of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment of pain of death.
• 14:05
  But we have lived through all of those already in silence except death.
• 14:11
  And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered and I would still die.
• 14:24
  It is very good for establishing perspective. In other words, your silence won't protect you from death. You'll always die and so you might as well speak back to the essay.
• 14:36
  And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.
• 14:52
  That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own.
• 15:03
  For instance, quote, I can't possibly teach black women's writing. Their experience is so different from mine.
• 15:11
  End quote, yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust?
• 15:18
  Or another quote, she's a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me? End quote, or quote, she's a lesbian.
• 15:26
  What would my husband say or my chairman? End quote, or again quote, this woman writes of her sons and I have no children. End quote, and all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and of each other.
• 15:41
  We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.
• 15:51
  For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition.
• 15:58
  And while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
• 16:07
  The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us.
• 16:23
  For it is not difference which immobilizes us but silence and there are so many silences to be broken.
• 16:37
  And there are so many silences to be broken.
• 16:50
  This essay continues to move me from a deep place in my body and my being and I found it so interesting what she said about the words of women that are crying to be heard.
• 17:02
  We must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.
• 17:13
  That's so beautiful in how much that mirrors what I felt called to do through this episode.
• 17:21
  What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say?
• 17:27
  Thank you all so much. I hope that you enjoyed this essay. I'm going to link to it so you can save it in your little phone.
• 17:35
  If you want to stay in touch with me, please follow my sub-stack newsletter. That's where I share my favorite essays.
• 17:41
  I share on Sundays usually. Don't hold me to it but I share a list of things bringing me joy.
• 17:47
  So I hope that you'll find me there and I'm sending you so much love today. I'm sending you light. I'm sending you joy. Love you babes. I'm going to hit send.
• 17:57
  If I hit send, be proud of me because it means that I overcame creative resistance.
• 18:01
  Okay, love you. Have a beautiful day. Sending you lots of love. Goodbye.