^ the Co-Op I used to live at
Named Zami, after a book by Audre Lorde
Stencil made by myself and two amazing friends
Audre Lorde: Sister Outsider
In September 30, 1979, Audre Lorde took the stage as part of New York Institute for the Humanities' conference on Simone de Beauvoir called “The Second Sex: Thirty Years Later.” As she looked over the audience of over 800 women, mostly white, straight and middle class, she exclaimed: “Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.”
Audre Lorde, born in Harlem to immigrants from Grenada, found in poetry her first tool to “dismantle the master's house.” After writing her first poem at age 8, she created a powerful legacy of work that continually re-imagines her multiple identities as, in her words, a “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” But also, as the title of her essay collection, Sister Outsider, expresses, she is a woman apart. For her poetry activism were one and the same. She explained to Claudia Tate in Black Women Writers at Work, "I loved poetry, and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest." In her poem, “A Litany for Survival” (included in her 1978 anthology The Black Unicorn: Poems) Audre Lorde writes:
“and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive”from: http://focusfeatures.com/slideshow/the_power_of_pariah
