I Am Your Sister by Audre-Lorde

Author:Audre-Lorde [Audre-Lorde]
Language: spa
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2009-08-16T18:57:30+00:00

For as a Black Lesbian poet, Parker knows, that for all women, the most enduring confl icts are far from simple.

And for the Sisters who still think that fear is a reason to be silent, Parker’s poetry says loudly and clearly: i have survived! i see, and i speak!

Movement in Black by Pat Parker

159

I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and to share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigating pain. . . . IF what I

have to say is wrong, then there will be some woman who

will stand up and say Audre Lorde was in error. But my

words will be there.

11

MY WORDS WILL BE THERE

I looked around when I was a young woman and there was no one saying what I wanted and needed to hear. I felt totally alienated, disoriented, crazy. I thought that there’s got to be somebody else who feels as I do.

I was very inarticulate as a youngster. I couldn’t speak. I didn’t speak until I was fi ve, in fact, not really, until I started reading and writing poetry. I used to speak in poetry. I would read poems, and I would mem-orize them. People would say, well what do you think, Audre? What happened to you yesterday? And I would recite a poem and somewhere in that poem there would be a line or a feeling I would be sharing. In other words, I literally communicated through poetry. And when I couldn’t fi nd the poems to express the things I was feeling, that’s what started me writing poetry, and that was when I was twelve or thirteen.

My critics have always wanted to cast me in a particular role, from the time my fi rst poem was published when I was fi fteen years old. My English teachers at Hunter High School said that this particular poem was much too romantic (it was a love poem about my fi rst love affair with a boy), and they didn’t want to print it in the school paper, which is why I sent it to Seventeen magazine, and, of course, Seventeen printed it.

My critics have always wanted to cast me in a particular light. People do. It’s easier to deal with a poet, certainly with a Black woman poet, when 160

you categorize her, narrow her so that she can fulfi ll your expectations.

But I have always felt that I cannot be categorized. That has been both my weakness and my strength. It has been my weakness because my independence has cost me a lot of support. But you see, it has also been my strength because it has given me the power to go on. I don’t know how I would have lived through the different things I have survived and continued to produce if I had not felt that all of who I am is what fulfi lls me and what fulfi lls the vision I have of a world.

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