The following is an edited excerpt from Your Silence Will Not Protect You by Audre Lorde, taken from the chapter Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred and Anger.
Theorising about self-worth is ineffective. So is pretending. Women can die in agony who have lived with blank and beautiful faces. I can afford to look at myself directly, risk the pain of experiencing who I am not, and learn to savour the sweetness of who I am. I can make friends with all the different pieces of me, liked and disliked. Admit that I am kinder to my neighbour’s silly husband most days than I am to myself. I can look into the mirror and learn to love the stormy little Black girl who once longed to be white or anything other than who she was, since all she was ever allowed to be was the sum of the colour of her skin and the textures of her hair, the shade of her knees and elbows, and those things were clearly not acceptable as human.
Learning to love ourselves as Black women goes beyond a simplistic insistence that ‘Black is beautiful.’ It goes beyond and deeper than a surface appreciation of Black beauty, although that is certainly a good beginning. But if the quest to reclaim ourselves and each other remains there, then we risk another superficial measurement of self, one superimposed upon the old one and almost as damaging, since it pauses at the superficial. Certainly it is no more empowering. And it is empowerment – our strengthening in the service of ourselves and each other, in the service of our work and future – that will be the result of this pursuit.
I have to learn to love myself before I can love you or accept your loving. You have to learn to love yourself before you can love me or accept my loving. Know we are worthy of touch before we can reach out for each other. Not cover that sense of worthlessness with ‘I don’t want you’ or ‘it doesn’t matter’ or ‘white folks feel, Black folks do.’ And these are enormously difficult to accomplish in an environment that consistently encourages non-love and cover-up, an environment that warns us to be quiet about our need of each other, by defining our dissatisfactions as unanswerable and our necessities as unobtainable.
Until now, there has been little that taught us how to be kind to each other. To the rest of the world, yes, but not to ourselves. There have been few external examples of how to treat another Black woman with kindness, deference, tenderness or an appreciative smile in passing, just because she is; an understanding of each other’s shortcomings because we have been somewhere close to that, ourselves. When last did you compliment another sister, give recognition to her specialness? We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other. But we can practice being gentle with ourselves by being gentle with each other. We can practice being gentle with each other by being gentle with that piece of ourselves that is hardest to hold, by giving more to the brave bruised girlchild within each of us, by expecting a little less from her gargantuan efforts to excel. We can love her in the light as well as in the darkness, quiet her frenzy toward perfection and encourage her attentions toward fulfilment. Maybe then we will come to appreciate more how much she has taught us, and how much she is doing to keep this world revolving toward some liveable future.
It would be ridiculous to believe that this process is not lengthy and difficult. It is suicidal to believe it is not possible. As we arm ourselves with ourselves and each other, we can stand toe to toe inside that rigorous loving and begin to speak the impossible – or what has always seemed like the impossible to one another. The first step toward genuine change. Eventually, if we speak the truth to each other, it will become unavoidable to ourselves.
An abbreviated version of this essay was published in ‘Essence’ vol. 14 no. 6 (October 1983).
Read more in Your Silence Will Not Protect You by Audre Lorde.
Audre Lorde (1934-92) described herself as ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’. Her extraordinary belief in the power of language – of speaking – to articulate selfhood, confront injustice and bring about change in the world remains as transformative today as it was then, and no less urgent.
Your Silence Will Not Protect You brings Lorde's poetry and prose together for the first time, with a preface by Reni Eddo-Lodge and an introduction by Sara Ahmed.