“Sister Outsider” by Audre Lorde

I’m a little embarrassed to say that this is the first book at I have read by Lorde. I know her poetry from coming across various pieces over the years, but I only recently finally got my hands on one of her books. She is such an amazing writer, whether it is poetry or prose. What I love about this collection is how well it embodies the title. “Sister” as in writing from one women to another, and “Outsider” as in writing as a Black women to a mostly white audience.

I am amazed how much of her writing is still relevant to today. Her “Open Letter to Mary Daly” could have been written today to any white feminist ignoring the voices of people of color. And of course her essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” is always timely and important. I had read it before, separately, and posted it online during the BLM riots this summer. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. People have to riot for change now! The bulk of the essay is about how we have internalized the master’s tools, and that is actually the most difficult one to dismantle though. This aspect also gets forgotten a lot by people who haven’t read the whole thing, and it is important. We need to constantly be examining ourselves and analyzing whether we are speaking from an oppressed state or a liberated one.

Other notable chapters include “Poetry is Not a Luxury” which makes a really good case for how poetry is primarily from the working class. Therefore looking down on poetry rather than prose is a form of classism. I had never thought of it that way, but yeah, having the time to write during a break on scraps of paper means that by necessity it will be poetry rather than prose.

I also quite appreciated the chapter on the erotic as power. Having just finished Ace, which makes a similar point, seeing that parallels here is interesting. The origins of the term “erotic” refer not to sexual content but to anything with intense emotion behind it. That means that there is inherent power in the erotic that has been suppressed by labelling it as sexual and therefore inappropriate. Women in particular tend to be oppressed in this way and restricted by limiting their use of the erotic. I found it fascinating that these two writers took the same term and made very similar points about it, even though it was directed at two separate communities.

Lorde is an incredible writer who can speak to so many different experiences. Black, lesbian, female, she is more than the sum of all these parts in her life and her writing. Now more than ever we need to listen to people at these intersections and understand how their identities connect.