Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the challenges faced by black writers who venture beyond established narratives and expectations.
Audre Lorde emphasizes the restrictive nature of predefined identities within black literary circles, illustrating how writers who defy societal expectations are marginalized. This marginalization mirrors the silence caused by systemic racism, suggesting that true artistic expression can often meet resistance not just from external forces, but also from within one's own community.
In practice
During a panel on literary diversity, one might reference this quote to discuss the importance of breaking stereotypes in black literature.
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, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.
Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit.
For a number of years, I'd been around the kind of people who financed movies and the kind of people who are there to make the deals for movies. But I'd always had this naive idea that everybody wants to make movies as good as they can be, which is stupid.
I write as if I were drunk. It is a process of intuition rather than placing myself above my story like a puppeteer pulling strings. For me, it's a scary, chaotic process over which I have little control. Words demand other words, characters resist me.
If you consider film an art form, as some people do, then the Western would be a truly American art form, much as jazz is.
Being Poet Laureate made me realize I was capable of a larger voice. There is a more public utterance I can make as a poet.
If something comes along that is totally outside of horror, fine, but I find there's an immense amount of freedom within the genre.
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