Thoughts on “The transformation of silence into language and action”

As I said in an earlier post, I’ve been reading sister outsider by Audre Lorde and I Wanted to talk about her essay The transformation of silence into language and action because it really made me think about some stuff. She opens with

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.

I think about this a lot about, the things I’m saying, about what I’m not saying, about what I should be saying, and it comes down to in the end that there are things I should say, even if I don’t know how to say them, even if I don’t say them well, even if you don’t know how to hear me,

She gave this speech shortly after a cancer scare when the thought of dying had come front and centre in her life in a way most of us, most of the time are able to cocoon ourselves from

In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words.

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you

And it brings up to me now that I am not in a place in my life where I would be killed for speaking up, for speaking my truths, for speaking up for others, the days when my life was in danger is long gone, but I am obviously going to die eventualy, and I don’t want to die knowing that there were things that should have been said, by myself for myself and for others

Silence when there should be words is a kind of lie I think, and if that lie is to keep yourself or other people safe, there is no shame there, no wrong there, but when the lie is to keep me comfortable then I don’t think that’s okay, firstly I think I have no right to that sort of comfort when I know my words could change things for someone or at least let them know I support them, And for myself comfort isn’t always the best path because comfort doesn’t teach us anything, doesn’t connect us,

Lorde says

But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.

And this is it isn’t it, for feminism to work, for social change to work, just for human relationships to work ,we need to connect, but that takes honesty with all the vulnerability that entails, because if we come to each other shadowed and masked then what is being presented will, not be reall, will not be something to hang on to. But it means we have to listen to each other, to listen to those whose voices challenge us and to speak things that we know will challenge others.

And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, “Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.”

And she speaks of how we will only know the words we need when we speak them, and it is through speaking that we understand our lives and it is through words that we must challenge ourselves and each other we must hold ourselves and each other accountable for the work we are doing.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself — a Black woman warrior poet doing my work — come to ask you, are you doing yours?

This blog here is partly because I knew there was work I should have been doing that I wasn’t doing and to do that work I needed to move myself into a different space where I could both be more honest and more fluid. And I am afraid, afraid of vulnerability, of exposure, of loss, of judgement but she says

And it is never without fear — of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death.

This comes down to me hard especially since someone in the blogsphere wrote a post that I disagree with that is prejudiced and ignorant about a group of people that neither myself nor the blogger who wrote the post belong to, that I really want to refute but that I’m scared of doing for the fall out that it will cause because of the reactions of people who are not going to agree with me but that I also consider friends

And it should come down to all of us hard, because I don’t think any of us are really good at telling the truth, we live in a world that both expects us to be both fractured and smooth, so we have to hide our completeness, our complexity and connections from each other and often from our self. And I know I at least have not been as good as I should have been at breaking silence when other people are being oppressed or are in danger.

There are some silences, I can not, will not break, especially around issues concerning my family, I will speak of them here sometimes, but not to my family because there are no salvageable connections there anyway, and my honesty has always been used to wound me. but there are other silences that will be broken here, things that I will think about and explore that may make me uncomfortable and may make my readers uncomfortable and angry.

we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson—that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and ourselves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned. we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.”

I think this is really important, our survival is not promised, is even often not wanted, because what is wanted is cogs in the capitalist machine that can be ground down and spat out, but it is our speaking our honesty that makes at least our emotional survival more likeley. And I also think if we can find time and space and words and noise enough to make someone else’s survival more likely then there will have been a point to all this.

And where the words of women are crying out to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own.

And then this, that for much of the time I have been not so good at, searching out and seeking other women’s voices, women who aren’t me, who aren’t positioned as I am, women who have things to say that are not about my life, women who often have less privilege and more oppressions than me, women with whom I disagree with, but I am getting better at it I think, I am more opening to listening and reading and searching for other women’s voices

Audre Lorde:The transformation of silence into language and action From Sister Outsider P40-44