Joy is the reason for being

I’m digesting a few quotes to celebrate black history month*, and to get my own head together.  Today, it’s Audre Lorde. Audre Lorde (born Audrey Geraldine Lorde February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992) was a Caribbean-American writer, poet and activist.

Once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy.  Audre Lorde

Lorde says Joy is a choice and feeling, and feeling should be recognized and embraced.  Too often, it’s stuffed down and away, numbed and suppressed.  Not feeling is a sort of grayness while feeling, any feeling is an explosion of colors.

I think the best writing is borne and carried along by feelings.

Our visions begin with our desires. Audre Lorde

I don’t aspire to or admire literary circles, but what Lorde describes is pretty much the same in commercial fiction.  We have our boxes.  Coloring outside those lines is not welcome.  She saw her box, acknowledged it, but didn’t hesitate to step outside of it.

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.  Audre Lorde

Lorde was fearless and never silent.  Those writers who conformed, who did what they were expected, those silent writers are forgotten, while Lorde’s words linger, well-remembered.

Your silence will not protect you. Audre Lorde

More about Lorde
*A few words about black history month.  I wish we had black history every month as we do European history, but that isn’t the case. So it is a necessary thing.  I think we need a native American month (especially), an Hispanic American month and an Asian American month too.