P.1 POETRY IS NOT A LUXURY
⠀The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing
upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to
bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form
those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realised. This is
poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to
those ideas which are — until the poem — nameless and formless, about to
be birthed, but already felt.
P.3 Possibility is neither forever nor instant. It is not easy to sustain
belief in its efficacy. We can sometimes work long and hard to establish
one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths we are expected to live,
only to have that beachhead assaulted or threatened by canards we have
been socialised to fear, or by the withdrawal of those approvals that we
have been warned to seek for safety.
P.6 In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or
distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed
that can provide energy for change.
P.9 There are frequent attempts to equate pornography and eroticism, two
diametrically opposed uses of the sexual. Because of these attempts, it
has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional)
from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical. ‘What do
you mean, a poetic revolutionary, a meditating gunrunner?’ In the same
way, we have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby
reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the
ascetic who aspires to feel nothing.
P.22 Women responding to racism means women responding to anger ; the
anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of
silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal and
co-option.
P.29 For it is those distortions which separate us. And we must ask
ourselves : Who profits form all this?
P.30 It is not the anger of other women that will destroy us but our
refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to
move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger
as an important source of empowerment.
⠀I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hut feelings, not
answering anger ; for to do so insults and trivialises all our efforts.
Guilt is not a response to anger ; it is a response to one’s own actions
or lack of action.if it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is
then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often,
guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of
communication ; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the
continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for
changelessness.
P.32 Yes, I am Black and lesbian, and what you hear in my voice is fury,
not suffering. Anger, not moral authority.
P.38 Through examining the combination of our triumphs and errors, we can
examine the dangers of an incomplete vision. Not to condemn that vision
but to alter it, construct templates for possible futures, and focus our
rage for change upon our enemies rather than upon each other.
P.39 So often we either ignore the past or romanticise it, render the
reason for unity useless or mythic. We forget that the necessary
ingredient needed to make the past work for the future is our energy in
the present, metabolising one into the other. Continuity does not happen
automatically, nor is it a passive process.
… Even though we fought common enemies, at times the lure of
individual solutions made us careless of each other. Sometimes we could
not bear the face of each other’s differences because of what we feared
those differences might say about ourselves. As if everybody can’t
eventually be too Black, too white, too man, too woman. But any future
vision which can encompass all of us, by definition, must be complex and
expanding, not easy to achieve.
P.45 Can any one of us here still afford to believe that efforts to
reclaim the future can be private or individual? Can anyone here still
afford to believe that the pursuit of liberation can be the sole and
particular province of any one particular race, or sex or age, or
religion, or sexuality, or class?
… Not to believe that revolution is a one-time event, or something
that happens around us rather than inside of us. Not to believe that
freedom can belong to any one group of us without the others also being
free.
P.50 How are you practising what you preach — whatever you preach, and who
exactly is listening? As Malcolm stressed, we are not responsible for our
oppression, but we must be reposnsible for our own liberation.
P.51 We are making the future as well as bonding to survive the enormous
pressures of the present, and that is what it means to be a part of
history.