thank you for joining us we are currently playing our pre-event slideshow blue text on a white background welcome the program will begin shortly this slide and slides following feature the schomburg center literary festival branding in the upper right corner with white text in a dark blue bubble with three peach colored droplets overlaid there is a digital collage image of a black man on the left pictured from the chest up with different shades of brown making up his skin wearing a patchwork shirt of varying blue patterns and a bird's eye image of a street with two cars on it one white and one yellow cutting diagonally across his chest this slide and all slides following also contain sponsor logos in the bottom right sponsored by new york life foundation deutsche bank america's foundation and the schomburg center for research in black culture the new york public library blue texts on a background composed of a light semi-transparent grade of headshots for all of the festival guests the text reads for the full schedule visit www.schomburgcenterlitfest.org blue text on a white background author talk audrey radical care and political warfare roxanne gay tracy k smith mahogany l brown and salamisha tillett moderator september 22nd 2020 at 8 pm eastern time blue text on a white background order the book online from the schomburg shop www.schomburgshop.com this slide features book jackets for three audrey lord titles on the left side there is the selected works of audre lorde with a photo portrait of audrey lord wearing a white blouse leaning against a wall and gazing into the camera to the right is the book jacket for sister outsider by audrey lord in pink text running vertically down the cover on a dark red background with gold flourishes the third featured book is the cancer journals by audre lorde with a photocollage of audrey lord wearing a patterned dress with an orange and black halo encircling her head on a yellow and teal floral background thank you for joining us we are currently playing our pre-event slideshow blue text on a white background welcome the program will begin shortly this slide and slides following feature the schomburg center literary festival branding in the upper right corner with white text in a dark blue bubble with three peach colored droplets overlaid there is a digital collage image of a black man on the left pictured from the chest up with different shades of brown making up his skin wearing a patchwork shirt of varying blue patterns and a bird's eye image of a street with two cars on it one white and one yellow cutting diagonally across his chest this slide and all slides following also contain sponsor logos in the bottom right sponsored by new york life foundation deutsche bank america's foundation and the schomburg center for research in black culture the new york public library blue text on a background composed of a light semi-transparent grade of head shots for all of the festival guests the text reads for the full schedule visit www.schomburgcenter blue text on a white background author talk audrey lord radical care and political warfare roxanne gay tracy k smith mahogany l brown and salamisha tillett moderator september 22nd 2020 at 8 pm eastern time blue text on a white background order the book online from the schomburg shop www.schomburgshop.com this slide features book jackets for three audrey lord titles on the left side there is the selected works of audrey lorde with a photo portrait of audrey lorde wearing a white blouse leaning against a wall and gazing into the camera to the right is the book jacket for sister outsider by audrey lorde in pink text running vertically down the cover on a dark red background with gold flourishes the third featured book is the cancer journals by audre lorde with a photo collage of audrey lorde wearing a patterned dress with an orange and black halo encircling her head on a yellow and teal floral background good evening from new york and welcome to the second annual schomburg center literary festival reading the african diaspora like many book festivals we had to reimagine a block long multi-stage outdoor festival as a virtual one with your favorite writers and the opportunity to discover more books to add to your shelves this week we have 35 authors and moderators sharing narratives from the us and uk to west africa and jamaica each night we shift between the past and the present much like the schomburg center's archives and programs tonight's program audrey lord radical care and political warfare features writers roxanne gay tracy k smith mahogany brown and moderator salamisha tillett and i will tell you more about them in a moment i'm novella ford i'm the associate director of public programs and exhibitions at the schomburg center for research and black culture where we are celebrating 95 years as one of the world's leading cultural institutions devoted to research preservation and exhibition of materials focused on global black experiences our archive boasts over 11 million items that illuminate the richness of black history and culture and we have made some of those items available digitally as we continue to navigate the quarantine imposed by covet 19. please visit our website at schomburg.org for additional details and i hope you do get a chance to visit our archives on the other side of this quarantine thank you for tuning in as i mentioned to the schomburg center literary festival if you are watching live via our lip fest website which is schaumburg centerlit fest.org you can scroll to the bottom and you can shop all the books featured tonight you can also see the week-long schedule so that you can plan the rest of your week to give you a heads up tomorrow we will explore the work of sterling a brown one of the most important and influential figures in the development of african-american literature and criticism in the 20th century then on thursday we have a day-long spotlight on y.a authors and books which begins at 1 pm some of the authors featured include jacqueline woodson in conversation with levar burton followed by uk author dean atta in conversation with emil wilbecken we have a panel on black comic books we closed that day with debut author and national book award long list author candace elo we have some additional y authors appearing on saturday including akoike aminzi and patrice cullers who you may know as the black lives matter one of the black lives matter founders who has released a y.a edition of her memoir when they call you a terrorist so i hope that you will check in beyond today for other programs that we have taking place over the schomburg lid fest and just a reminder you can watch this on schomburg centerlit fest.org and if you miss anything we will have an opportunity for you to rewatch them in the coming weeks this festival continues to expand the schomburg's long tradition of championing authors of african descent from across the globe in publications that celebrate black history and culture how fortunate that there are three books revisiting the essential writings of audre lorde at this time who knew that audre lorde was the person that we would need in this moment but i would say that she is always present she is always needed and as sonia sanchez when she could have chosen so many authors to read from last week when we had a program around poets she chose two poems by her friend audre lorde as well as alice walker so i'm going to introduce the panel so that they can introduce you to their audre lorde first we have mahogany l brown who is a writer organizer and educator she's the executive director of bowery poetry club and artistic director of urban word nyc and poetry coordinator at saint francis college she is the author of woke a young poet's call to justice woke baby and black girl magic kissing caskets and dear twitter she will release her first y.a novel chlorine sky in january 2021 and i hope that we can host her again next year mahogany has provided the forward for penguin classics republication of audrey lord's sister outsider a collection of 15 essays and speeches next roxanne gay has edited the newest release the celebrate the selected works of audre lorde gay's writing appears in best american mystery stories 2014 best american short stories 2012 best sex writing in 2012 harper bazaar a public space mcsweeney's tin house oxford american and many many others she's a contributing opinion writer for the new york times she's the author of books 80 an untamed state the new york times best-selling bad feminist the nationally best-selling difficult women in the new york times best-selling hunger a memoir of my body she is also the author of world of wakanda for marvel and the editor of best american short stories 2018. next is tracy k smith who is no stranger to the schomburg and she is one of the most celebrated poets of our time she served as the 22nd united states poet laureate from 2017 to 2019 and is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir ordinary light in several books of poetry including her pulitzer prize-winning collection life on mars she is the director of creating writing of the creating creative writing program at princeton university and the chair of the university's lewis center for the arts tracy has provided the forward to another republication of audrey lord's work the cancer journals available in october and last but certainly not least is our moderator salamisha tillett who is the henry rutgers professor of african american and african studies and creative writing at rutgers university newark he is a contributing critic at large for the new york times and the director of the new arts justice and art and activist initiative at express newark she is the author of sites of slavery citizenship and racial democracy in the post-civil rights imagination in the cultural memoir in search of the color purple the story of alice walker's masterpiece which comes out in january 2021 just to give you a few housekeeping we are recording the program for the archive but you and the audience will not be part of the recording please be mindful of your fellow audience members in the chat and again thank you for tuning in we will begin with readings from each of our panelists so please first we welcome to our virtual stage roxane gay to read from the selected works of audre lorde hello here today and uh especially to be able to read some of audrey lord's work uh she uh is one of those writers who remains timeless and every time i read and reread and engage with her work i am reminded and new of why i have always been drawn to her work for the past few events i've been reading her prose so tonight i'm going to read just a few poems the first is from her book the first cities and this is called generation how the young attempt and are broken differs from age to age we were brown free girls loves singing beneath their skin sun in their hair in their eyes sun their fortune the taste of their young boy's manhood swelling like birds in their mouths in a careless season of power we wept out our terrible promise now these are the children we try for temptations that wear our face and who came back from the latched cities of falsehood warning the road to nowhere is slippery with our blood warning you need not drink the river to get home for we purchase bridges with our mother's bloody gold we are more than kin who come to share not blood but the bloodiness of failure how the young are tempted and betrayed to slaughter or conformity is a turn of the mirror times question only and also from that book is a poem called if you come softly if you come softly as wind within the trees you may hear what i hear see what sorrow sees if you come as lightly as threading dew i will take you gladly nor ask more of you you may sit beside me silent as breath only those who stay dead shall remember death and if you come i will be silent nor speak harsh words to you i will not ask you why now or how or what you do we shall sit here softly beneath two different years and the rich earth between us shall drink our tears now let's see and finally i want to read a poem called who said it was simple who said it was simple there are so many roots to the tree of anger that sometimes the branches shatter before they bear sitting in netics the women rally before they march discussing the problematic girls they hire to make them free an almost white counterman passes a waiting brother to serve them first and the ladies neither notice nor reject the slighter pleasures of their slavery but i who am bound by my mirror as well as my bed see causes and color as well as sex and sit here wondering which me will survive all these liberations thank you guys so much and next we are going to hear from the absolutely wonderful mahogany brown okay miss roxanne i i just feel like that those those three poems got my heart racing i feel everyone feels that too thank you for for opening with such uh such tenderness um we always think of archery lord telling reminding us that your silence will not protect you but like uh love is also a revolution and and that is a prime example i'm going to read from the collection sister outsider a small piece of an essay that she wrote in age race class and sex women re defining difference and then i'll close with the poem and thank you so much again for having me shout out to schoenberg for being the illest certainly there are very real differences between us of race age and sex but it is not those differences between us that are separating us it is rather our refusal to recognize those differences and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation racism the belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance sexism the belief in the inherent superiority of one sex over the other and thereby the right to dominance ageism heterosexism elitism classism somewhere on the edge of consciousness there is what i call a mythical norm which each one of us within our hearts knows that is not me in america this norm is usually defined as white thin male young heterosexual christian and financially secure it is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within the society those of us who stand outside that power often identify one way in which we are different and we assume that to be the primary cause of all oppression forgetting other distortions around difference some of which we ourselves may be practicing by and large within the women's movement today white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race sexual preference class and age there is a pretense to the homogeny of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist as we move forward as we move toward creating a society within which we can each flourish ageism is another distortion of relationship which interferes without vision by ignoring the past we are encouraged to repeat its mistakes the generation gap is an important social tool for any repressive society if the younger members of a community view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess they will never be able to join hands and examine the living memories of the community nor ask the all-important question why this gives rise to a historical amnesia that keeps us working to invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread ignoring the differences of race between women and the implications of those differences presents the most serious threat to the mobilization of women's joint power as white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone then women of color become other the outsider whose experience and tradition is too alien to comprehend i hope y'all are taking notes i hope you're with me this is this is testimony right refusing to recognize difference makes it impossible to see the different problems and pitfalls facing us as women thus in a patriarchal power system where white skin privilege is a major prop the entrapments used to neutralize black women and white women are not the same for example it is easy for black women to be used by the power structure against black men not because they are men but because they are black therefore for black women it is necessary at all times to separate the needs of the oppressor from our own legitimate conflicts within our communities this same problem does not exist for white women black men black women and men have shared racist oppression and still share it although in different ways out of that shared oppression we have developed joint defenses and joint vulnerabilities to each other that are not duplicated in the white community with the exception of the relationship between jewish women and jewish men on the other hand white women face the pitfall of being seduced into joining the oppressor under the preachings of sharing power this possibility does not exist in the same way for women of color the tokenism that is sometimes extended to us is not an invitation to join power our racial otherness is a visible reality that makes it quite clear for white women there is a wider range of pretended choices and rewards for identifying with patriarch apparel patriarchal power and its tools but black women and our children know the fabric of our lives is stitched with violence and with hatred that there is no rest we do not deal with it only on the picket lines or in dark midnight alleys or in the places where we dare to verbalize our resistance for us increasingly violence weaves through the daily tissues of our living in the supermarket in the classroom in the elevator in the clinic and the schoolyard from the plumber the baker the saleswoman the bus driver the bank teller the waitress who does not serve us some problems we share as women some we do not you fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying you definitely can read the rest of that in that sister outsider collection and i'll close with one short poem the women of den dance with swords in their hands to mark the time when they were warriors and this is for us thank you for letting me be a part of this film fatale uh collective today i did not fall from the sky i nor descend like a plague of locusts to drink color and strength from the earth and i do not come like rain as a tribute or symbol for earth's becoming i come as a woman dark and open sometimes i fall like night softly and terrible only when i must die in order to rise again i do not come like a secret warrior with an unsheathed sword in my mouth hidden beneath my tongue slicing my throat to ribbons of service with a smile while the blood runs down and out through holes in the two sacred mounds on my chest i come like a woman who i am spreading out through nights laughter and promise and dark heat warming whatever i touch that is living consuming only what is already dead thank you so much and next you'll hear from the incomparable tracy k smith thanks mahogany and thanks roxanne um you know it's one thing to live with a love and a gratitude to lord and it's another to to hear her words embodied tonight and feel how much we need them as a nation as a people it's an urgency i feel um so it's a real gift to be here tonight and be able to share i thought i would um kind of give a little love song to my experience of the cancer journals um and then share a poem of lourdes maybe quote from one other brief passage and sister outsider but i wanted to begin with um just thinking about the brilliant way that lord zick work upon her experience of cancer and mastectomy um also it sheds light on the private experience that many of us um must encounter and it also creates a really powerful vocabulary for um resistance um in other contexts um i want to think about the honesty with which lord tracks the pain fear anger and insight of the experience of cancer and i want to think about the ways that her mind and spirit refuse to let any of that battle go to waste it's a um i think an example of like consummate resourcefulness on one level what she offers in the essays and journal entries making up the cancer journals is a discourse on the politics of cancer which she describes as a profit producing industry which has sidestepped questions of arresting causality and instead created a market for things like prosthetics and reconstructive surgery products which lord argues reinforce the dangerous notion that female bodies must be pretty and palatable to others describing her own post-op experience lord writes in the offices of one of the top breast cancer surgeons in new york city every woman there either had a breast removed might have to have a breast removed or was afraid of having to have a breast removed and every woman there could have used a reminder that having one breast did not mean her life was over nor that she was less a woman nor that she was condemned to the use of a placebo in order to feel good about herself and the way she looked yet a woman who has one breast and refused to hide that fat refuses to hide that fact behind a pathetic puff of lamb's wool which has no relationship nor likeness to her own breasts a woman who is attempting to come to terms with her changed landscape and changed timetable of life and with her own body and pain and beauty and strength that woman is seen as a threat to the quote morale of a breast surgeon's office the clarity with which lord calls out this infuriating contradiction has bearing upon our attitudes towards mastectomies female body image and autonomy and all this time later it also urges me to consider another malignancy roiling american society which is that of racism which leverages its own forms of censure and social sanction against those who refuse to be cowed into silence and assimilation in this context i take lord's testimony of her experience as a kind of road map not just to enduring or withstanding oppression but laying barrett's workings for others to see and making such knowledge into an instrument of resistance for lord resistance must draw upon the deep private resources of the self while also maintaining a commitment to the collective the communal it's generative it's corrective in her words this commitment quote means teaching surviving and fighting with the most important resource i have myself and taking joy in that battle it means for me recognizing the enemy outside and the enemy within and knowing that my work is part of a continuum of women's work of reclaiming this earth and our power and knowing that this work did not begin with my birth nor will it end with my death and it means knowing that in this continuum my life and my love and my work has particular power and meaning relative to others i witness evidence of a similar recognition in the current movement coalescing around the sanctity of black life in america and with it the importance of black stories black creativity black self-care and black community as things we must overcome barriers both internal and external to claim i witnessed this commitment as a surge of power and consciousness both coinciding with and arising from the equal surge in violence and intolerance against blackness and black calls for justice so i guess what i'm i'm intending to emphasize is the vulnerabilities that lord claims as a woman artist and survivor are not obstacles to the work that she does in many ways they make this work possible um [Music] there's a quote from um the essay that opens sister outsider that i just want to share um notes from a trip to russia it comes into my head because you know during this this literal struggle for her life she's traveling she's um teaching others teaching white feminists how they might better situate themselves to accept and support black women and she's making a kind of sense out of other people's experience that might be useful to the conditions of black reality in america that she's so concerned with this is just a little quote from um notes on a trip to russia and that trip was really about looking for every kernel of insight of possibility and every tool that she might be able to apply to this this um human struggle that she's interested in and invested in um i came away with revolutionary women in my head but i feel very much now still that we black americans exist alone in the mouth of the dragon as i've always suspected outside of rhetoric and proclamations of solidarity there is no help except ourselves maybe i'll just leave leave that there and urge you to dive back into this really remarkable um prose that i feel is critical to getting through the the moment that we find ourselves in which is brutal and also i think so full of possibility that i want to claim this is um lord's poem a litany for survival for those of us who live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision crucial and alone for those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice who love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns looking inward and outward at once before and after seeking a now that can breed futures like bread in our children's mouths so their dreams will not reflect the death of ours for those of us who were imprinted with fear like a faint line in the center of our foreheads learning to be afraid with our mother's milk for by this weapon this illusion of some safety to be found the heavy-footed hoped to silence us for all of us this instant and this triumph we were never meant to survive and when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain when the sun sets we are afraid it might not rise in the morning when our stomachs are full and we are afraid of indigestion when our stomachs are empty we are afraid we may never eat again when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish when we are alone we are afraid love will never return and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid so it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive i'll join all of us to come back on um i would like to thank everyone first i would like to thank novella and deschamberg for inviting us and also thank you tracy mahogany and roxanne for sharing audrey's wonderful words to thank audrey herself for giving us the language and the vocabulary of resistance i feel like everything that you all covered kind of reminds us that she's given us all the tools we need to survive the moment we're in and resist the forces that are working against our liberation so i've had the pleasure of reading everyone's forward uh to books that are about to be released and books that have already been released and so um i'm going to ask you all uh in the order of your reading um about your forwards and then i'm going to do a series of just open-ended questions that anyone can answer um and with the forward each of you obviously are citing or quoting audrey and so roxanna i'm going to start with you and your forward you're retelling the story of audrey's letter to mary daley [Laughter] and there's so many quotes that i wanted to cite that you cite but i'm going to start with this one the future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference so we're at this really important historical moment with the passing of justice ginsburg and the potential nomination of another white woman to the supreme court and i was thinking deeply about lord's insistence on thinking about there's a shared experience of womanhood and yet within that that these differences are so fundamental to how we need to organize and mobilize and so if you could and then your essay obviously talks about how intersectional feminism is kind of in vogue now but lord you know was theorizing this many many many years ago so i just want you to talk a little bit more about this idea that uh lord gives us about power and patterns of difference and the power of naming those things and what we can learn about you know our moment now from this one of the things i thought lord was most revolutionary in doing was leaning into difference instead of seeing difference as an obstacle several times across her writing she writes about difference as a source of strength and really she cautions the women in her communities to not be intimidated by difference and to not flatten different and it's so incredibly important you know intersectionality is unnecessary tool and kimberly crenshaw has done invaluable work in developing a really sound theory around intersectionality but there have been so many especially black women scholars who were theorizing and putting this work into practice well before that and what i really appreciated especially in lord's letter to mary daley is that she was finding common ground because yes we are all women while also you know just saying can i live as a black woman as a black lesbian and it's interesting that we're having the very same conversations today um where we see oftentimes white feminists trying to flatten the differences between us and say you know we have to be united in solidarity uh without recognizing that sometimes solidarity means discussing our differences and discussing that solidarity does not mean that we ignore our differences it means that we account for our differences and we do whatever it takes to make sure that we move forward equally and that there are things that we have to be done in order for that to happen we're not going to move forward equally just because we're all women and so i think about that a lot and i was definitely trying to get at that in my introduction because i think it's one of the most powerful things about audrey's work as everyone here knows people love to talk about the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house and it was a very profound thing that she said but people always quote it selectively and they don't quote everything that follows and everything around it the entire body of work that led to this moment and so i was very interested in making sure that we were looking at that she was talking about difference as strength when it was such a rare thing for a scholar to do thank you um mahogany uh you at the end of your essay quote lord's essay man child and here's the quote that i would like to cite today if they cannot love and resist at the same time they will probably not survive and it seems to me that that encapsulates many black social movements black liberation movements but maybe none as much as black lives matter and this idea of loving and resisting and rage which is another uh theme through all of your works which i'll come back to living and existing and abusing and emoting all of these emotions at the same time i wanted you to talk a little bit more about what this means to love and resist and why lord what you think lord meant by if we can't do both then we will not survive if they can't do both they will not survive and then what that means for us in this really really really uh i don't know generation changing moment that we're in thank you for that um i think sonia sanchez assists to sign sanchez also with the black arts movement was um a champion of the idea that love is one of the first revolutions that we can't be a part of this uh resistance we can't be on the front line if there is not a way for us to go home to to recalibrate um and also just to center ourselves i i know that the reason that most of the work happens in the way that it does it's because of love right that is james baldwin says i will love you and i'm gonna tell the truth like if i love you i'll tell the truth so all of those things like that it's yin and yang it's not one or the other and uh rage cannot exist alone um that that will kill you inside like that's tumor-ready also ready um it messes with your heart uh all of the things and i believe that love is is absolute and it is an equalizer but again it it is like a part of the moral compass and listening to audrey lord's work um i love what you said roxanne about uh folks saying half of the line it's like the bible you know what i mean like they say the one that they want you to know but not the stuff that they have to follow for that to make sense right so there's the equilibrium is always often we're only quoting the parts that are the shiniest um when the reality is you know there isn't just good or bad it's both um so for rep revolution to happen we we have to have love attached to that otherwise what are we really fighting for um justice is love work um i i don't know i don't know what else i guess i'm kind of going in a circle almost because i'm like but of course right of course but i do understand how i get i'm saddened when people think that uh these poems that audrey wrote were just like angry poems because i'm like but dude like when you read the the the uh the first poem works and i was like do you hear the love and like she said i come for you which is like a double meaning not only am i coming um to to love but i am i am coming through fire thank you and tracy um it is through poetry that we give name to the ideas which are until the poem nameless and formless about to be bathed but already felt about to be birthed sorry but already felt um and i guess i really am struck by the fact that all of the well many of the works that you're talking about aren't you read from poems but the books themselves um show the breadth of lord's uh genre blending and genre bending and so i guess i wanted to talk to you um also about you know writing about the journals themselves and what is it that we can understand about lord's legacy but about her intervention through thinking about her as a poet but also as an essayist and in terms of zombie as a biomythographer the many genres that she inhabited and how those genres in fact reflect the way in which she broke down so many categories at once as both her lived experience but also as a blueprint for like how difference can function in society as roxanne said as a form of strength sometimes i feel like the way i help myself to understand the work of poets who are doing huge um life and culture work is their project is bigger than poetry um audrey lorde is an amazing poet ultimately i believe that what she's speaking to and invoking is much larger than you know than a single art form um and one of the things that i think her prose allows her to do is to teach us to understand what poetry um allows us to tap into and this is this is something that's useful in in every facet of existence she talks about how um you know poetry is a place where knowledge precedes understanding and we can enter into a kind of receptivity to things that don't yet fit within our vocabulary or our understanding but that that that have imprinted us in some way or that could be useful to us she talks about like um a deep and often a female um creative power that she's interested in listening to and tapping into and she she um posits that as really different from maybe a white male poetics of authority of um doing something that is impressive that's working at the surface level she kind of calls that out as this is about fear this is about wanting to claim um the boundaries of an art form so that there is a power or a control that can also be claimed and so her poems and her her about about what poetry offers us is about a lived urgency that we actually need and that we possess and i think that aligns really directly and beautifully with her sense of activism there's something that we must claim um and share and allow to startle overwhelm and embolden us um i love the way that the erotic energy is a part of that you know she talks about how um female eroticism is another one of those things that the male kind of like establishment has taught us to shame to feel shame toward and how that is also a form of oppression because it creates a sense of silence and a relinquishing of power um she's saying you know no let's let's use this as something that is life-giving life-sustaining and world-creating um i love the way that this conversation runs through all of her work whether she's traveling whether she's arguing teaching schooling folks um and whether she's she's mapping a sense of of what we must become willing to do thank you um i want to shift gears just a little we've already started talking about um anger but i i kind of a few years ago i had the opportunity to teach a graduate course on black rage and uh what i found from my class was that lord is probably one of the most profound um and insightful theorists of black anger or black rage or anger in general in the various traditions that she occupies so i read a quote here from lord every black woman in america lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers and so i was thinking with mahogany you were talking a bit about how people read the anger but don't hear the love and tracy's work um from her forward she talks about uh lord starts with anger and ends with insight and then in roxanne you two reference uh lord's uses of anger and your forward but also you wrote a really wonderful new york times op-ed that we also read in my class as well and so i wanted to talk about um the way in which you all think that lord understood the power and the political value of black women's anger as distinct from white male rage um and also uh you know just to tease this out a little bit because i do think that if you actually want to understand black women's anger as as righteous as radical and as revolutionary you have to start with audrey lord at least she was wrestling with this and trying to understand how white women's anger is different than black women's anger and living is different white man's anger so i just that's my question um how do you understand lord's relationship to anger and uh and rage you know i think that lord is one of the few women of her generation that embraced anger and saw it as a tool for change and was very willing to push back against a lot of the preconceived notions people have about black women and anger she felt like difference i think she saw anger as a strength as a tool for building community and creating change because if you're not angry then do you really understand the problems that we're trying to address because if you understand the problems like rage is the only response and i really appreciated that and i think for a lot of writers of my generation she made it possible for us to express our rage she made it possible for brittany cooper's eloquent rage which is such a wonderful book uh trusty mcmillan cotton's thick which also explores the very things that we should be angry about and yet are often castigated for being angry about so i thought she used it as a tool i think she knew she knew that uh we would need a cheat sheet she knew that rage and the stereotype that black angry woman was going to be the thing that uh kind of disabled so many of us from seeing clearly that you're right we are not only are we permitted to be angry but we should be right and and and how do you move forward um regardless of uh what category or or uh ideas are assigned to you um don't worry about the respectability uh worry about the work and um it's because of her that i was able to even move through grad school in a way that was i i would originally think like the church word indignant i felt like i was just walking in just slamming doors and putting my feet up but in reality i was just asking for what my uh scholarship afforded me and the response told me why would you why would you think you could ask that but audrey lord's text reminded me you have a right to demand um what you deserve i think about you know the really powerful lesson of what lord does with her anger so even that little scene of her going back into the surgeon's office and and being scolded for having decided that she felt whole in a way and wanted to to um choose not to hide the the fact of a missing breast um she goes home having not spoken spoken up to this nurse and she talks about the situation with her circle of loving women friends and she forms a really in intense argument about what um this attitude is rooted in the damage that it causes and what it will take to um move past it to knock it over um i feel like it's a really powerful and thoughtful process that her anger sets her upon in every case it's about dialogue you know even the letter to mary daley is is a literal invitation to dialogue over a sense of grievance um it's about um making the the kinetic value of of anger um useful to countless other people because it gets translated into this amazing um body of work it's which is kind of a road map as i keep you know saying to myself how do you survive a world that's full of all of these annihilating forces that are very deliberately pointing at you and what you represent well um you're going to turn that energy into a kind of action all of the anger all of the the fear all of the um the pain and in in her experience of cancer all of that is like very literal it's not even you know like figurative um all of that gets turned into um a set of ideas uh a call to understanding and action um anger is what pushes that into motion i think i'd like to talk a little bit about what some would see is that kind of opposite of anger but in in no way is it in in in lord's life and then words universe and this idea of uh self-care right and so um her last book burst of light she is a journal similar to the cancer journals and she's writing as she's literally dying of cancer and she moves in and out between the going to the doctor's office to organizing women in germany and moving back and forth between the individual and the collective uh and retreating into writing and yet trying to take care of herself in her final months essentially so i wanted to talk about how self-care is another thing that lord both practices and theorizes and gives us a vocabulary to understand and what that means in this moment of political mobilization and um liberation this is an organizing that by people and some new white people have taken the charge and and committed to this idea of black lives mattering maybe more now than ever before so let's just not forget you but some new white people have taken that that language up for the first time in their lives so uh self-care and as a political act not necessarily only as a as goop but as something that's you know what i mean revolutionary radical uh but uh part of the black liberation tradition anyone can answer i'm a tourist so i believe in self-care yeah um i think self-care like love uh it it it should be mandated um one thing that i've realized in just doing some organizing work that you can burn out um and then what right like what what will you what will you have left in your in your wake um in your absence and self-care is one of those ways for you to a uh delegate and also like you know um reboot um take your time and and not feel bad for being human not feel bad for for needing a beat needing a breath um just like love just like rest just like if you like me i like tequila and reality tv whatever your thing is you deserve to like replenish the whale so that you can get back to the work but if you are running on empty um then how how will the work get done right um and there are so many so many different uh forces trying to infiltrate and and use your absence against you it is up to us to document um lord was an amazing archivist to teach she was an amazing educator and to share that information widely so that when you need to take a beat when you need to take a pause that the work can be picked up and continued until you're ready to return i was on the road a couple years ago and i started noticing that i was getting questions often it was like when i was in a large audience that was mostly white and there were one or two young black people in the audience and their questions would be how do you practice self-care and this was before i was familiar with the term and i you know came to understand this is a political question that these these students are asking and they're asking because they're in environments where um they're not being supported they're not being honored they're being gaslighted i think about the way it feels now in an institution that is my professional home where i've felt supported for so long to feel all of these distractions that require you to explain why anti-racism is important explain why we should believe black students when they talk about trauma that they experience all of these things that deplete your energy and that can kind of drive you to a sense of um despair this is what we you know like this is why we need to begin to let ourselves make the choice to love ourselves to heal ourselves and i guess i'm coming to understand that doing that is about you know like looking after me but it's also about saying i want to make sure there are some of us who are in good form to help others i want us to to love ourselves so that we can be there to to love one another i feel like that's a big part of what self-care um what i'm coming to understand that it is it's creating a a broad net of people who have um energy and hope to share and to spare at a time when every other person wants to siphon off the energy that you have in foolishness absolutely um like you i started getting asked this question about self-care at events and i'm old so i was like i don't know what you're talking about my generation does not care for ourselves and i had to really think about that like why don't i have an answer to this question why do i think there's something shameful and and caring about myself and it's so important when we look at the amount of work that there is to be done in the realm of social justice especially now like when i look at what's happening now and what we're up against and some of the futility of it if we don't care for ourselves we are not going to be prepared for whatever is next like we are clearly going to lose a couple battles here but we cannot give up the war and joy and self-care are actually part of how we get through and how we sustain ourselves for the duration um and look beyond just the immediate of okay like speaking about the supreme court we're probably gonna lose that fight and it's not giving up to say that it's just being realistic and so how do we sustain ourselves to withstand whatever is going to come from that and prepare and push back and self-care is so critical and so i i have been thinking more and more about what self-care should look like for me and how i can make sure as a teacher that i teach people to care for themselves as much as i teach them to stay in the fight sometimes teaching our students to care for themselves is also saying you can choose which kind of praise or what sources of praise are valid for you it's not simply a matter of like waiting to receive praise from um from the people who might make self-care you know an urgent necessity for you um and i think that's a really important choice too i feel like it comes through lord's work um there is a kind of authority that isn't um doesn't have your interest in mind and its authority therefore is questionable let's get out from under the need to be um you know validated by those sources so i'm gonna ask one more question and then open it up the audience um so there seems yeah as the fact that you all have three books that are coming out or have come out or coming out during this season um speaks to lords that there's a zeitgeist in which lord is uh that is caught up to audrey lord um and i think of this with james baldwin uh lorraine hansberry and i'm working on a book on nina simone and it's not coincidental that all of these figures are black and queer um and also lived and moved throughout multiple genres of the art forms that they um created or participated in and so when though a figure when the society catches up to a figure um i'm still interested in what's left to be learned right because because if we had fully caught up to any of them would be in a radically different world right so i was curious if you could all just answer um briefly what is it that you still think is maybe missing from the zeitgeist what is it about lore that we still are left that we can still learn um that hasn't been told yet that you may know personally maybe you didn't even include it in your forward if it's something still left for us to grapple with um uh for me it's her i mean she wrote an essay about the uses of the erotic as power and i don't think that enough attention is given to audrey lorde as um someone who wrote about sex and sexuality and did so openly uh there's a lot there that has not been mined i we tend to think oh she's an incredible scholar poet activist and we don't tend to recognize her as also a woman and a woman who shot pleasure from other women and who celebrated that pleasure uh so i think that's something that there is still a lot of work to be explored um i think there's a lot of work to be explored about erotics and audrey lore yeah i think that's really important and it aligns with um i feel like some of the most important thinking about about human community um about submission to others as they see and define themselves um is coming out of the queer and trans communities and i feel you know i i feel my students who are um you know members of these communities teaching their elders um that possibility is so much broader than than we grew up feeling that it was in our sense of the narrowness of of identity and um sexual expression was rooted in fear um audre lorde is fearless and i think that some of the um aspects of her work that feel um challenging or shocking um are the the areas that we need to kind of open ourselves up to submit to in a way and understand that the different forms of power that she wants to call our attention to generative power i'm interested in um the work that she did at john jay college and um how difficult it must have been to to and to understand the impact of mass incarceration on the community and still work inside that vacuum where these young officers in training were going um or attending and learning from her and i i'm when i return to that i can see in this the subtext that there were conversations that weren't shared on the page and i just i would love to have seen how she navigated those conversations let me take a question from the audience um so i think uh that there one of the questions i think here is that um can feminism truly be intersectional since its foundation is a white female point of view do black women need to create their own movement and social theory and i guess i would like to ask you all um because the feminism that i've inherited and grown up with is a black feminism i didn't learn feminism as white i learned it through black women artists writers and the women in my life and so i was curious for you how does audrey lord explode this idea that feminism belongs to or is founded by white women um for you and maybe how you know if we can understand that tradition and we understand black feminism as the ultimate tool to our liberation well i would certainly push back on the notion that feminism is a white women's thing uh white women may think that and they may act like that but black feminism is powerful and has been around for hundreds of years um and so black women already have created their own movement also womanism is a thing um and that is a specific black feminism uh and so i think what people need to do is make sure that they uh educate themselves about black feminists who have made so much of what we do possible um and can feminism ever be intersectional sure it's the better question is can feminists ever be intersectional because it's really the onus is upon us as feminists to to be intersectional in our thinking uh regardless of our subject position yeah i mean my understanding is that white feminists learned a lot from the perspectives and the practices of black feminists and that um helped to um catalyze the the movement that we recognize um i love the way that lord talks about what uh collective struggle made up of disparate consciousnesses and and experiences can constitute um she calls it a new level of working together i feel like we're at a moment where so much of what we've done and how we've done it is kind of falling apart and this might be a really great moment to say what are you afraid of that i represent which is what lord asks and how can we take that difference and and make it into something something productive something sturdier than what each of us has on our own a lot of my understanding of what keeps alliances from happening is um power if if you've got a claim to a certain kind of power you have to really think about if you're willing to let that go in order to to lend your your efforts to something that could be larger and more more um inclusive that's the question i think that many white people um many men and perhaps a lot of white feminists are probably should put to themselves period perfect so i have one more question um audrey laura this is a nice question they're all great questions but this is a nice one to end on i think audrey lord was uniquely courageous and fabulous in so many ways uh what in her life or the early on or later do you think helped make her that way and i think i'm going to start with you just because part of your forward you talk about you naming yourself and and linking that to audrey's respelling of her name so that to me seems like a really amazing you know you're a little girl and you you re-spell your name like that already is setting you on a path of self-definition that many uh people don't ever have absolutely she she reintroduced herself uh to to her own life to her the world that basically created her and it it seemingly without shame and because of her um i was able to go home and be like no it's mahogany you're gonna just have to say it and even now they're like mo like it's it's a tough thing but i am devout i am devout in in just owning who i am and why that name means what it means to me and i think that just the way in which the way in which she walked and also her hat swag my goodness i i feel like the women writers the hat swag the renaming the like you know just the the the boisterous love of self um it it it that is what shows um these young uh people of color how to be vibrant and i mean of all of all walks of life especially the queer life but like all walks of life you get to feel your kind of bravery uh become a home i love that i want to end on that swag okay thank you everyone i'm going to invite novella back to the screen um and i would like to thank all of our guests for being so dynamic and so sincere and so truthful in this moment thank you thank you thank you thank you tracy and mahogany roxanne and salamisha for this nourishing conversation as many of you were saying in the chat how important it was to be able to have this discussion and to have these folks join us with these words just a reminder you can get all three books in the schomburg shop at schomburgshop.com um this is gorgeous if you actually have not seen the cover yet it's beautiful and then this is the selected works of audre lorde and then the other one um will be released in october but you can go ahead and start to pre-order it uh again the lip this is taking place from starting yesterday all the way through saturday you can visit our website at schaumburg center centerlitfest.org and a reminder that tomorrow we are featuring sterling brown um the one thing that i will say from this conversation that was so important is that now that for some people there is time available there are so many quotes that we all use from audre lorde and really sort of many other people but the opportunity to really dig deeper into the work and see the surrounding text around those quotes will have so much more of an impact and influence our lives in such stronger ways if we give it a chance so again thank you for tuning in and we'll see you again tomorrow right here take care blue text on a background composed of a light semi-transparent grade of headshots for all of the festival guests the text reads for the full schedule visit www.schaumburgcenterlitfest.org you