My meandery re-reading of Audre Lorde’s essays began with musings on her birthday, followed by “Notes from a Trip to Russia” and “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”.

“Even if you’re new to Audre Lorde, you’ve probably seen this passage of hers quoted: “I was going to die, if not sooner than later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.” Just the other month, Joseph Osmondson wrote about this for Electric Lit: “Writing Private Illness Reminds Us That Silence Will Not Protect Us.”

Like “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” this is a short essay. One of those that resists isolating a passage, because it all fits so neatly together. Lorde is describing a process, and examining only one element of that process seems to minimize the whole. Because once she realizes “I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior,” the momentum has already gathered.

“What are the words you do not yet have?” She asks, outwardly.

“What do you need to say?” She continues, inviting participation.

“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?”

There, now, we can sit: reflect, ponder, contemplate.

But that’s only part of the essay’s intent: “Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am 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?”

There is a break.

A space.

And when Lorde resumes, she does so like this: “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.”

That space on the page is where we, as readers, had the opportunity to make our excuses.

To explain away our voicelessness and inactivity. To tell ourselves that she is someone extraordinary, someone who is not afraid, someone who is uniquely qualified to speak and to act.

But, after that brief recess, during which time she anticipated excuses and laments, she resumes her narrative, reveals her vulnerability and reminds us of our collective and individual responsibility to make change.

“And where the words of women are crying 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. For instance, “I can’t possibly teach Black women’s writing—their experience is so different from mine. Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another. “She’s a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?” Or, “She’s a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?” Or again, “this woman writes of her sons and I have no children.” And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.”

She does not stand apart from the crowd when she exposes this responsibility. Readers understand that she has posed some of these questions to herself as well.

And she does not claim that it is easy (nor natural), but something that can be learned, which is perhaps the most hopeful aspect of this short piece:

“We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.”