My Favorite Passage

As we are reading the articles that Ms. Fletcher has handed out to us, the one that stuck out to me the most was “The Transformation into Language and Action” by Audre Lorde. This article begins with a poem; how I interpreted this poem was that our abilities that we can give to the earth are more important than our actual self. I perceived the poem in this sense because the last line states “… and our labor has become more important than our silence”, meaning that the words that we do not say because we are scared of what the world will judge them by is less important than the physical abilities that we can give to the world. Audre Lorde then goes onto saying how that is incorrect and no matter how we feel we need to let our thoughts out into words even if others don’t quite understand our meaning. She then goes onto saying how silence will not protect you and although spitting out the words that the little voice in our head is telling us to release is hard, it is something that should be done. In paragraph ten she proposes the question “Because I am a woman, because I am black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself, a black women warrior poet doing my work, come to ask you, are you doing yours?” And I started to really think about what she was truly asking and I think she is asking the question of if we really put ourselves out there and tell the world what we think. I have come to the conclusion after reading this passage that I do not, for the sole fact of judgment. I am scared that my words are going to offend someone. I am scared that I am not going to word them right and they are going to come out of my mouth as gibberish. But I am reassured by her that they may me scrutinized by others, but it is better than keeping them in.

Toward the end of her article she says two lines that really popped out to me. One being “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 on our safe corners mute as bottles, and we still will be no less afraid.” To me this means that no matter how silenced we are, no matter how comfortable we feel, and no matter how fulfilled our life seems to be we will still be “no less afraid” than if we spoke up and said what was on our mind. The other line that had a impact on me was the last line of her passage, which says “The fact that we are here and that I speak now these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.” This quote inspired me so strongly because she is telling us to break the silence and to open up and express ourselves through our words and actions, which is something many struggle with, including myself.