Lorde & Ahmed on Silence: how other activists impact Healing Bells

Our Healing Bells work stands on the shoulders of many other arts activists. In this weekly blog (catch it when it drops on Tuesdays!), you’ll get to meet some of these brave activists who inspire our work, starting today with Audre Lorde and Sara Ahmed.

Credits: Yurani Cubillos

Audre Lorde was a writer, feminist, and civil rights activist, or as she said, “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” In Sister Outsider, she wrote of ways in which women were silenced, and through her poetry, called for change.

“For within living structures defined by profit,

By linear power, by institutional dehumanization,

Our feelings were not meant to survive.

Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes,

Feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men.

But women have survived.

As poets.

And there are no new pains.

We have felt them all already.

We have hidden the fact in the same place where we have hidden our power.

They surface in our dreams, and it is in our dreams that point the way to freedom.

Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare.” 

-Sister Outsider (Penguin Random House, 2007), 28.

Designed by Yurani Cubillos, Photo of Audre Lorde. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons

After receiving a cancer diagnosis, Lorde wrote:

“I was going to die, if not sooner then later,

Whether or not I had ever spoken myself.

My silences had not protected me.

Your silence will not protect you.

But for every real word spoken,

For every attempt I had every made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking,

I had made contact with other women while we examined the words 

to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.

And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength

And enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.” 

-

Sister Outsider, 30. 

In her book, Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed referred to Audre Lorde when she urged people not to remain silent about social injustices but to find their own ways to “speak up.”

“Audre Lorde once wrote, ‘Your silence will not protect you’.

But your silence could protect them.

And by them I mean: those who are violent, 

Or those who benefit in some way from silence about violence…..

So much injustice is produced by silence not because people do not recognize injustice,

But because they do recognize it.

They also recognize the consequences of identifying injustice;

Which might not be consequences they can live with.

Killing joy [a consequence] thus requires a communication system:

We have to find other ways for the violence to become manifest.

We have a feminist history to draw on here:

You can write down names of harassers on books;

Put graffiti on walls;

Red ink in water.

There are so many ways to cause a feminist disturbance.”

-Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 260.

Coming up next week, find out how Lorde’s statement that “Your silence will not protect you” inspires us and why we lean into trauma.