Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

While most of Sister Outsider indicates how Lorde’s outsider position as a Black lesbian has informed her perspective on oppressive ideologies, this interview with Adrienne Rich shows readers the personal and pivotal moments in Lorde’s life that inspired her vocation as a writer and educator. Stepping into these roles has required an acute self-awareness, so this interview demonstrates Lorde’s commitment to acknowledging, accepting, and moving with her feelings and perceptions to survive and fulfill roles to herself and her community.

The interview transcription that appears in Sister Outsider is edited down from three hours of tape, so it is probable that Lorde, Rich, or both chose to begin the transcription with questions and responses about “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” and “Uses of the Erotic” to illustrate that feeling is the dominant theme. Not only does the interview begin with a discussion of these two prose pieces, but it circles back to them in the final section. In the beginning, Lorde reveals that the two pieces are “clear progression in feeling out something connected with the first piece of prose [she] ever wrote” (81). She goes on to say, “One thread in my life is the battle to preserve my perceptions—pleasant or unpleasant, painful or whatever” (81), and that she has kept herself through feeling all her life, feeling out ways to get and give information (81). These remarks immediately establish that Lorde has used feeling as a guide throughout her life, which is precisely what “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” and “Uses of the Erotic” encourage women to do.

When the interview circles back to these prose pieces in the ending section, Lorde clarifies what using feeling as a guide means—in contrast to how it has been misconstrued by her critics. She explains that “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” is not “simply restating the old stereotype of the rational white male and the emotional dark female” (100), but rather acknowledging think and feel as “a choice of ways and combinations” (101) to which the feeling aspect is integral. As discussed in the analysis of “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Lorde advocates for the integration of feeling to enhance the quality of light by which women scrutinize their lives, as opposed to the hard stop at rationality alone. It is not that men and white people do not feel or that women are also not rational; rather, the Western world has historically elevated rationality over feeling (101). Similarly, she explains that “Uses of the Erotic” is in no way antifeminist, as critics have accused, but rather an encouragement for women to learn to trust the feeling part of themselves that they have been socialized to suspect and reject (102).

The use of feeling as a guide and inspiration for Lorde’s work is also evident in her explanation of the poem “Power.” By placing herself in the shoes of the lone Black woman in the jury that acquitted a white police officer who murdered a Black child, Lorde wrote “Power” with fear and rage as her guides. It was not simply emotion, however, but also the use of poetry as a translator of the chaos of feeling into “action and effect and change” (107), just as she explains the purpose of poetry in “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” Her primary point is that feeling as a guide and poetry as a translator illuminate the capacity of rage and pain to become not merely distorted and destructive, but useful for survival (108).

This articulation of feeling and poetry explains why in the early years of her life, Lorde’s response to direct questions about her feelings and thoughts were recitations of poems (82). However, she also felt that “there were so many complex emotions for which poems did not exist” (82) that she must write her own poetry, and thus her career as a poet began. It was feeling as the guide that led her on to the path of being a poet.

It was also feeling as a guide that launched her exploration into prose, although she found the prose path difficult because her mother taught her to think and perceive nonverbally, to gather the information beneath language that she needed for survival (83). Prose, then, appeared difficult for its linear, blocked structure; for Lorde, feelings did not follow such a linear, analytic path. Then came the pivotal moment in Cuernavaca, Mexico where she realized that “words could tell. That there was such a thing as an emotional sentence” (85). The moment inspired her first piece of prose, “La Llorona.” Again, acknowledging her feelings and using them as a guide led Lorde on to her path of writing prose and poetry.

Furthermore, her path as a writer led into her path as an educator, where feeling and perception were significant to her teaching and learning process. Recall that in the beginning of the interview, Lorde talks about keeping herself through feeling, and trusting her own perceptions. Later, Lorde explains that a request for documentation feels to her like a questioning of her perceptions and a devaluation of what she is in the process of discovering (104). This revelation is significant; that process of discovery, that willingness to face her feelings and what she intuited, was integral to her teaching career and how it unfolded.

Fear was the overwhelming feeling that marked Lorde’s various teaching ventures. When asked to become poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College, she found it “frightening […] the idea of someone responding to me as a poet” (89). When she was asked to come teach at the SEEK Writing Program, she says that she went in terror (94). As a professor at John Jay College, she was “terrified about the guns” (97) that policemen carried in her English class. However, she moved with this fear, allowing it to lead her on the path of discovery. She tells Rich:

I know teaching is a survival technique. It is for me and I think it is in general; the only way real learning happens. Because I myself was learning something I needed to continue living. And I was examining it and teaching it at the same time I was learning it. I was teaching it to myself out loud (88).

Thus, teaching was also a learning process that required her not only to trust her perceptions but also to be open about who she was and what she perceived. She discusses the need to reveal to her Tougaloo students that she was married to a white man, which opened the path for her to “deal with their hostility, their sense of disillusionment, to come past that” (90). Afterward, she and her students could begin working out what they needed from each other in the writing. Following her own feelings, then, opened space for her students to become vulnerable and express their emotional lives, which she came to know through their poetry (92). This experience helped her realize that teaching was what she needed to do. She again emphasizes the learning that came through teaching when she discusses her experience at SEEK: “I learned every single thing in every classroom. Every single class I ever walked into was like doing it anew. Every day, every week” (94).

Feeling as a guide and trusting her own perception also played into her teaching at Lehman and John Jay. While teaching at Lehman, two perceptions prompted her to move on to John Jay: one, the emotional toll of teaching a white class, who Lorde believed should be taught by a white professor for that reason; and two, she wanted to address the unique problems that Black teachers face within Black communities after their own racist and sexist education. By transitioning to John Jay, she followed the path of her perceptions. Like Tougaloo, John Jay required her transparency and honesty; her students’ lesbian-baiting made her more open about her life as a poet and a lesbian, which she revealed by posting “Love Poem” on a wall in the English Department (98).

Her trust in feeling and perception also allowed Lorde to speak up for herself using words. While she had been taught to think nonverbally, writing poetry and prose helped Lorde translate her inner life into a verbal medium. Her teaching experiences also cultivated her ability to speak up for herself. She explains that after posting “Love Poem” in the English Department, she learned that “speaking up was a protective mechanism” (98). This suggests that Lorde’s use of feeling and perception as guides is ultimately a survival tool.

The interview with Rich demonstrates that Lorde lives by the methods that she advocates in Sister Outsider. She has grounded true knowledge and understanding in her life by accessing and using her feelings; this ultimately compels her to share that knowledge by way of her writing and teaching.