She wrote for herself and she wrote for her communities. She spoke her truth always and urged other women to speak their truths: “What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? 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?” (“Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”). She believed in the connection between written language as it leads to action.
Her essays speak to anger, strategies for resisting the invisibility she felt because of her race, gender and sexuality, and to ways of living most fully in the world. Speaking out, keeping herself alive, raising children were all acts of resistance.
Which might seem an odd thing to say about a writer, but Lorde speaks over and over again about the ways that she is resisting silence: as a Black woman among Black men, as a Black woman among white women, as a lesbian among heterosexuals.
