Conference Keynote Address: SISTERHOOD AND SURVIVAL

Author(s): Audre Lorde

Source: The Black Scholar, Vol. 17, No. 2, THE BLACK WOMAN WRITER AND THE
DIASPORA (March/April 1986), pp. 5-7
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41067253
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 Conference Keynote Address: ^*IT%
SISTERHOOD (
AND SURVIVAL V=>
greet you. In the name of our mothers
who are not here because they have left
us. I greet you in the name of our sisters
who are too far away or who cannot afford
to come to this place. I greet you in the name
of our children whose living future is so
endangered around the world, but whose
energies and determination should be a
lesson for us all.
I am truly happy to be here to see your
faces, to be a part of the Black Women
Writers of the Diaspora. I would like to say
a few words of what sisterhood and survival
mean to me. For myself personally, survival
means working for the future, and if I am
to use all of my self power in the service of
what I believe - that all people across the
earth must be free - then I must also identify
that self and the sources from which that
power springs.
I am a black feminist lesbian poet, and I
identify myself as such because if there is
one other black feminist lesbian poet in
isolation somewhere within the reach of my
voice, I want her to know she is not alone.
I have been teaching the poems of Angelina
Weld Grimke recently, another black lesbian
poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Thanks to
the work of women like Gloria Hull, Barbara
Smith, Pat Bell-Scott, Erlene Stetson and
others, her work is once more becoming
available to us. But it has been lost for many
years, to me. And I often think of her, dying
alone in an apartment in New York City in
1958, while I was a young black lesbian, in
AUDRE LORDE is a renowned poet and essayist.
Her recent books include Zami, A New Spelling of
My Name and Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches.
THE BLACK SCHOLAR MARCH/ APRIL 1986 PAGE 5
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by Audre Lorde
isolation not too far away, and I think of
what it could have meant in terms of sister-
hood and survival for each one of us to have
known of the other's existence, for me to
have had her words, and for her to have
known I needed them! That we were not
alone.
In the last two years I have been traveling
around a lot and learning what an enormous
amount I don't know as a black American
woman. And wherever I went it was so
heartening to see black women doing - re-
claiming our lands, reclaiming our heritage,
reclaiming our selves, even in the face of
enormous odds. And we are everywhere,
those of us who define black as a political
position, and those of us who define black
as of African heritage. And I recognize the
inherent differences between those posi-
tions.
All over the world I found black women
coming together around their identities,
questioning and re-defining what that Afri-
canness could mean, within our particular
communities, and upon the world stage.
And I don't mean in the abstract. I mean,
for example, in the'lives of the Afro-German
women examining the strengths it took to
survive literally being scrubbed white as
children, or to Katerina Birchenwald, the
Afro-German poet who in her work is
refashioning the German language through
her poetry of blackness. I mean in the lives
of the Afro-Dutch women fighting racism in
Holland while also actively engaged in the
anti-apartheid struggle.
For me as an African-American woman
writer, sisterhood and survival mean it is not
enough to say we are for peace when our
sisters' children are dying in the streets of
Soweto. There are no stones in Johannes-
berg, Ellen Kuzwayo told me last week. The
little chaps who were gunned down throwing
stones at policemen must have filled their
pockets with those stones and carried them
all the way from Soweto. What does it mean,
our wars being fought by our children?
and survival demands that I
ask myself as an African-American
woman, What does it mean to be a citizen of
the most powerful country on earth? And we
are that. What does it mean to be a citizen
of a country that stands upon the wrong side
of every liberation struggle on this earth?
Let that sink in for a moment.
We cannot join the children in kneepants
and jumpers throwing stones at army hippos
in Capetown, but we can refuse to support
companies that do business in South Africa.
And we can persuade others to refuse to
PAGE 6 THE BLACK SCHOLAR MARCH/APRIL 1986
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support companies that do business in South
Africa.
Even closer to home, what are we saying
to our sons and nephews and students as
they are herded into the U.S. Army by
unemployment and despair, to become meat
in battles to occupy the lands of other people
of color? How can we ever forget the faces
of young black American soldiers, bayonets
drawn, in front of a shack in Grenville,
Grenada?
What is our work for sisterhood and
survival as black women writers of the
Diaspora? Our responsibilities to other black
women and their children across the globe
we share, struggling for futures?
What if our sons are ordered into
Namibia, and South West Africa, and An-
gola?
Where does our power lie and how do we
use it in the service of what we believe?

And where do our lives intersect with the
lives of other women of color and where do
they diverge?
In traveling I came into contact with black
women all over the earth. Pacific Island
women, the Kanak women in struggle in
New Caledonia, Maori women of Aotearoa,
New Zealand. I marched with black Austra-
lians, the Koori women of Melbourne, in a
land rights march, the women of Angola,
and South Africa, out of their countries, and
still in battle. And what I found, besides the
particular differences of our struggles, was
also a great similarity - the origins of our
oppressions are the same. It was very affirm-
ing to see all over the world women of color
rising up and demanding - "You took our
land, you didn't pay for it, you messed it up,
polluted it, misused it, now give it back!"
It made me think a lot about what it means
to be indigenous, and what my relationship
as a black woman is to the land struggles of
the indigenous peoples of this land, to
Native American women, and how can we
translate that consciousness into a new level
of working together; how do we use each
other's differences in our common battles?
In Melbourne, Australia, I attended a play
by an urban Aboriginal woman, the very first
play written and produced in Australia by a
black woman playwright. The play was enti-
THE BLACK SCHOLAR MARCH/APRIL 1986 PAGE 7
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tled, "Tjindarela," by Eva Johnson. It speaks
from the pain of children stolen from us in
body and mind, a pain well known to
indigenous women of color the world over.
All of our children are prey. How do we
raise them not to prey upon themselves and
each other? This is why we cannot be silent,
because our silences will come to testify
against us in the mouths of our children.
long as we believe ourselves to be
powerless we will never be able to use the
power we have. We are black women writers
of the diaspora. I think I can say for each
of us that we believe in speaking the truth
as we know it, and making those truths work
within our lives and the lives of our children.
This week at the U.N. celebration, President
Kenneth Kuanada of Zambia reiterated what
we know - that there is a real need for
international help in ending apartheid in
South Africa and in Namibia.
Yes, black children are being killed on the
streets of every city in this country, and black
neighborhoods incinerated, and our black
elders are being evicted with shotguns. And
these are not isolated events upon the world
stage; they are directly related to apartheid
in South Africa. Genocide is genocide.
So while we are fighting for survival in our
schools and in the streets of Detroit and New
York and Austin, sisterhood requires us to
also remember that black Americans still
control over $200 million a year in this
country. As long as we think of ourselves as
powerless we will waste the power we have.
$200 million. That's one kind of power.
Where do you bank? Buy gasoline? What
position does your congressman hold on
sanctions against South Africa?
Each of us is called upon to take a stand.
So in these days ahead, as we examine
ourselves and each other, our works, our
hopes, our fears, our differences, our sister-
hood and survivals, I urge you to tackle what
is most difficult for us all, self-scrutiny of
our complacencies, that idea that since each
one of us believes she is on the side of right,
she need not examine her position.
We are sisters, and our survivals are
mutual. D