EP 3 Audre Lorde - Freedom Begins With Self | Women And Resistance.

In this episode of Women and Resistance, we explore the life and legacy of Audre Lorde. 

In this conversation, she discusses her life, identity, and the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. 

She emphasises the importance of collective struggles against oppression and the need for solidarity among marginalised groups. Lorde reflects on her experiences in education, activism, and the power of the erotic as a source of strength. 

She challenges societal norms and encourages individuals to fully embrace their identities and experiences. 

The conversation culminates in a reflection on her legacy and the ongoing fight for freedom and justice.

Takeaways

*Audre Lorde identifies as a black, lesbian, mother, warrior, and poet, emphasising the importance of intersectionality.
*She discusses the anger often imposed on black women and how it can be a righteous force for change.
*Lorde highlights the need for solidarity among marginalised groups to combat oppression.
*She reflects on her upbringing and the impact of her West Indian heritage on her identity.
*Education played a crucial role in her activism and understanding of societal issues.
*Lorde emphasises the power of the erotic as a source of strength and self-knowledge.
*She critiques the notion of silence as a protective measure for marginalised individuals.
*Lorde argues that racism is a belief in the superiority of one race over others, leading to dominance.
*She encourages individuals to embrace their scars and experiences as part of their identity.
*Lorde's legacy continues to inspire discussions on feminism, race, and sexuality.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Women and Resistance
00:43 Exploring Audre Lorde's Identity
03:16 Intersectionality and Oppression
06:44 Personal History and Family Background
12:03 Childhood Experiences and Education
14:42 Navigating Womanhood and Reproductive Rights
17:24 Motherhood and Personal Evolution
19:12 Love, Politics, and Identity
21:15 Literary Contributions and Readings
21:44 The Power of the Erotic
24:27 Defining Eros and Its Significance
27:02 Exploring Anger and Its Impact
28:57 Racism and the Struggle for Unity
31:45 Anger as a Response to Racism
35:33 The Need for Constructive Anger
38:02 Freedom and Self-Connection
40:22 The Journey of Self-Acceptance
43:54 The Importance of Feeling
46:07 Breaking Free from Constructs

Welcome  to Women and Resistance, a powerful podcast where we honour the courage, resilience, and revolutionary spirit of women across the globe. Hosted by Aya Fubara Eneli Esq and Adesoji Iginla...

You're listening to Women and Resistance with Aya Fubara Eneli Esq and Adesoji Iginla—where we honour the voices of women who have shaped history through courage and defiance...Now, back to the conversation.

That’s it for this episode of Women and Resistance. Thank you for joining us in amplifying the voices of women who challenge injustice and change the course of history. Be sure to subscribe, share, and continue the conversation. Together We Honour the past, act in the present, and shape the future. Until next time, stay inspired and stay in resistance!

Transcript

Adesoji Iginla (00:03.01)
Yes, greetings, greetings, and welcome to another episode of Women and Resistance. I am your host, Adesuji Iginla. And Women and Resistance is a podcast where we honor the work of women, historically, who have done a lot to further the cause of the Black Body. Tonight, we have the esteemed honor of having in our midst a writer.

poet, socialist, feminist, warrior, and should I add, self-described, black, lesbian, Audre Lorde. Welcome.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (00:50.3)
Good evening.

Adesoji Iginla (00:52.856)
Good evening, and thank you for answering the call. Let me set the stage.

Adesoji Iginla (01:01.354)
You are, as everybody knows, a foremost writer and poet. A lot people might know you through your art form, but so this platform gives you the opportunity to help, you know, show the other side of you. First and foremost, it would be who is Audre Lorde beyond the name, the books? If you could give us a walkthrough.

from your early days of consciousness.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:42.65)
I much don't want to be here tonight.

Adesoji Iginla (01:48.878)
Okay.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:50.5)
I suppose that in many respects, I could be the poster child of...

that most famous of tropes that they like to impose on black women, the angry black woman.

And I will, I think later, share a little bit more about my anger. For it is a righteous anger and it's not one that I have any problems expressing.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (02:33.678)
Although I am.

quite aware.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (02:44.228)
of its ability.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (02:51.876)
as a passion to power me and to power life. There are also consequences. But let me...

get beyond a surliness that I am feeling at this moment and try to be a bit more hospitable to your you and your audience. I after all was raised by West Indian parents and if you know anything about the West Indian upbringing we are raised to know our manners.

Although I must say, in that respect, I must have brought quite a bit of embarrassment to my family. Actually, I did bring a great deal of embarrassment to my family.

I was born black and a woman.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (03:59.566)
In my lifetime, I tried to become the strongest person I could to live the life I had been given and to help effect change towards a livable future for this earth and for my children.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (04:22.808)
as a black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, poet, mother of two, including one boy and a member of an interracial couple, I usually found myself part of some group in which the majority defined me as

Deviant, difficult, inferior.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (04:57.724)
sometimes just plain wrong.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (05:02.726)
from my membership in all of these groups, I learned that oppression and the intolerance of difference come in all shapes and sexes and colors and sexualities. And that among those of us who share the goals of liberation, which I certainly hope your audience does,

For those of us who share the goals of a workable future for our children, there can be no hierarchies of oppression.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (05:49.894)
through my life experiences. I have learned that sexism and heterosexism both arise from the same source as racism. says a voice from the black community, but being black is normal.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (06:18.16)
Well.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (06:22.86)
many black people of my age can remember grimly the days when it didn't used to be.

I simply do not believe that one aspect of myself can possibly profit from the oppression of any other part of my identity.

I know that my people cannot possibly profit from the oppression of any other group which seeks the right to peaceful existence.

Adesoji Iginla (06:58.508)
Hmm.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (07:06.272)
Rather, we diminish ourselves by denying to others what we have shed blood to obtain for our children. I must bring it back to the present. Can you understand the absurdity?

of the arguments of.

A-DOS or...

foundational blacks in the face of the tyranny of ICE against our African brothers and sisters. You know I traveled extensively in Africa.

Adesoji Iginla (07:49.228)
Yeah, I was going to bring that up, but go ahead.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (07:52.846)
And our children need to learn that they do not need to, they do not have to become like each other in order to work together for a future they will all share.

Within the lesbian community, I am black.

And within the black community, guess what? I am lesbian. And I am woman. And any attack against black people is a lesbian and gay issue because I and thousands of other black women are part of the lesbian community. And any attack against lesbians and gays is a black issue because thousands of lesbians and gay men are black. There is no hierarchy of oppression. I've not even brought in.

Adesoji Iginla (08:40.878)
Yeah.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (08:45.242)
to this conversation the issue of class, which has to be part of the conversation. I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only. I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group. And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which

Adesoji Iginla (09:06.467)
Mm.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (09:15.182)
I must battle these forces of discrimination wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, listen carefully.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (09:32.836)
It will not be long before they appear to destroy you too.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (09:40.86)
was born on February 18th, 1934. Today marks an anniversary of my birth.

Adesoji Iginla (09:48.718)
would have been.

Yeah, it'll be 92.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (09:57.296)
I was born in Harlem, New York. My name was Audrey with a Y. Geraldine Lor.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (10:10.278)
But as I practiced my letters, I hated, I hated the tail of that Y falling underneath the line. I loved the neatness of the A U D R E and all the other letters.

Adesoji Iginla (10:34.338)
Mmm.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (10:35.398)
So I removed the Y because I preferred precision. I believed that names shape.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (10:46.992)
My parents were immigrants from Grenada in the Caribbean. They carried island memory into Northern streets. My father was Frederick Byron Lord. He worked tirelessly and was a great provider for our family. I have fond memories of sneaking into his pockets and stealing money, including

when I thought.

that although I was the smartest kid and for the election to be president, I was the one, they said it was based on merit and as the smartest kid, I was the one who who should be elected as president. I still thought I would oil the wheels of.

the election just a little bit as the only black student in this Catholic school. And I liberally stole from my father's pockets, buying hard candy and such.

My mother warned me.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (12:08.444)
You better go to that school and focus on your studies. You're not there to win any election and don't come back to this house crying when you lose.

I did. It was unfair.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (12:27.546)
Meritocracy, they say. My mother was Linda Belmar Lord. And she believed in discipline, dignity, and respectability as survival strategies in a racist America. We never talked about race. My mother could have passed for a white woman. The product of.

Adesoji Iginla (12:30.072)
Yeah, those exist.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (12:56.134)
we allowed to say it on these airwaves?

Adesoji Iginla (12:58.848)
Is there? Go ahead.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (13:00.922)
her mother having been taken advantage of.

by a white man.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (13:11.748)
I was the youngest of three daughters. My older sisters were very well behaved, much lighter skinned. They did not embarrass the family.

eye on the other hand was darker skinned, nearsighted almost to the point of blindness.

Watching everything, stumbling over my feet. I didn't speak or read.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (13:48.508)
I was almost four years old.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (13:53.756)
I screamed at everything and my mother was forever pinching, pinching me to get me to act right.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (14:09.165)
once I discovered the world of books.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (14:15.056)
found the world that I could escape into.

And my childhood was one in which I was constantly trying to find a place to escape to.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (14:28.794)
I was put in these schools run by nuns who I suppose thought they were doing their duty but made it very clear they had no love for we black kids in these schools and they let us know as much.

I survived those nuns. Hmm. You ever had to play the game of fairies and brownies in your class? Take a guess. Who do you think were the fairies? What did you think you had to do to be a fairy? And what do you think you had to do to be a brownie? I was a brownie most of the time, but every once in a while.

especially after I learned my numbers.

spend a few days as a fairy.

Adesoji Iginla (15:28.28)
few days.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (15:30.534)
Sometimes I would break my glasses and then I was really in trouble. And the nun would piously ask all the other students.

Pray for me because I was such an evil and wicked child who would cause my parents such financial hardship by breaking my glasses as though I had done it intentionally. And since I could not see to get my work done, I would be sat in the back of the class with a dunce hat on my head.

Adesoji Iginla (16:04.652)
Wow. The kit.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (16:15.524)
My mother, did I tell you could pass for white? My father was pretty dark skinned. My mother taught us to distrust all white people. She didn't want us having any friends. My sisters were close in age, they had each other. I molded little dolls out of clay, out of flour. And I prayed and I prayed and I prayed that one day that doll would

come alive and would be my little own playmate. I prayed for another sibling, but that prayer was never to be answered. I eventually came to think that perhaps when I prayed, that was actually an assurance that that prayer would never come to pass. I probably should stop praying for things.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (17:11.644)
I was fat and dark skinned and damn near blind.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (17:25.242)
I did eventually make it to Hunter College High School. It was a prestigious majority white institution. And guess what? For academically gifted girls. Because actually, I was brilliant.

I wrote my first poem in the eighth grade, scribbled wherever I could. All of these thoughts swirling around in my head, conversations I could never have with my mother.

My father, he just worked.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (18:06.864)
Hmm. And my sisters. I was just an embarrassment to them.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (18:16.572)
It was a very lonely childhood. I joined the group we called ourselves the Brandit. You know, people will do whatever it takes to find a place to belong. We're all just looking for connection, really.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (18:34.436)
I learned brilliance and alienation simultaneously. I learned that intelligence does not protect you from racism. Nothing does, really.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (18:57.008)
There's so many stories I could tell, but I know I have to be mindful of the time because they're things that I want to read to you too about things I've written, but you live this life and you get to see the underbelly of society and you get to see young girls who can't quite find where they fit in and mothers who are.

so enraged but don't know what to do with that rage and they take it out on their daughters in the ways that they think that they are protecting their daughters and then this pain and this trauma just carries on.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (19:32.634)
and you're thrown out into a world to deal with a thing that nobody names and nobody talks about. How are you to fight the thing that no one will talk about?

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (19:52.378)
and my best friend committed suicide.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (19:58.044)
She told me she was gonna kill herself.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (20:06.63)
grandmother found her in the tub. Tub pink in color, water pink in color. She had slit her wrists, but they found her in time and they saved her life. But she said, I'm gonna kill myself.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (20:31.644)
gestate rat poison.

her from the inside out.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (20:45.948)
You know what it feels like?

Adesoji Iginla (20:52.078)
So do what?

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (20:53.052)
to watch the body of your 15 year old friend in a casket lowered into the ground.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (21:06.552)
Only to come back home.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (21:13.924)
and have your parents talk to you about how to stay away from those people.

Adesoji Iginla (21:25.122)
which people.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (21:35.472)
They didn't even know her. Couldn't understand her pain. But judged her nonetheless. Do you know how many young people are out in the streets today?

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (21:49.904)
misunderstood.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (21:54.202)
I moved out of my family home as soon as I graduated from high school.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (22:04.742)
had an abortion on a kitchen table not even six months later.

And here we are. It's 2026.

and you all have messed around and allowed this patriarchy to take away the rights of women.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (22:28.924)
to safely control their reproduction.

Adesoji Iginla (22:29.144)
Yeah.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (22:35.778)
spare you the details.

But the stories abound of botched abortions in alleyways and back rooms of young girls who bled to death. Is that what you all want again?

Adesoji Iginla (23:02.838)
mean, funny you should bring that up. In one of your essays in Sister Outsider, you did ask the question, when would white women and black women come together to find common ground? One would have thought Roe v. Wade would have been the common ground. Yes. Yes.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (23:19.42)
book.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (23:31.46)
I am angry. But I would try to stay on point.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (23:39.77)
Because for all the embarrassment I caused my parents, they did instill in me good manners.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (23:51.546)
I traveled extensively in Mexico, eventually returned back to the United States of America, and I earned my BA from Hunter College in 1959.

And then I earned my master's in library science from Columbia University in 1961. Yes, I was a librarian before I was publicly a radical poet, as they would say.

Adesoji Iginla (24:14.562)
Get rid.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (24:21.882)
My friends, hold on to the libraries, personal and public.

Libraries are archives of memory. Memory is resistance.

Memory is resistance. Don't let them erase your memory.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (25:00.092)
Some will say that I was sexually adventurous.

Adesoji Iginla (25:06.69)
Okay.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (25:08.152)
I would say I was horny. Yes. And I did not shy away from sharing about my experiences. And neither should you. In 1962, although I had prior to that had many sexual

experiences with women. I married Edward Rollins, a white attorney. Yes, he was male.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (25:54.264)
This was not a betrayal of myself. It was a part of my evolution. And I reserve the right at all times to evolve as should you.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (26:10.268)
The 1960s did not offer black women easy pathways to self-definition. You can judge from where you are now. Let's be honest. 2026 does not offer black women easy ways to self-definition, easy pathways to self-definition, especially around sexuality. With Edwin, I had two children, Elizabeth Rollins and Jonathan Rollins.

Adesoji Iginla (26:29.932)
Yeah, you do have a point.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (26:42.8)
Motherhood deepened my sense of urgency.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (26:50.108)
and by 1970, I divorced Edwin.

to be true to myself.

At that point, I was fully stepping into my identity as a lesbian.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (27:08.642)
After my divorce, I formed a long-term relationship partnership with Frances Clayton. She was also white.

And much later, after Frances and I parted ways, and in some of my books I explore a little bit, not too much. But I do speak about this tension.

This notion of, well, we're all lesbian, so our experiences are the same, but you don't understand my experience as a black woman. And if you negate that, you don't quite get me. And even though there were times that I tried to act like there were no differences, I had to be honest with myself that there indeed were differences and that can cause a chasm.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (28:12.686)
Later, I built a profound and enduring relationship with Gloria I. Joseph. She's a scholar, an activist, a thinker, and she's written extensively about our relationship about me. We eventually made our home in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. I am not proud to say that that relationship was

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (28:43.313)
as beautiful as it was, that was also fraught with its own tension. And in that relationship, I also saw my anger.

Adesoji Iginla (28:57.358)
think we'll have to do something else.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (29:02.634)
and I will address that as well.

Adesoji Iginla (29:05.697)
Okay.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (29:07.63)
It's important as I speak to you and as I hopefully encourage you and your listeners to not just sit as spectators of my life, but to consider your own lives.

to understand that for me, love was never separate from politics.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (29:37.796)
and that my work was never separate from my love and my love was never separate from my work, there was no compartmentalizing once I came fully into myself.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (29:56.464)
How I named myself, I said, I am black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet, not black first because it was convenient, not lesbian last because it was safer. Every word was deliberate.

Of course, I have many published works. I'm gonna go through that really quickly and then I'm gonna read some of my works to you. In 1968, I published my poetry, The First Cities, and then in 1970, Cables to Rage, coincided with my divorce. 1973, From a Land Where Other People Live.

In 1974, I published New York Head Shop in Museum. 1976, I published Cole. 1978, The Black Unicorn. And 1986, Our Dead Behind Us. In 1993, The Marvelous Arithmetic of Distance. These were all poetry books. And in terms of prose,

I published the Cancer Journals in 1980.

I also published Zami, A New Spelling of My Name in 1982. I've already shared with you Sister Outsider, which was published in 1984. Excuse me. And A Burst of Light in 1988. And Zami.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (31:35.944)
I described as a bio-mythography because truth is layered.

Adesoji Iginla (31:45.901)
Mm.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (31:48.27)
I think now would be a good time for me to do some reading if that is okay with you. Is that okay with you?

Adesoji Iginla (31:55.64)
Please do. Yeah.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (32:00.442)
Give me a second.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (32:12.134)
There's so much I want to share with you.

you

This is from my book, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House.

want to first talk about the uses of the erotic because I am aware that there are some people who have

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (32:47.292)
relegated me to just the erotic.

the salacious. And like I said, yes, I was horny and I loved making love.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (33:12.07)
But let's talk about the uses of the erotic.

There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.

I'm not gonna read all the way through. I'm gonna just select some parts to read to you.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (33:52.56)
We have been taught to suspect this resource vilified, abused, and devalued within Western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority. On the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.

It is a short step from there to the false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong. But that strength is illusory. For it is fashioned within the context of male models of power.

As women, we have come to distrust the power which rises from our deepest and non-rational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears the same depth.

too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves. So women are maintained at a distant inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (35:38.044)
For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic.

Hmm, but let me tell you this. The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which once we have experienced it, we can aspire.

Why pray tell do you think female genital mutilation exists?

Adesoji Iginla (36:28.974)
true.

Adesoji Iginla (36:32.802)
control.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (36:33.264)
who benefits from women not ever being able to experience their own power. Let's very quickly.

Adesoji Iginla (36:42.638)
Thank you.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (36:45.336)
define eros. The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects, born of chaos and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then I speak of it as an assertion of the life force of women, of that creative energy empowered.

the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.

Adesoji Iginla (37:24.206)
Mm.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (37:26.972)
In the same way, we have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing.

What I'm saying to you is that self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (38:00.59)
For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of ourselves, all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves, from our life pursuits, that they feel in accordance with that joy, which we know ourselves to be capable of.

Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence. That's why they don't want us to have our orgasms. But I had mine, and I encourage you to have yours.

Adesoji Iginla (38:40.588)
Hmm.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (38:47.268)
Listen, in touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial, all the things that they have told women to wear as cloaks, as

some kind of jewelry that makes us more desirable. What a crock of you know what.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (39:30.352)
What would you like to say as I look for the next area that I want to read? Because I do want to talk about anger and I want to specifically talk to my sisters about this suppressed anger and what it does to us.

Adesoji Iginla (39:45.492)
I was going to pose a question with regards to your traveling. You've been to Berlin, Lagos, and your poems have cited the issue of marginalized groups.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (40:00.665)
I see you are not willing to address the erotic. Does it make you uncomfortable?

Adesoji Iginla (40:05.682)
No, it doesn't actually have the book. But no, it doesn't. So the question being communicating the experience of marginalized groups. mean, in that case, you go also bring in the question of the erotic group, where men do control the desires of women through female genital mutilation and also

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (40:08.28)
okay. Carry on with your question. I'm listening.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (40:30.448)
Mm-hmm.

Adesoji Iginla (40:33.73)
the encouragement of chastity and what have you. I mean, there are various forms in which, yes.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (40:38.748)
Chastity just for women though cuz you men are supposed to go so your royal oaths

Adesoji Iginla (40:44.366)
Of course, of course, of course. mean, what would the world be without men, you know, exploring the limits of patriarchy as it will be. yeah, that said, you know, so, I mean, the question would be, how does one reconcile that with the call to arms, which, not call to arms, maybe that's a word.

call to solidarity between marginalized groups, i.e. I mean, 2026, the Latinos and the Africans and African-Americans who have decided, you know, go a separate ways and effectively playing into the hands of the races as it were, and now bearing the brunt of such a problem. So.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (41:40.4)
Hmm. Well, I think it's important that we define what racism is. interestingly enough, I think people are still very confused about that.

Adesoji Iginla (41:53.282)
Yeah, yeah, go ahead, go ahead. Give us your take on it.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (41:55.652)
And as I write in my book, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House, racism is the belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others, and thereby the right to dominance manifest and implied. And as I would argue in the text that I'm about to read to you,

Adesoji Iginla (42:00.343)
tools.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (42:24.132)
What has happened to?

marginalized people is this tendency to buy into

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (42:38.512)
this world order, if you will, that white people have created, this racial hierarchy.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (42:50.78)
and within my family as the darkest child. I certainly experienced that.

And so you can understand how within the world system, there is a struggle, if you will, not to be the one at the bottom, which would be Black, which would be the darkest. And even within particular groups, whether Latino, whether Asian, just make sure you're not the darkest even within that group.

And as I read this, might help even to explain a better address what you're raising because what I've also talked about is in some of my writing in Sister Outsider is also this notion of what do we understand unity to be?

Adesoji Iginla (43:35.671)
I trust the point.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (43:53.646)
I argue that unity implies the coming together of elements which are to begin with varied and diverse in their particular natures.

and our persistence in examining the tensions within diversity actually encourage growth towards our common goal. But we need to be clear about imagining a goal that is different from what whiteness and white patriarchy in particular has tried to impose on the imaginations of the entire world.

where some of us simply cannot think of a world that operates any differently from the way that they've set it up, their world order.

And so this text that I'm going to read, it's called, Uses of Anger, Women Responding to Racism. And again, I can't read everything, so I'm going to jump around a little bit, hopefully give enough to whet, pun intended, the appetites of your listeners.

so that they may go and further study this and have these conversations with themselves and with others.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (45:27.31)
My response to racism is anger. I've lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. And that's what my mother taught me, by the way. My fear of anger, though, taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing also.

Women responding to racism means women responding to anger. The anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-option.

My anger is a response to racist attitudes and to the actions and presumptions that arise out of those attitudes. If your dealings with other women reflect those attitudes, then my anger and your attendant fears are spotlights that can be used for growth in the same way I have used learning to express anger for my growth.

but for corrective surgery, not guilt. Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder. They serve none of our futures.

For example, I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference and a white woman says, tell me how you feel, but don't say it too harshly or I cannot hear you. But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing or the threat of a message that her life may change?

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (47:34.0)
The Women's Studies program of a Southern university invites a Black woman to read following a week-long forum on Black and white women. What has this week given you, I ask. The most vocal white woman says, I think I've gotten a lot. I feel Black women really understand me a lot better now. They have a better idea of where I'm coming from. As if understanding her lay at the core of the racist problem.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (48:07.292)
After 15 years of a women's movement, which professes to address the life concerns and possible futures of all women, I still hear on campus after campus, how can we address the issue of racism? No women of color attended.

On the other side of that statement, we have no one in our department equipped to teach their work. In other words, racism is a black woman's problem, a problem of women of color, and only we can discuss it.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (48:55.204)
If women in the academy truly want to dialogue about racism, it will require recognizing the needs in the living context of other women. When an academic woman says, I can't afford it, she may mean she's making a choice about how to spend her available money. But when a woman on welfare says, I can't afford it, she means she's surviving on an amount of money that can barely subs...

barely subsidized her in 1972, and she often does not have enough to eat. Yet the National Women's Studies Association in 1981 holds a conference in which it commits itself to responding to racism and refuses to waive registration fee for poor women and women of color.

Adesoji Iginla (49:47.278)
Peace.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (49:50.31)
who wish to present and conduct workshops.

Adesoji Iginla (49:52.374)
Okay.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (49:57.168)
So what are we really doing? But let me go on because I wanna talk about.

the hatred and anger that we turn towards each other.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (50:23.384)
Most women have not developed tools for facing anger constructively. Consciousness-raising groups in the past largely white dealt with how to express anger, usually at the world of men, and these groups were made up of white women who shared the terms of their oppressions.

There was usually little attempt to articulate the genuine differences between women such as those of race, color, age, class, and sexual identity. There was no apparent need at that time to examine the contradictions of self-women as oppressor. There was work on expressing anger but very little on anger directed against each other. No tools were developed to deal with other women's anger except to avoid it, deflect it, or flee from it under a blanket of

guilt.

My response to racism is anger. That anger has eaten clefts into my living only when it remains unspoken, useless to anyone. When women of color speak out of the anger that laces so many of our contacts with white women, we're often told that we're creating a mood of hopelessness, preventing white women from getting past guilt.

To turn aside from the anger of black women with excuses or the pretext of intimidation is to award no one power. It is merely another way of preserving racial blindness. The power of unaddressed privilege, unbreached intact. Guilt is another form of objectification. Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity. Black women are expected to use our anger.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (52:07.788)
only in the service of other people's salvation or learning.

My anger has meant pain to me, but it has also meant survival.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (52:22.534)
But I also want to speak about that anger when it's turned against each other. You know, black women, when we see each other and we don't speak, you know when we gatekeep against each other?

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (52:38.426)
When a black woman walks in and we look her up and down and decide whether we're going to dismiss her or whether she's good enough to join our clique.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (52:50.202)
We need to examine that anger as well.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (52:58.214)
Here's my bottom line. I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of color remains chained, nor is any one of you. In the little time that we have left, I wanna say this.

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (53:31.014)
Difference is not threat. Difference can be power. It is power. Black liberation movements often ask black women to be quiet. They often ask us to subordinate gender to race, to subordinate sexuality to unity. I refused. I refuse today. Your silence will not protect you. My silence did not protect me.

and particularly black women, your silence will not protect you.

And yes, my life was not confined to the United States. I traveled and taught extensively in Mexico, where I confronted both freedom and fear. In West Africa, where I felt the spiritual resonance of return.

of course in St. Croix. In Germany, where I am memorialized, in the 1980s I was invited to teach at the Free University of Berlin and there I encountered black German women who had no collective identity language. Germany had erased them from its narrative.

Through conversations and workshops and organizing circles, we began articulating the term Afro-German. I encouraged black German women to claim their stories publicly. Do not be silenced. My presence catalyzed that Afro-German movement. Writers like Mae Iyem, Katharina Oguntoye, and others were influenced by that movement. And because of that, there's an Audrey Lord strasse in Berlin.

Adesoji Iginla (54:55.854)
Hmm.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (55:12.056)
Schools and memorial plaques honor me. My impact is institutionalized in German in their Black Feminist Scholarship. Germany memorializes me not as an American poet, but as a catalyst for Black German consciousness. This is international resistance. In 1978, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Yes.

My breast was cut off and my goodness, if you have someone dealing with cancer, breast cancer in particular, you must get a copy of the cancer journals because even in our illnesses, the way they prey on us, one breast attacked by cancer, but you want to cut off both so that the plastic surgeons can have their way with me.

Adesoji Iginla (55:56.888)
Yeah.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (56:04.92)
I refuse to wear prosthetics. I do not have to make you feel more comfortable with my body. I chose to love myself with my scars. And yes, did I grieve. Was there pain? my God, absolutely. And no, my choice is not for everybody. Everyone has the right to choose, but choice we must have.

I refuse to have my scars hidden or trivialized.

Later the cancer spread to my liver.

And on November 17, 1992, I died in St. Croix. But before I died, I took the African name Gamba Adisa. Warrior, she who makes her meaning known. I am buried in St. Croix, full circle. My parents came from Grenada. Caribbean soil, Atlantic witness, and I am back there.

Adesoji Iginla (57:07.18)
Hmm. Not sure.

Yes, thank you, thank you, thank you. What can we say? That's another form of resistance. Not writing your stories, ensuring that everything is documented. mean, you giving us a path to follow. I mean, you said.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (57:37.244)
Let me say this young man, just because you know especially in these spaces where we have to be so proper. I think you've all heard the phrase or some of you have. I think therefore I am something along those lines. No that one's not Mbutu. That was the western philosophy.

Adesoji Iginla (57:53.954)
Yeah, I'll boot you.

Adesoji Iginla (58:04.162)
I am different. I am diff-

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (58:06.66)
Mbutu is I am and you are. Because I am, you are, right? No, there's what I think, therefore I am. I am, right?

Adesoji Iginla (58:12.344)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Adesoji Iginla (58:16.436)
the affirmation, you're talking about the affirmation, okay.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (58:19.524)
No, but what I say is, I feel therefore I can be free.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (58:29.626)
And I want to challenge all of you to get in touch with yourselves.

Radical, right? Some of you are clutching your proverbial pearls. Why is it so threatening to you? Ask yourself that, to hear the words. Get in touch with yourself. Feel.

Adesoji Iginla (58:43.372)
emotional

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (58:58.54)
experience the joy of yourself and experience that connection with someone else. And when you know you can feel and when you have experienced that euphoria, that joy, how do you then shrink in any other area of your life?

Adesoji Iginla (59:19.328)
Hmm

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (59:19.758)
If I am that free to feel that joy, if it's something accessible to me, something I was created to experience, why then would I put shackles on myself in any other area of my life? Do you understand how our sexuality and how the erotic, the power of the erotic is intentionally?

blocked, locked away. You are made to feel like some kind of dirty, defective human being for even considering it. And trust me, I went to all of these schools run by nuns, the indoctrination. But how can you be free if you won't feel? How can you truly connect with others?

can we rethink the world order and truly love others when we are too afraid to experience ourselves? How? How?

I wish this was a dialogue that we could have with your audience. How?

Adesoji Iginla (01:00:37.486)
question.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:00:39.861)
Now, I recognize your maleness. I'm gonna ask your female audience.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:00:48.784)
When was your last orgasm?

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:00:56.07)
think it's a tragedy that from the research that has been done, the statistics show that a great percentage of women die without ever having experienced that. And then this notion of purity and if a man has not chosen you and did not, what is your terminology? Put a ring on it.

Adesoji Iginla (01:01:24.534)
on the finger.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:01:27.738)
You stay locked away from yourself for your entire life? What level of madness is that?

Adesoji Iginla (01:01:33.39)
Mmm.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:02:02.14)
Did I make you uncomfortable?

Adesoji Iginla (01:02:03.966)
No, no, no, no, no. I mean, I read the book, so I was quite prepared for what you were going to draw at yourself. no, no, no, no. I mean, being prudish is not.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:02:22.884)
a Western concept, their constructs, while they then practice all manner of debauchery.

Adesoji Iginla (01:02:24.566)
Yeah.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:02:36.558)
in the dark.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:02:40.495)
Listen.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:02:46.97)
When someone uses you for their pleasure without your consent, it's abuse.

Adesoji Iginla (01:02:54.018)
very much so.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:02:56.636)
How is it that you are made to feel dirty to experience your own pleasure, but when you are objectified and used for someone else's pleasure, then that's okay.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:03:24.764)
Freedom starts with that self connection.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:03:38.094)
And perhaps it will begin to allow us to process better some of this anger. It was an anger that sometimes came out in my intimate relationships. All of the suppression, all of the parts of us that we are forced to suppress, to fit in, to fit into what?

Adesoji Iginla (01:03:58.542)
Mm.

Adesoji Iginla (01:04:05.9)
construct.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:04:08.376)
A construct designed to annihilate us.

We must break free. I thank you for your time.

Adesoji Iginla (01:04:18.434)
No, I thank you. I thank you for the energy. I thank you for the fortrightness. I thank you for the words. Because it's often not easy to find the words to express one's innermost desires, as it were. And we've been conditioned to feel, to use your words, dirty, Pradesh.

Adesoji Iginla (01:04:46.114)
disdain when we talk about sexual proclivities and for want of a better word, I think your take on our emotions and how it's thrown out to the world because we have this repressed side of us, hopefully your presence today and the words you've used would loosen the strings of

Adesoji Iginla (01:05:18.519)
of repression.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:05:19.024)
will moisten the path.

Adesoji Iginla (01:05:22.286)
to use your words, yes. In other words, I will use, but I defer to you. I defer to you. So, Ms. Lord, what else can we say? Thank you very much. As we, week, we're going to be talking to Ms. Ida B. Wells. I'm not sure most people have heard of her, but...

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:05:24.422)
Yeah.

Adesoji Iginla (01:05:54.198)
Next week will also be a chance to walk her path, hear what she's got to say to us with regards to what we're currently experiencing. Because again, we're talking about women and their bits to ensure that we survive whatever is thrown at us. And like you said in the course of your speaking, whether public library or personal libraries, those are our memories.

Our memories are ways of ensuring that we survive of what's next is to come. And we've experienced most of these things before, if we just gain a hold on our memories. And yes, so next week it's going to be IWL's. And Ms. Lord, thank you for coming through. Any final thoughts?

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:06:51.548)
Freedom begins with self.

Adesoji Iginla (01:06:55.06)
And to everyone that has given us some... Yes. Yeah, good.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:06:56.879)
and power.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:07:01.848)
May I? May I? I realize that the time is late. there is something that I feel inclined to share if I may.

Just

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:07:23.622)
just dropped in my spirit. And I apologize, I probably should have shared this earlier. With everything going on with the...

Taxpayer sponsored Ku Klux Klan, now labeled as ICE. I think it's important to share this poem with your audience. And these will be my last words. It's titled, A Woman Speaks. Moon marked and touched by sun, my magic is unwritten. But when the sea turns back, it will leave my shape behind.

I seek no favor untouched by blood, unrelenting as the curse of love. Permanent as my errors or my pride, I do not mix love with pity. Now, this is not the one I want to read to you. My apologies. Let me read this one. I want to read about power. Power. The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.

I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds and a dead child dragging his shattered black face off the edge of my sleep blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders is the only liquid for miles. And my stomach churns at the imagined taste while my mouth splits into dry lips without loyalty or reasoning.

thirsting for the wetness of his blood as it sinks into the whiteness of the desert where I am lost without imagery or magic, trying to make power out of hatred and destruction, trying to heal my dying son with kisses. Only the sun will bleach his bones quicker. A policeman.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:09:24.368)
who shut down a 10 year old in Queens, stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood and the boy said, die you little motherfucker.

And there are tapes to prove it. At his trial, this policeman said in his own defense, I didn't notice the size or anything else, only the color. And there are tapes to prove that too. Today, that 37-year-old white man with 13 years of police forcing was set free.

11 white men who said they were satisfied just as had been done and one black woman who said

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:10:27.91)
They convinced me, meaning they had dragged her four foot 10 inch black woman's frame over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval until she let go the first real power she ever had and lined her own womb with cement to make a graveyard for our children.

have not been able to touch the destruction within me. But unless I learn to use the difference between poetry and rhetoric, my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire. And one day I will take my teenaged

plug and connect it to the nearest socket, ripping an 85 year old white woman who was somebody's mother. And as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed, a Greek chorus will be singing in three quarter time. Poor thing, she never heard a soul. What beasts they are.

Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. (01:11:51.302)
Thank you.

Adesoji Iginla (01:11:53.048)
Thank you. And that said, we'll leave it at that. And good night and God bless.