The
Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action (excerpt) by
Audre Lorde26 06 2007
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me
must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised
or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.
I was forced to look upon myself and my living with a harsh and urgent
clarity that has left me still shaken but much stronger. Some of what I
experienced during that time has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel
concerning the transformation of silence into language and action.
In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I
wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and
omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most
regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to
speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many
different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the
other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly now, without
regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only
betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or
waited for someone else’s words.
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.
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? Perhaps for some of you here
today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am
Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself — a Black woman warrior poet
doing my work — come to ask you, are you doing yours?
And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into
language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught
with danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty
with it, said, “Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you
remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that
wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder
and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up
and punch you in the mouth from the inside.”
In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear — fear of
contempt, of censure, of some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of
annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we
cannot truly live.
And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the
source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into
dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever
while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted
and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute
as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.
Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment
to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that
language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of
silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to
establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her
role as vital within that transformation.
For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth
of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For
others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us.
But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those
truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way
alone can we survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and
continuing, that is growth.
And it is never without fear — of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny
and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those
already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now that if
I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole
life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is
very good for establishing perspective.
We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have
learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to
respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we
wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that
silence will choke us.
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to
break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is
not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many
silences to be broken.
(Originally delivered at the Modern
Language Association’s “Lesbian and Literature Panel,” Chicago, Illinois,
December 28, 1977. First published in Sinister Wisdom 6 (1978) and The Cancer
Journals (Spinsters, Ink, San Francisco, 1980)http://iambecauseweare.wordpress.com/2007/06/26/the-transformation-of-silence-into-language-and-action-excerpt-by-audre-lorde/ 
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