Black Women Writers at Work

I was moved with both recognition, and with fear, again, at Audre Lorde's comment that "it's scary because we've been through that before. It was called the fifties. Then I was moved with that stirring to act, upon reading in print what I have known and been told in different words since Dunbar (High School): "My responsibility is to speak the truth... with as much precision and beauty as possible. ... We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't."
And we must not remain silent while the blood of our sisters/brothers/neighbors/communities/fellow human beings is shed.

Sherley Anne Williams reiterates this responsibility of a writer to write as well as one can and to "say as much of the truth as I can see at any given time."
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Although this book is dated, and does not include my favorite author (Octavia Butler), I am so glad that I read this book in spite of my initial misgivings. From Bambara's hope that "We care too much ... to negotiate a bogus peace," to DeVeaux's "responsibility to see," I find my own compulsion to write validated by the responsibility of a writer to render individual expression into a universal expression, and to give voice to the voiceless/unseen/erased. To show the unspoken and to "empathize with the general human condition."

Society needs all perspectives because without those perspectives, we are missing vast parts of what our society actually looks like, which leads to deep problems. Writing, as was pointed out, must transcend individual experience, but it also comes from and is filtered through individual experience, so we desperately need every point of view. show less

“I went through a period once when I felt like I was dying. I wasn’t writing any poetry, and I felt that if I couldn’t write I would split. I was recording in my journal, but no poems came. I know now that this period was a transition in my life.

The next year, I went back to my journal, and here were these incredible poems that I could almost lift out of it. Many of them are in The Black Unicorn. “Harriet” is one of them; “Sequelae” and “A Litany for Survival” are others. These poems came right out of the journal. But I didn’t see them as poems then.”

– Audre Lorde

[As quoted in Black Women Writers at Work, edited by Claudia Tate]