For the first time, the American Audrey Lord appears in Greek letters – poet, black, lesbian, feminist, daughter of immigrants from Grenada, educator, cancer survivor, activist – with the collection of texts “Sister Outsider”. “We are Black women and born into a society where revulsion and loathing of everything Black and everything female is entrenched. We are strong and resilient. We also have deep scars” notes the texts written in the late 1970s and early 1980s – the collection was published in 1984 – but it’s as if they were written just yesterday. “Now I speak to you as a woman about my experience,” says Lord, a mother of two children, one of whom is a boy, and the collection’s translator Ismini Theodoropoulou guides us through the 1979 text “The Man-Child: A Black Lesbian’s Response feminist”.

“To give my children as much power as possible, I am willing to look within myself, to show them honestly what I find in there without expecting them to react in a way that is inappropriate for their age. This way they too will learn to look beyond their fearswrites Lorde. She says that her eight-year-old son, Jonathan, who didn’t like playing with wood, went to a new school and the other kids made his life hell. On the way home from school, they made him clean their shoes. “If you ever come back here crying…” was her reaction; she wondered if “is it possible that my own son is being impaled?” and was startled by her reaction: “I was ready to demand that he learn the first lesson of the corruption of power: that the mightiest is right. I could hear myself perpetuating the age-old distortions about what strength and bravery really are.». Jonathan lived in the same house with three strong women, his mother, her partner and Beth, his “non-verbal” sister. For Jonathan, authority in the home was female. “And because our society teaches us to think in a disjunctive way – kill or be killed, impose or be imposed upon – that for him meant he was either superior or inferior to us.” emphasizes Lorde and on the advice of a friend next time she takes Jonathan in her arms, wipes his tears and tells him “sHave I ever told you how scared I was at your age?’ recounting that she was then “a fat little girl running for safety“, who was trembling lest the glasses she wore should break.

The Lordshe insisted very much on showing her children herself as she really was, with her weaknesses, contradictions but also her enormous strength and zest for life – not so that her children would become like her, but so that they would get the lesson that if you don’t accept yourself and don’t show it and expose it to those around you as it is, you are doomed not to evolve and to live unhappy, outside of yourself, trapped in the definitions of others» points out Ismini Theodoropoulou.

“The greatest lesson I can teach my son is the same I teach my daughter: to be who he wants to be, for himself. And the best way to achieve this is to be who I am and hope that this way he will learn to be not what I am, which is impossible, but to be himself… And the first step to to achieve this is to teach my son that I am not there to feel for him,” says Audrey Lord. “The thinking/feeling dichotomy promoted in Western societies is false and fragments human nature – because in reality thinking and feeling are one. An extension of this false dichotomy is the old stereotype of the rational man and the emotional woman, which implies that logic is strength and emotion is a defect, a weakness,” reminds Ismini Theodoropoulou. “This stereotype is destructive to both men and women – but especially for men it has a corrosive effect on their emotional world, as it robs them of the ability to listen to their feelings, that is, robs them of a piece of their human nature. As Lorde says characteristically, “the world of men has been advising us all our lives to avoid this power. It is the same world that values ​​deep emotion as important enough to want women to put theirs in the service of men. But at the same time, they are so afraid of it that they don’t consider the possibilities that it could unleash in themselves.”” continues.

“To us oppression and America (s.s. chooses to write the word with a lowercase letter) are one and the same, and in order to survive we must always keep our eyes open” writes Lorde; she is furious and devotes the text “Uses of Anger: Women Respond to Racism” and text “Meeting Visions: Black Women, Hate, and Anger.” In a 1987 radio interview with CBS’s Don Swaim, the well-known African-American writer Toni Morrison concluded that anger has “absolutely no use” for her, seeing it not as “a passionate emotion that ignites ” but as “loss of control”. However, for Lord, “anger carries a lot of information and energy”; “expressing anger and translating it into action for our vision and our future is a liberating and empowering act, helping us see things clearly.” .

Lord talked to Jonathan, now 14, about this text; “as I was talking to him and asking for his permission to share some parts of his life, I asked him what the most negative and most positive aspects of growing up with lesbian mothers were. . He said the biggest benefit he got is that he knows more about people than most kids his age, and that he has fewer complexes than other boys about men and women. And the downside, Jonathan said, he feels is the taunting he’s received from some kids with straight parents. “Guys from your company you mean?” I asked him. “Oh no” he answered quickly. “My company knows what is happening to them. I mean other children”. Ismeni Theodoropoulou emphasizes: “Lord, always respecting the limits and desires of others, exposes and “undresses” only her own self in the eyes of the reader. A thinker whose work is so strongly inspired by the need for each man to define himself and set his limits based on his needs and desires, could not expose the life of her son (even though he is still child) to the readership without seeking their consent».

In the video we hear Audrey Lord reading “Uses of Eroticism: Eroticism as Power”, her 1978 lecture which is included in “Sister Outsider” published this year by TEXTS.

In the second video she herself reads her poems, in September 1992 in Berlin, two months before her death.

Then Blanche Cook and Clare Coss, longtime friends of Lord’s, created one album with her personal photos.