By Arisa White
When I don’t want to lose contact with my feelings, with the intelligence of my lived experiences, and to remain sensuous and alive in the face of tyranny, I return to Audre Lorde’s writings—a poem, an essay, a speech, an interview—to ground and water myself.
Her writings are ceremonies for deep reflection and for tapping into the erotic, which Lorde redefines as “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 feelings.” Such a redefinition serves our humanity by awakening inner strength and wisdom.
In the erotic space “between the beginning of one’s sense of self and the chaos of one’s strongest feelings,” questions emerge. This introspection restores a sense of agency and creativity and gives me a way to stay active when the systemic nature of change feels insurmountable. Each day, born of chaos, we build the language for our transformation and liberation.
Through Lorde’s work and teachings, we are learning to project ourselves beyond our sense of ourselves as “things.” We are practicing radical imagination, in which possibility moves toward life, and you enter a galvanizing dialectic that turns your attention back to your subjectivity, making you aware of your personal power and the responsibility that comes with it.
“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?” she asks in the 1977 paper delivered to the Modern Language Association, titled “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” Lorde goes on to inquire: “Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am a lesbian, because I am myself—a Black woman warrior poet doing my work—come to ask you, are you doing yours?”
These challenging questions are thought-provoking, pushing you to confront your own fears and complicity. If Lorde’s words, which continue to resonate from the afterlife, haven’t caused you to cower, she is urging you to engage in work that also extends into the collective. Our identity and the resources available to us are shaped by the social and political environments we inherit, inhabit, and are relegated to. Our physical and spiritual feelings mirror the health of our ecosystems. Reparations begin within the body.
And a deranged society can make us feel insignificant and fungible. As creative individuals, we must recognize that living consciously requires ongoing effort. Even seemingly fixed ideas can be questioned and used creatively. In a 1983 interview with Claudia Tate, Lorde, when asked about her writing process and the transition from journal entry to poem, states: “Art is not living. It is the use of living. The artist has the ability to take the living and use it in a certain way and produce art.”
Following Lorde’s challenge to take our “living” and “use it in a certain way” allows us to assert agency in a world that often seeks to marginalize us. Nurturing creativity is not a passive escape or a luxury; it is a vital act of resistance and the driving force behind political engagement. By making art, we refuse to let our experiences and realities be passively consumed. Instead, we use our lived experiences to question what is considered unchangeable. Through creative action, we move beyond survival and actively contribute to the pursuit of a conscious and just society.
Arisa White, PhD, will be leading The Unburdening: An Expressive Arts Retreat for BIPOC Women at Garrison Institute from August 21-23 in collaboration with Isabel Saez and Melissa Small Cooper. Arisa is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Colby College and a Cave Canem Fellow whose work bridges rigorous literary craft and somatic healing. An award-winning poet and multidisciplinary artist, she is also a certified Kundalini Yoga teacher, whose practice integrates breathwork, mantra, and movement into her creative pedagogy.
