This Poem is written in 3 stanzas, the poem A Woman Speaks, from The Collected Work of Audre Lorde, is like an ocean before a storm. The tone and form create a serene surface, yet as the piece progresses, it gestures towards the true conflict within. Lorde focuses on both the inconsistencies in how black women are viewed and her own battle to define her identity outside of society’s norms. There are many declarative statements that serve to act as her own affirmations of worth, power, and vulnerability during the historical period of underrepresentation and prejudice she experienced.
A Woman Speaks is both a warrior’s song for the invisible and a conversation between women of different cultures. It seeks to affirm the lived experience of black women in the US and across the diaspora, and at the same time open a dialogue about what could still be done within the feminist movement to improve the lives of women of color. What is also important to this piece is that there is no accusations, only declarations of Lorde’s own truth. This piece is not meant to place blame, but to open up a perspective of the world to others who may not have ever experienced it in this way.
The speaker, a Black woman, describes her own underappreciated power, saying that she's a moon magically touched and changed by the sun, and yet her magic has never been written down. Even if her power has gone unrecorded, she says, when the tide goes out, the sand will be imprinted with her shape. She goes on to describe her attitude to the world: she doesn't want to accept any favors that aren't marked with violent passion, powerfully inescapable as love, or enduring as her mistakes and her ego. She doesn't dilute her love with flimsy pity, nor her hatred with petty contempt. If you're interested in knowing who I am, she tells the reader, you'll have to peer into the exposed guts of the god Uranus, where you'll find a stormy ocean.
The speaker goes on to say that her identity doesn't rest in the circumstances of her birth or her goddess-like power. She feels both eternal and not quite mature yet, and she's still looking for her lost sisters, sorceresses from a now-vanished kingdom in West Africa; she feels these women carrying her in the folds of their clothes, just as their shared mother carried her grief.
The speaker concludes that she's been a woman for ages, and warns the unwary to watch out for her dangerous smile. Her witchy power makes her likely to betray her enemies, and she feels a burning, growing rage against white women's exclusionary visions of a better future. She herself, she proclaims, is a woman, and she is not white.
First Stanza
A Woman Speaks‘s first two lines established the subject of the piece. “Moon marked and touched by sun/ my magic is unwritten”. These lines bring attention to how black women are perceived as both unearthly, goddess-like beings described in Jazz and many other artforms that praise their features and beauty, yet at the same time, their history is mostly forgotten. She calls attention to a need for understanding and action rather than feelings of remorse for this erasure in lines 10 through 12, “I do not mix /love with pity /nor hate with scorn”. She expresses a sense of being unknown by others. The voicelessness she describes can be attributed to the historical discriminated against women in the workplace and lacking political representation for queer women in the context of late the 70’s through the early 90’s American society when Audre Lorde was an activist and poet.
Second Stanza
The second stanza of A Woman Speaks calls upon a reoccurring theme throughout her many pieces that draw attention to the strange position of women of color as both too strong and also underestimated. An important reference is made in the sixth line of the “witches in Dahomey.” Dahomey is another iconic piece by the same author named for the 14th-century African kingdom infamous for their fierce women warriors. Calling them witches is meant to illustrate how their strength is seen as evil, otherworldly, and positions them as outsiders. This stanza beckons the memory of generations of strong women who continue to seek a balance between strength and vulnerability. She connects herself to this history of warrior women stating that they “ wear me inside their coiled clothes”. She bends time, obscuring its linear form to position herself in the world of the Dahomey, then back again to her mother, and then to her own experience. This represents the oneness Audre feels with her ancestors and her elders.
Third Stanza
The common archetype of the seductress is used in this last stanza reinforces the nuances between the common feminist critique of patriarchal society and what Lorde views as a missing piece of the feminist movement; its uplifting of black women. “Beware my smile/I am treacherous with old magic”. Rather than a true warning, I read these lines as a declaration of mysterious power, with a hint of sarcasm to dismantle the idea of the black woman as dangerous. She seems to long for a “wide future” in six, yet her last six words: “ I am /woman/ and not white,” act to boldly present herself as different, out of the reach of this “promise” but and still, a woman, engaged in similar struggles for equality, yet to be realized.
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