Our society allows people to be absolutely neurotic and totally out of touch with their feelings and everyone else's feelings, and yet be very respectable.
And this is for Colored girls who have considered suicide, but are moving to the ends of their own rainbows.
i found god in myself and i loved her i loved her fiercely
It still amazes and fascinates me that women of color have kept my work alive for these many generations.
My characters don't talk necessarily in a normal American way of talking. They talk a little different.
My family moved around a lot, so I don't have any friends that I had all my life, but I did have annual trips back to Queens.
I remember that my mother used to take me to see ballets, especially if there were black people in them.
Before I went to college, I went to the S.N.C.C. office three times a week to offer my services and catch up on my 'Liberator' magazine. The other two days, I went to the Lycee Francais to keep my French crisp. I felt comfortable in the diversity of my worlds.
I was chastised for writing several obituaries for Malcolm X, exploring different aspects of his writing. One teacher in particular told me, didn't I think I was beating a dead horse? and dismissively threw my paper on my desk.
There was quite a ruckus about the seven ladies in their simple colored dresses. I was truly dumbfounded that I was, right then and there, deemed the biggest threat to black men since cotton pickin', and not all women were in my corner, either.
If anything is life-changing, being the descendant of a slave is.
Spell-check ruins my work. It fixes all my slang and dialect into standard English. So I'm caught in a tangle of technology that feels very foreign to me.
I'm a firm believer that language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives and other people's lives.
White people use their literature to maintain culture. That's why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.
Multiculturalism is a white people joke.
Multiculturalism isn't about culture, it's about power.
I hadn't published a book of poetry in over a decade because I've been very ill. As I got better and started to write, I said, 'Wow, even as an old woman, I could have a selected book of poems.'
Sisterhood is important because we are all we have to stand on. We have to stand near and by each other, pray for one another, and share the joys and the difficulties that women face in the world today. If we don't talk about it among ourselves, then we are made silent by the patriarchy, and that serves us no purpose.
I never intended to go to Broadway. I was very happy being in an Off Broadway theater and having an Off Broadway life. What it did to me is try to fit a round peg - that's me - into a whole bunch of square buildings. I just didn't fit.
Luckily, my father and my mother liked us to talk, so they encouraged us to talk, so that the girls in my house, they're all very powerful speakers and powerful agents of their own will, as is my brother.
