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8 Berkeley Women's L.J. 1 (1993)
Your Silence Will Not Protect You - A Tribute to Audre Lorde

handle is hein.journals/berkwolj8 and id is 5 raw text is: Your Silence Will Not Protect You A Tribute to Audre Lorde Barbara Christiant The phone rings. It is Lisa, one of the graduate students with whom I work. Barbara, I have bad news. Silence. Audre Lorde just died in St. Croix. I am stunned, unprepared, though I should not be. Audre has had breast cancer for many years. I know she now lives in St. Croix, my ancestral home, where the sun and the sea is invigorating her. The islands, her mother's islands, would save her body, I had hoped. Lisa repeats again: Audre died in St. Croix. Silence. Then I say, I will never see her again. I will always hear her though. For Audre left for us her work- words that many of us had been too afraid to speak. We had been taught that silence was golden, that it could protect you. Yet, as our daily lives and statistics proclaimed, we were steadily being attacked from within our homes, as well as from without. Audre Lorde refused to be silenced, refused to be limited to any one category, insisted on being all that she was: poet, black, mother, lesbian, feminist, warrior, activist, woman. As I grieve her passing on, I cannot help but think of the irony that we split her into her separate parts: So many white feminist/lesbians respond only to her lesbianism; blacks to her race activism; literary critics to her poetic craft; mother goddess followers to her African goddesses. Ah-Audre-if there is any tribute we can give you, it is to acknowledge all those parts of yourself without which you would not be you. t Barbara Christian is a full Professor in the African American Studies Department at the Uni- versity of California, Berkeley. She is the author of books on African American women writ- ers, notably BLACK WOMEN NOVELISTS: THE DEVELOPMENT OF A TRADITION (1892-1976) (1980) and BLACK FEMINIST CRITICISM: PERSPECTIVES ON BLACK WOMEN WRITERS (1985), which includes an essay on Audre Lorde's collection of essays, SISTER OUTSIDER. Portions of this essay have previously appeared in Crossroads and The Women's Review of Books. BERKELEY WOMEN'S LAW JOURNAL

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