Sister outsider book7/5/2023 Speaking out, though, can bring solidarity and care, which are forms of protection. Therefore, silence offers no protection from mortality. As a matter of fact, the people who provided her with strength and insight during her period of illness and fear were women with whom she had bonded because of her decisions, at various points, to speak up and make her thoughts known. And yet, Lorde points out, people experience pain constantly regardless of what they choose to say, and she herself experienced a brush with death regardless of the many times she had opted to stay silent. After all, she posits, people generally silence themselves because they are afraid that pain, or even death, might occur as a result of their choice to speak. In this three-week period during which Lorde felt so keenly aware of her mortality, she regretted not the times she had spoken up but the times she had stayed silent. Still, those three uncertain weeks felt transformative. She recalls the three agonizing weeks awaiting surgery, after which she found out that the tumor had been benign after all. Only months before, doctors found a tumor in Lorde's breast. Lorde introduces herself as a Black lesbian poet whose life feels newly precarious.
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