Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Poetry is the illumination of the feeling that predicates ideas and inspires lasting action. Poetry, then, is not a luxury for women but rather a necessity for survival. Poetry illuminates the dark place in women that is a place of possibility (36), a “reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling” (37). This inner reserve has been hidden—although growing stronger in hiding—because a dominating European, white, and patriarchal mode of living has valued thought over feeling and construed life as “a problem to be solved” rather than “as a situation to be experienced and interacted with” (37).

Both thought and feeling are necessary for survival, and women have the capacity to fuse the two—and this is evidenced by poetry. Poetry is “a revelatory distillation of experience” (37) because it sheds light on emotion by translating it to language, idea, and action. Those emotions, when they come to be known, accepted, and explored, give birth to radical ideas and foster change and re-conceptualization. Thought alone is not enough for bringing about liberation because possibility is fleeting and there are no new ideas. There are, however, old and forgotten ideas, recombination of ideas, extrapolations of ideas, and recognition of ideas; these are accessible through feeling.