When Silence Isn’t Safe: Audre Lorde’s Call to Courage in a Time of Reckoning

Returning To Voices That Refuse To Whisper

May 04, 2025

1×

0:00

-8:16

In times of quiet introspection, I find myself returning to voices that first taught me how to name the world. Not for nostalgia—but for survival.

Some books find you precisely when you need them most. In 2023, during a writing residency when the world felt both expansive and uncertain, Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name appeared in my hands like an offering. She called it a biomythography—personal history and mythology braided into something both deeply intimate and universally true. Reading it felt like witnessing an act of alchemy, words transforming into power on the page.

I promised myself I'd return to more of her work. I didn't. Life moved in its relentless way. Other books called louder.

But now, in this fractured moment where democracy trembles and truth itself seems negotiable, I'm finding myself pulled back to those voices that refuse to whisper.

Ida B. Wells. Toni Morrison. bell hooks. And Audre Lorde.

Not just because they wrote history, but because they are still urgently, insistently, telling the truth about now.

This week, it is Lorde's fierce voice that feels most necessary, like water in a desert.

Her collection, Your Silence Will Not Save You, landed in my hands as if by design, the title itself both warning and mandate, five words that pierce the comfortable veil of inaction.

I've long told myself: "I've learned to surrender to mystery when certainty is elusive—and certainty is often elusive." But Lorde reminds me that silence in the face of injustice is not mystery. It's complicity!

And the times we are living in demand something more from each of us than comfortable uncertainty.

When Words Become Lifelines

Audre Lorde didn't just write words; she forged weapons and wove lifelines. Self-described "Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," she embodied intersections that the world insisted on seeing as contradictions. She refused to fragment herself for others' comfort.

Born to Caribbean immigrant parents in 1934 Harlem, Lorde learned early the power of naming what polite society demanded remain unspoken. Her poetry and prose burn with a clarity that feels almost prophetic now, as if she were speaking directly to our fractured time.

In Your Silence Will Not Save You, she offers essays that cut through pretense alongside poems that pulse with both tenderness and fury. The collection includes "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action," where she writes with disarming directness:

"I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood."

These weren't abstract philosophies. They were survival strategies, born after a cancer diagnosis forced her to confront mortality directly. Standing at that threshold between life and death, she asked herself questions that haunt me now:

What had she left unsaid? What price had she paid for her silence? What fears had seemed so enormous but would shrink before the final silence of death?

She writes that our silences will not protect us. That not speaking doesn't shield us from pain, it simply withholds our truth from the world and, worse, from ourselves.

When I read these words today, my throat tightens with recognition. How many times have I swallowed truth for comfort? How many conversations have I avoided, thinking silence was kindness when it was actually fear?

The Language of Living Fully

Lorde understood anger as information, not something to suppress but to examine. In "The Uses of Anger," she reframes Black women's rage not as something to apologize for but as clarity, as fuel, as the appropriate response to injustice.

Reading her now, I feel permission to name my own anger at what is happening in our world. The calculated erosion of rights. The normalization of cruelty. The weaponization of nostalgia against progress.

Her words breathe across decades:

"What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you sicken and die of them, still in silence?"

I let these questions sit in my chest like stones. They have weight. They have consequence. This isn't just about history or literary appreciation. It's about right now.About how we navigate these times of creeping authoritarianism, deliberate division, and moral exhaustion. About how we refuse to be silenced by fear, fatigue, or the false comfort of neutrality.

Lorde's voice reminds me: My words matter—not because they're perfect, but because they're true.

Because speaking truth into a space creates room for others to do the same. Because silence serves those who benefit from the status quo.

The Courage to Speak, the Willingness to Be Changed

I trace the spine of Lorde's book with my finger and feel something like a current run through me. I am not the same woman I was when I first read Zami. I carry different scars, different hopes, different fears.

And I won't be the same after finishing Your Silence Will Not Save You.

Because Lorde's work demands transformation. It insists that we be changed by what we discover, and that we speak, even when we're not sure who will listen. Even when we fear no one will.

Her writing feels less like reading and more like being read…as if she sees through the comfortable fictions we tell ourselves about why we stay silent.

"When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid."

I write these words on a small card and place it where I'll see it daily. A reminder that courage isn't the absence of fear; It's the commitment to move through it toward what matters.

Lorde's legacy isn't just in her writing, it's in the permission she gives us to tell the truth without apology. Her call to transform silence into language and action isn't metaphor or poetry. It's instruction.

And in these uncertain times, when truth itself seems under siege, I want to follow it. Even when certainty is elusive. Even when the mystery scares me. Even when the words catch in my throat.Because silence will not save us. But perhaps our voices, joined together, might!

Let’s Build Something Together

If Audre Lorde’s words struck a chord with you, if you felt a mix of recognition and discomfort that comes with confronting necessary truths I’d love to hear which part resonated most.

What’s your relationship with silence? What words are you finding the courage to speak? Drop a comment below.