In this personal correspondence, writer and activist Audre Lorde expresses her gratitude to Christian: “Reading you is a profoundly humbling experience,” Lorde writes. “I never thought I’d live to see the day such words existed. That you know them and you write them down fills me with pleasure and energy and appetite for the future.” In the letter, we can see how luminaries of Black feminism were inspired and sustained by one another’s work.
Dear Barbara –
Reading you is a profoundly humbling experience. I never thought I’d live to see the day such words existed.
That you know them and you write them down fills me with pleasure and energy and appetite for the future. And you do it all so beautifully!
Thank you, Barbara, so much, for using and for speaking.
In the hand of Afrekete,
Audre
Letter, Audre Lorde to Barbara Christian, 1986, Carton 1:32, Barbara Christian papers, BANC MSS 2003/199 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
