Reading essay’s in Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider - “Poetry is not a Luxury”, where she emphasizes how poetry becomes the voice where women, black women in particular are able to fully contextualize their experience of life without the words of other races or genders (namely white male writes) had me thinking about a lot of things lately. As a black woman who runs a blog with my cousin and writing my own material in my free time, I wonder a lot about my voice. Where it comes from? What does my writing add to the conversation that my fellow sisters and brother’s are writing about in the blog-o-sphere? What do I, a 21 years old college student have to say about my world and how I see it?

Everyone is entitled to an opinion especially in the age where all you need is a smart phone and an outlet, having a voice isn’t the most difficult thing to obtain, but what I worry about is the intent of these voices and what inspires them. I didn’t even know, until recently, about the copious amount of blogs out there dedicated to the black voice and our black experiences. I love it all! The natural hair blogs, the blogs who specialize in talking about relationships in the African American community, blogs dedicated to music in our community, the movies, television shows — the list is endless but something I want to reaffirm here on coffee talk is not only my purpose as co-owner of this multifaceted and ever-developing outlet, but my purpose as a black, Muslim, woman, writer.

I feel as though I have been a part of this dialogue, be it in my highly biased classroom environment or within my own peers, about the role of race and gender in the artistic and expressive space. Some may disagree with me and that’s perfectly fine, but I am here to say that there is no way to subtract the core of your existence, especially as a black woman writer in your art. What Sister Lorde is tackling in her works and the above essay particularly touches on that, even in it’s title stating boldly that poetry is not a luxury and I wholeheartedly agree. I’ve taken just about every Brit Lit class there is to take and all Romantic writers agree that poetry is about the spontaneous flow of emotions and though it may be, I believe that not only poetry but all literary works, even a blog, have a much higher calling than just the pleasurable spewing of emotions. Poetry is the documentation of the life and it’s participants. I don’t believe writing is a passive form of expression alone. It is concrete and complex and it is active and participating in the dialogue that is life.

With the passing of one of my favorite writers last week, the late Great Amiri Barka, may he rest in peace; I wonder greatly now more than ever about my purpose as a writer and what my message is. Remembering his play The Dutchman, which is an immensely dense, compacted two act play with only two characters, but speaks volumes on race, racism, jazz, slavery and even sexism — I am drawn to why I decided to write in the first place and it was not because I had nothing better to do. I decided to write because like Audre Lorde’s brevity, I am called to be brave in who I am, where I came from and my pure pumping black heart with all of it’s stories and tales. Lifetimes have lived behind my eyes so I don’t write to pass the time, I write to live. I write not for a luxury but because my situations and how I see the world is important because of who I am as a black Muslim woman writer. That voice, not only from me but for so many others like me, with my skin color, my curly hair, my wide hips and full lips, my attitude and corn bred fed body, are needed desperately and consistenly for the discourse of life.

with love,

Hoda. xo.