Il vostro silenzio non vi proteggerà

How can one transform oppression into personal power and collective struggle? Audre Lorde, who described herself as a “Black lesbian mother poet warrior feminist”, turned her life into an extraordinary tool for political engagement and resistance. The daughter of Caribbean migrants, she grew up in Harlem in a mid-20th-century America deeply steeped in racism. Severe short-sightedness during her childhood separated her from her surroundings and her own family, but it also gave her an original view of the world, which she put to use in the imagination necessary for both politics and poetry. Throughout her life, Lorde sought paths to freedom and equality through the recognition of all differences and all bodies, in health and sickness, for herself and for others. She wrote: “Without community, there is no liberation, no future, only the most vulnerable truce between myself and my oppression”.

Caterina Venturini composes a passionate pamphlet-story, inspired by her own experience and literary encounter with Lorde, drawing generously on the biography of this unforgettable “outsider sister” and the lifeblood of her poems “of love and struggle”. These militant pages, which frame the story of a thinker in the battles of the present, call us all to action: not only against the silence in which patriarchy thrives, but against all forms of discrimination.