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…. Your silence will not protect you…. 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 will sicken and die of them, still in silence?… The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.

– Audre Lorde (1984, 40, 41, 44)

I have been working to change the way I speak and write, to incorporate in the manner of telling a sense of place, of not just who I am in the present but where I am coming from, the multiple voices within me. I have confronted silence, inarticulateness. When I say, then, that these words emerge from suffering, I refer to that personal struggle to name that location from which I come to voice – that space of my theorizing… Language is also a place of struggle.

– bell hooks (1990, 146)

I needed these words in my quest for wholeness, not only as a dark person but as a human being wrestling with a world that prides itself on being unrecognizable to humanity…. I needed a way to pull my thoughts and feelings together to say something that explained to myself the world in which I lived.

– Bettina Love (2019, 124)

In a world constantly teetering on the brink of disaster, even annihilation, I find myself on the front lines doing battle, a battle often fought with the very serious tool of humour, for a future truly worthy of human beings…. My commitment is to truth. And the seemingly ugly, the seemingly distasteful, the seemingly common, when developed in artistic truth, becomes beautiful.

– Sarah E. Wright (1993, viii)

And even if they had been able to read, in the history books they would have found themselves only in the blank spaces between the lines, in the dashes, the pauses between commas, semicolons, colons, in the microcosmic shadow world between full stops. Between the interstices of every date on which a deed was done, they haunted the pages, imprisoned in mute anonymity, the done-tos who had made possible the deed.

– Sylvia Wynter (1962/2010, 54)

first, the sound. you hear it even if no one else does. even if you wake and already don’t remember. second, the seconds. you feel the up-tick in your heart bringing you back into time. third, the rise. as if you are pulled vertical across the floor and before you know it you have taken several steps. it is a minute or so before you are you as you know you. in the rising you could be any of us.

– Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2020, 11)