What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman's face?
Audre LordeAfrican tradition deals with life as an experience to be lived. In many respects, it is much like the Eastern philosophies in that we see ourselves as a part of a life force; we are joined, for instance, to the air, to the earth. We are part of the whole-life process. We live in accordance with, in a kind of correspondence with the rest of the world as a whole. And therefore living becomes an experience, rather than a problem, no matter how bad or how painful it may be.
Audre LordePain is an event ... Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain.
Audre Lorde