African 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.

Who I am is what fulfills me and fulfills the vision I have of the world.

Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.

You are the one that you are looking for.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women leaves a serious gap within this conference. . . .

We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.