Her books-among them Sister Outsider, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and her Collected Poems-all sought to pierce "the tyrannies of silence." One of her greatest subjects was crumbling the twin pillars of racism and sexism: "Within this country, where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism." And there are so many silences to be broken," she wrote in "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action." She fought especially hard to create space for Black and queer women in that movement, to "bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. Through her activism and work-speeches, essays, poems, journals-she was a tireless revolutionary in the fight for women's rights. Over the next sixty years, she became an undeniable icon, a self-styled "Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" synonymous with intersectional feminism. The daughter of Caribbean immigrants, Audre Lorde was born in 1934 in Harlem.
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