The Full Text of “A Woman Speaks”
The Full Text of “A Woman Speaks”
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“A Woman Speaks” Introduction
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American poet and activist Audre Lorde's "A Woman Speaks" celebrates the unique power of Black women's voices while also lamenting their underrepresentation. The poem argues that Black women have all too often been left out of the "futures" envisioned by both white feminist women and Black men fighting for racial justice. But the very fact that Black women have been marginalized both in terms of gender and race makes their voices powerful and their perspectives necessary. Lorde wrote "A Woman Speaks" in 1984; it was published posthumously in a 1997 book, Collected Works of Audre Lorde.
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“A Woman Speaks” Summary
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The speaker, a Black woman, describes her own underappreciated power, saying that she's a moon magically touched and changed by the sun, and yet her magic has never been written down. Even if her power has gone unrecorded, she says, when the tide goes out, the sand will be imprinted with her shape. She goes on to describe her attitude to the world: she doesn't want to accept any favors that aren't marked with violent passion, powerfully inescapable as love, or enduring as her mistakes and her ego. She doesn't dilute her love with flimsy pity, nor her hatred with petty contempt. If you're interested in knowing who I am, she tells the reader, you'll have to peer into the exposed guts of the god Uranus, where you'll find a stormy ocean.
The speaker goes on to say that her identity doesn't rest in the circumstances of her birth or her goddess-like power. She feels both eternal and not quite mature yet, and she's still looking for her lost sisters, sorceresses from a now-vanished kingdom in West Africa; she feels these women carrying her in the folds of their clothes, just as their shared mother carried her grief.
The speaker concludes that she's been a woman for ages, and warns the unwary to watch out for her dangerous smile. Her witchy power makes her likely to betray her enemies, and she feels a burning, growing rage against white women's exclusionary visions of a better future. She herself, she proclaims, is a woman, and she is not white.
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“A Woman Speaks” Themes
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The Power and Marginalization of Black Women’s Voices
“A Woman Speaks” argues that Black women’s power and wisdom have long been ignored in the fight for progress and equality. Marginalized both in terms of gender and race, Black women have been historically left out of the “futures / promised” by white women (and, implicitly, Black men), their stories under-represented and their voices silenced. Yet the speaker affirms that the intersecting identity of being both a woman and Black is a source of deep, mysterious “magic.” The poem implies that if there is going to be any kind of worthwhile “future” for Black women, they themselves must be included in the making of it.
The poem suggests the ways in which Black women have been pushed to the margins of society. The speaker says that her “magic is unwritten,” for instance, implying that her influence on society has gone unrecorded and underappreciated. And yet, she continues, “when the sea turns back, / it will leave [her] shape behind.” This metaphor seems to capture the speaker’s impact and erasure at the same time: on one level it might imply that when the tide turns (i.e., when a great shift occurs, such as racial or feminist progress), Black women will be left behind. At the same time, however, it suggests that even as her “magic” goes “unwritten,” her “shape” will leave an impression on the sands of progress. The speaker isn’t doubting that Black women have power, in other words; she’s arguing that this power hasn't been fully appreciated.
Despite the ways Black women have been marginalized, the speaker still believes her identity as a Black woman is a source of great strength. She links herself to “witches in Dahomey” (an allusion to a kingdom that once existed in West Africa). These lost “sisters” (whom the speaker has been cut off from due to the legacy of slavery) “wear [the speaker] inside their coiled cloths.” This image seems to suggest an intimacy between the speaker and these “witches,” yet at the same time, the speaker says she does “not dwell” with them. In other words, the speaker feels both connected to and cut off from a lineage of powerful Black women.
The speaker goes on to say that she is “treacherous with old magic.” This line, along with the poem’s other references to "magic” and “witches,” might be ironic—the speaker winking at the ways in which Black women have been dehumanized by society, their power being seen as threatening, unnatural, and, paradoxically, inconsequential. But the speaker also seems to be firmly laying claim to a “magic” unique to Black women, insisting on her own potential and power in a world that underestimates or outright ignores her.
The speaker goes on to imply that the only way Black women can hope to be included in progress is by speaking up for themselves. Black women are “promised” inclusivity, she says: a “wide future” that’s not just about equality for white women or Black men. Her “fury” at these promises suggests how empty they have proven and implies that she is tired of waiting for others to include Black women. The speaker says that she “seek[s] no favor / untouched by blood,” suggesting that she isn’t looking for the future to just be handed to her; she recognizes that she herself is going to have to work for it. And by ending on the proclamation “I am / woman / and not white,” the speaker affirms the power and agency of Black women, suggesting that the future is theirs to mold.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-34
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “A Woman Speaks”
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Lines 1-4
Moon marked and ...
... my shape behind.In "A Woman Speaks," a Black female speaker will make a firm declaration about who she is—and who she is not. This will be a poem about identity, power, and pride, and about the ways in which Black women have often been shouted down or talked over even by their supposed allies.
The poem begins with the speaker describing herself, saying that she is the "moon marked and touched by sun." Right from the start, then, there's a feeling that the speaker lives in two worlds at once—as if she's diurnal, awake during both the day and the night. There's something rather magical about this image as well, which paints the speaker almost as a goddess, a "moon" in some kind of relationship with a personified "sun."
The speaker spells that magical atmosphere out in the very next line, when she says her "magic is unwritten": words that suggest she has a kind of secret supernatural power. The alliterative /m/ sounds in "Moon marked" and "magic" might even suggest a relationship between women's "magic" and the "moon" (the moon is commonly associated with femininity, motherhood, and feminine power in literature).
Let's take a step-by-step look at the complex metaphor of "unwritten" magic:
- This "unwritten" magic might suggest that Black women's power has often gone unrecognized. Lorde, who wrote this poem after a discouraging feminist conference, might have been thinking of the ways that white people have often excluded and erased Black women from literary and academic circles, appropriating or undervaluing their contributions.
- Then again, the speaker might be evoking African oral traditions, in which poems, stories, and history were passed along by word of mouth rather than written down. In this way, the poem might be taking pride in Black culture, saying that the speaker's power is no less meaningful because it doesn't look like white people's.
In short: there are a lot of ways to understand this metaphor, but they all gesture towards the simultaneous power and marginalization of Black women's voices.
The speaker then says that "when the sea turns back / it will leave [her] shape behind." This image is also ambiguous:
- It might suggest that the tide of progress is fickle, and when it changes, Black women will be left behind—their needs and contributions will be forgotten.
- But the speaker might be saying almost the opposite: that when the tide changes, when the future unfolds, it will bear the mark of Black women's efforts.
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Lines 5-9
I seek no ...
... or my pride -
Lines 10-15
I do not ...
... restless oceans pound. -
Lines 16-20
I do not ...
... my sisters -
Lines 21-24
witches in Dahomey ...
... mourning. -
Lines 25-34
I have been ...
... and not white.
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“A Woman Speaks” Symbols
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Magic and Witches
The poem's images of magic and witches symbolize the ways Black women are both powerful and marginalized.
In feminist literature, witches often represent the ways that women who deviate from sexist social expectations are ostracized, villainized, and punished for their differences. At the same time, feminists have embraced the symbolism of witches to show how women have found empowerment through breaking from such expectations.
This poem makes a similar move, depicting the Black speaker and her "sisters" as powerful witches with "unwritten" magic at their disposal. But this idea might also gesture to the ways that white women whose bright "futures" the speaker looks at so skeptically have mistreated and vilified Black women in the same ways that men have mistreated and vilified them.
The poem's witch symbolism suggests that Black women might often have been ostracized, but they're also powerful—and if white women are unwilling to take Black women seriously, then they had better "beware."
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 2: “my magic is unwritten”
- Line 21: “witches in Dahomey”
- Line 28: “I am treacherous with old magic ”
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“A Woman Speaks” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration gives the poem rhythm, musicality, and meaning. Take a look at the opening lines, for instance:
Moon marked and touched by sun
my magic is unwrittenThe muted /m/ alliteration here perhaps suggests the muffled quality of the speaker's "unwritten," or unappreciated, "magic."
Listen, too, to the intense alliteration in this passage from the second stanza:
and still seeking
my sisters
witches in Dahomey
wear me inside their coiled clothsThe sibilant /s/ sounds in "still seeking / my sisters" draw whispery attention to the important idea of Black sisterhood, while the tight /c/ sounds of "coiled cloths" sound a lot like what they describe: the intricate curls of robes or headscarves. The /w/ of "witches" and "wear," meanwhile, adds some plain old musical intensity to this striking image of a sisterly group of Black witches communicating across generations.
In the last lines of the poem, meanwhile, the /w/ alliteration in "woman" and "white" highlights the way that the word "woman" is all too often assumed to mean "white woman": the poem suggests that women of color, and Black women in particular, are often treated as non-women, left out of a lot of so-called feminist "progress."
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 1: “Moon,” “marked”
- Line 2: “my,” “magic”
- Line 6: “untouched”
- Line 7: “unrelenting”
- Line 8: “permanent”
- Line 9: “pride”
- Line 16: “do,” “dwell”
- Line 17: “divinities”
- Line 19: “still,” “seeking”
- Line 20: “sisters”
- Line 21: “witches”
- Line 22: “wear,” “coiled,” “cloths”
- Line 23: “mother”
- Line 24: “mourning”
- Line 29: “noon's,” “new,” “fury”
- Line 30: “futures”
- Line 33: “woman”
- Line 34: “white”
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Metaphor
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Enjambment
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Simile
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Allusion
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Parallelism
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Assonance
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"A Woman Speaks" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Unrelenting
- Entrails
- Uranus
- Dwell
- Divinities
- Half-grown
- Coiled
- Dahomey
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(Location in poem: Line 7: “unrelenting as the curse of love ”)
Unyielding; without pause.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “A Woman Speaks”
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Form
"A Woman Speaks" doesn't follow a traditional form (such as a villanelle, for example), but instead uses organic free verse. The poem's 34 lines are divided into three stanzas of varying lengths. The lines tend to be on the shorter side, and many are just a few words long: the speaker sounds as if she's choosing her words carefully, giving every new idea its own space. This fits right in with the idea that the speaker is a representative for Black women, whose voices have been historically ignored, underrepresented, and silenced; the poem's short, powerful lines demand the attention the world has often denied the speaker and her "sisters."
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Meter
Like many 20th-century poems, "A Woman Speaks" is written in free verse, meaning that it doesn't follow any set meter. As a poet who was first and foremost an activist, Lorde was known for writing poems that were meant to speak truth to a wide audience in accessible, everyday language. Unmetered free verse was one way to make poetry feel conversational and down-to-earth. Lorde's poetry also picked up on Black art traditions, using rhythms inspired by Black music (such as blues and jazz) and African oral traditions. This poem, with its short, powerful, rhythmic lines, is a good example!
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Rhyme Scheme
Like much free verse poetry, “A Woman Speaks” doesn’t use a rhyme scheme. While lots of 20th-century poetry doesn't use rhyme, the lack of rhyme in this poem feels especially apt: a rhyme scheme might seem too mannered in a poem that aims to use direct, approachable language to communicate Black women's power and anger.
A rhyme scheme might also have played into traditional white, European conventions about what a poem should be—conventions that Black women, in particular, have reason to mistrust, considering how unrepresented their voices have historically been in literature.
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“A Woman Speaks” Speaker
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Rather than give a more personal self-portrait, the poem's speaker focuses on shared identities: being a "woman / and not white." She thus isn't so much a single specific person as she is a voice for Black women in general.
When the speaker mentions her "sisters [...] / in Dahomey," for instance, she marks herself as one of many Black women seeking a connection with their history. Dahomey was a kingdom in West Africa that participated heavily in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, so the fact that the speaker is "still seeking" her "sisters" there suggests that she is a Black woman who has been cut off from her heritage by slavery.
Her warning to "beware [her] smile" similarly suggests that she speaks for many Black women. This warning grows out of the speaker's "new fury," a growing, powerful rage at the empty "promise[s]" of a brand of feminism that has historically fought only for the rights and wellbeing of white women.
The speaker also describes herself as an embodiment of the Greek goddess Aphrodite, who was born when the severed genitals of Uranus, god of the sky, were flung into the sea. By telling the reader to "look" for her in "the entrails" (or exposed guts) of the patriarch Uranus, the speaker suggests that she wants to use her goddess-like power to destroy the oppressive systems that seek to dominate her.
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“A Woman Speaks” Setting
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The poem has no physical setting, but it does conjure up some symbolic landscapes. For example, when the speaker mentions "the sea" and "the restless oceans," "the sea" might be read as the tide of social progress. The movement of "the restless oceans," meanwhile, might suggest that the work of activism is never done: Black women have been "pound[ing]" against a wall of sexism and racism for centuries.
The poem's lack of setting fits with the "ageless[ness]" and anonymity of the speaker, whom the reader doesn't learn a lot about other than that she has "been woman / for a long time." In other words, because the speaker isn't a single, specific person, but a voice for Black women throughout history, the poem's setting is also not defined or specific, but timeless. This poem's speaker might exist anywhere, at any time: the point is that she refuses to be silent. Wherever she is in the world, she is making herself heard.
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Literary and Historical Context of “A Woman Speaks”
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Literary Context
Audre Lorde (1934-1992) wrote "A Woman Speaks" in 1984 after attending a feminist conference in London where, she said, “for a week, over and over again, [she] was [...] made, very very conscious of the ways in which Black women and white women do not hear each other.” That same year, she performed the poem at an annual conference at Amerika House in Berlin, Germany. It was published in the posthumous book The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (1997).
Like much of Lorde's work, the poem speaks directly to issues of identity—in this case, gender and race, though she also wrote extensively about being queer, fat, and a mother. And like most of her work, this poem falls into the category of "protest poetry"—poetry that aims to provoke social and political change, using direct, ordinary language that is accessible to everyone.
Lorde was an important member of the Black Arts Movement, an artistic and cultural movement that arose in the 1960s and ‘70s. Like the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ‘30s, the Black Arts Movement sought to move away from European artistic conventions and toward new forms based on Black history and culture. Poets such as Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Amiri Baraka introduced blues and jazz rhythms into their work and focused on writing for ordinary Black audiences rather than white literati.
Lorde’s work had and continues to have an enormous impact on feminist activism, inspiring countless Black women (especially queer Black women) to find their voices despite the obstacles they face.
Historical Context
Lorde was born in Harlem, New York, in 1934. She grew up during the Great Depression, and as she came of age, the Civil Rights Movement was just beginning to grip the United States. Lorde took part in the protests against racial discrimination that were occurring all across the country, and in the 1960s she became an important figure in both literary and activist spaces.
These spaces, however, were often co-opted by white women who did not experience the same kind of oppression as Black women: white women suffered from sexism, but Black women suffered from racism, too—including the racism of white feminists. Unfortunately (and not unironically), Lorde was often treated poorly by white feminist academics, accused of being too radical for her own good.
Lorde's own experiences as a Black lesbian shaped her influential theory of intersectionality: the idea that people’s intersecting identities (including their race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and so on) impact their lives in overlapping and complicated ways. Lorde asserted that, for instance, a white woman is bound to have different experiences of oppression from a Black woman, just as a straight, cis, wealthy, thin, or able-bodied woman is going to have a different experience of oppression than a woman who is queer, trans, poor, fat, or disabled. Intersectional feminism stresses how important it is to understand that the most marginalized of people face multiple forms of oppression at the same time.
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More “A Woman Speaks” Resources
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External Resources
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An Introduction to the Poet — Read a biography of Lorde (and more of her poetry) at the Poetry Foundation's website.
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The Poem Aloud — Watch a 1984 video recording of Lorde reading this poem.
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An Interview with Lorde — Watch an interview in which Lorde discusses her work.
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Lorde's Intersectional Feminism — Read "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," the famous essay in which Lorde advocates for a more intersectional feminism—that is, feminism that considers how intersecting identities (such as race, gender, sexual orientation, and class) shape women's lives.
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Angela Davis on Audre Lorde — Watch a 2014 speech in which writer and activist Angela Davis discusses Lorde's influence.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Audre Lorde
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