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.