We learned to let our faces hide
our selves, to speak our story in a private
tongue, the past a shadow in our bones.

We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.

Oíamos la oscuridad.

We walked in wisdom with our shadows, in search of the dead part of ourselves, which would be our shelter.

The time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us today...

...some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak.

we were only made for the little silence, not for the silence of the stars.

Dear sisters and brothers, we realise the importance of light when we see darkness. We realise the importance of our voice when we are silenced.

Slowly we became silent, and silence itself if an enemy to friendship.

We've learned that quiet isn't always peace.

For some the wind can fleshly blow, for some the sunlight fade at ease, but we, made partners in our dread, hear but the grating of the keys, and heavy-booted soldiers' tread. As if for early mass, we rose and each day walked the wilderness, trudging through silent street and square, to congregate, less live than dead.

In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear — fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live. 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. Even within the women’s movement, we have had to fight, and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our Blackness. For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson — that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.

We've been conditioned to avoid silence at all costs lest we be confronted with our own inner chaos.

Soundlessly, shadow with shadow, we wrestled together,
Till the grey dawn.

[W]e are none of us very good at silence. It says too much.