This, her first essay in Sister Outsider, is based on edited journal entries from her travels in 1976, when she was invited to observe the African-Asian Writers conference, which was sponsored by the Union of Soviet Writers. She writes about her flight to Moscow, nine hours long, and her impressions: “Russians are generally as unfriendly to each other as Americans are and just about as unhelpful.”

Life there “is a constant fight against the cold weather,” she notes, and “living is only a triumph against death by freezing.” (Which recalled Margaret Atwood’s musings on that theme in Canadian literature, in Survival.) Lorde observes the architecture of houses, and how even in the face of decay, there was an “ornate richness about the landscape”, how these buildings, even in “grey winter,” all “seemed to tell me immediately that I was not at home.”

She contemplates different ideas of labour and status and belonging, and she comments on hotel rooms and gas for cooking. Some of the differences she finds uncomfortable (everyone carries their own luggage everywhere) and others she finds inspiring: “There is something that I noticed all over: the very old people in Russia have a stamp upon them that I hope I can learn and never lose, a matter-of-fact resilience and sense of their place upon the earth that is very sturdy and reassuring.”

When, at last, the writers’ conference begins in Uzbekistan, she notes that “some of the personal tensions between North Russian and Uzbek are national and some racial.” The people in Tashkent inhabit a city of two parts, half old, having survived the earthquake of 1966, and half new, rebuilt by people from the Ukraine (‘the’ being the norm then) and Byelo-Russia and all over the Soviet Union. She “could scarcely believe it”—how much the old part reminded her of parts of Africa (Ghana or Dahomey).

“The basic position seems to be one of a presumption of equality,” she writes, “even though there is sometimes a large gap between the expectation and the reality.” She writes about the beautiful marble and the streets, as well as an experience on a collective farm in Gulstan, where a woman invited her into the home; in a language she could not understand—a “woman like myself, wishing that all of our children could live in peace upon their own earth.” Another woman translated their conversation about her three children and Lorde’s two: “I spoke in English and she spoke in Russian, but I felt very strongly that our hearts spoke the same tongue.”

She learns about the history of Uzbeki women, many Muslims, who fought to be able to read and go bare-faced: “a story of genuine female heroism and persistence.” She observes that, although there is a lot of lip-service paid to equality in the United States, that there is a gap between theory and reality when it comes to problem-solving there, too. And after they all return to Moscow, she meets a Chukwo woman (from the part of Russia closest to Alaska), who also spoke in her own language: “I feel like we’re an endangered species too, and how sad for our cultures to die.”

Without avoiding the contradictions (e.g. she admires the fact that writers are paid and powerful AND she admits that’s only when their writing is “acceptable”), she weighs and balances the differences she witnesses on her travels, compared to her life as a professor in NYC.

“But you do have a country there that has the largest reading population of the world, that prints books of poetry in editions of 250,000 copies and those copies sell out in three months. Everywhere you go, even among those miles of cotton being harvested in the Uzbekhi sun, people are reading, and no matter what you may say about censorship, they are still reading, and they’re reading an awful lot. Some books are pirated from the West because Russia does not observe International Copyright. In Samarkhand, Ernest Gaines’ The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was the latest bestseller. Now, how many Russian novels in translation have you read this past year?”

Nearly fifty years later, when every day the numbers of refugees from Ukraine rise dramatically in the wake of the Russian invasion/war, when we read about Audre Lorde’s “feasting on difference”—much of this essay remains pertinent. Ideas about isolation and the crucial need for dialogue, about tensions and resilience, and about extirpation and heroism.

Originally, I thought I would reread these essays in a lazy weekly way, maybe three over the course of a month, but unless anyone is interested in reading them on a speedier schedule, I’ll aim to be a little lazier than that…maybe I’ll be feeling more scholarly as autumn approaches.

And speaking of taking time, I won’t be reading blogs and articles for the month of April, and when I return to a regular routine at my desk, I will be putting the dreaded “mark all as read” feature in Feedly to work; so, if you post/publish something this month, that you suspect that I would especially love to read, on your blog or anywhere else, please send me a link via email or whatever other social media works for you, and I will catch up (in May, if not before).