Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches Literary Elements

Nonfiction (Essays, Interviews, Letters, and Speeches)

Various—includes New York, Mississippi, the Soviet Union, and Grenada in the late 20th century

Audre Lorde, the author, is the first-person narrator of these writings

Passionate, Critical, Emotional

Protagonist: Audre Lorde, Black women, and oppressed peoples more generally. Antagonist: Robert Staples, Mary Daly, Ronald Reagan, American society.

Each essay describes a different conflict, but in general Lorde illustrates a conflict between subjugated people (women, Black people,and lesbians, for instance) and the dominant subjugating culture

The editors of this collection have positioned Lorde's famous essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House" in the final third of the collection, framing it as a climactic moment.

The arrangement of the essays in this collection allow Lorde's observations about raising young children to foreshadow later developments in those children's lives and personalities.

At the close of "Notes From a Trip to Russia," Lorde lists various injustices in Soviet society, punctuating them with the refrain "So, what's new?" This phrase understatedly suggests that such injustices are so frequent in America that they are barely noticeable to most Americans.

Earnest Gaines: Twentieth-century American novelist
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf: Stage musical by Ntozake Shange
Jocasta/Oedipus and Clytemnestra/Orestes: Figures from ancient Greek tragedy and mythology
Bernice Reagon: Civil Rights activist, scholar, and song leader
I Ching: Ancient Chinese text originally used for divination

Lorde portrays the village in Mexico in which she lived as a young woman with vivid visual, olfactory, and aural images to evoke its beauty and intensity. She describes her own body through visual images commonly used to characterize landscapes, hinting that Black women often view their own bodies as foreign and alarming.

Lorde often stresses that expressing and acknowledging strong emotion causes it to lose power, whereas suppressing emotions allows them to control the person who feels them. This paradoxically implies that the more time a person spends thinking about, voicing, and sharing their feelings, the more liberated they will feel from them.

Lorde draws parallels between the foreign cities she visits in the Soviet Union and the cities of New York and Accra, with which she is already familiar.
Later, she parallels the military invasion of Grenada with the everyday state violence enacted against Black Americans.

In "Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist's Response," Lorde lets "testosterone" metonymically stand in for the broader concept of masculinity.

In "Poetry Is Not a Luxury," fear is personified as a force willfully controlling the lives of those who experience it.