Favourite Title of a Book // 30-Day Book Challenge - Day 28

Today is the twenty-eighth day of the 30-day book challenge, in which I will be writing about a different book or book series every day for 30 days, with each book chosen according to the daily prompt. Today's prompt is: "favourite title of a book".

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to the second post in two consecutive days from this blog. It's a miracle which I would honour by going on about it some more, but I have a suspicion this post will be quite short and I don't want to use up half the wordcount on a lengthy intro. So, let's move on.

The topic for today's post is "favourite title of a book", for which I have chosen Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde.

Unlike the books mentioned in this challenge's other posts, Sister Outsider is not a work of fiction. Rather, it is a collection of essays and speeches by the renowned poet and writer Audre Lorde.

Lorde is a writer I first encountered almost ten years ago, when I was first coming to terms with my own identity as a young closeted queer. Reading Lorde at that time was significant, as she produced her work from the perspective of her identity as a black lesbian woman. All of the pieces in Sister Outsider are coloured by this point-of-view, some addressing it on a more personal level while others address systemic oppression - or, as is often the case, they look at the overlap between the two.

The title of the book, Sister Outsider, encapsulates one of the key themes in this collection: unity in exile. By exile, I mean being marginalised by greater society, as so many minorities are - especially those groups to which Lorde belonged, as a queer woman and a person of colour. Sister Outsider, as a title, at first seems paradoxical. How can one have sisterhood or camaraderie as an outsider? How can a person who lives their life on the margins expect any sort of community? Not without difficulty, surely, but once you realise you are not the only person on the margins - nor the only exile, nor the only outsider - then establishing such unity doesn't seem such a far-off concept after all.

In one of Lorde's most famous pieces, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House", she stresses the need to embrace our differences as marginalised people (specifically women in this case) and to lean on each other, rather than merely hoping to be tolerated by those in power:

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill.  It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.  For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.  They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.  And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support. 

To me, this paragraph emphasises the dual meaning of Sister Outsider: of the need for unity, and the importance of acknowledging our status as outsiders. We cannot have one without the other, as Lorde so poignantly illustrates.

I chose Sister Outsider as my favourite title partially because of its clever wordplay, at first seeming paradoxical but then becoming perfectly logical when you understand the tenets of Lorde's philosophy. The other reason I chose it is because of the value of this very philosophy, so much of which is contained within just these two words. I don't know of another book whose title has managed to say so much in so little. For that reason most of all, it is my favourite.