Some dates hold a particular kind of weight.
Not because the calendar says they should, but because the ancestors left fingerprints there.
February 18 is one of those days.
Today, we honour two women whose words have raised generations: Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde, born on the same day, decades apart, yet braided together in legacy. Two writers who didn’t just create literature. They created language we could live inside.
If you’ve ever read a line and felt your spine straighten…
if you’ve ever closed a book and whispered, I feel seen…
if you’ve ever found yourself in a sentence that refused to let you shrink…
This is that kind of day.
Toni Morrison: The Woman Who Made Us a Home in Language
There are writers who entertain.
And then there are writers who build worlds so complete you can smell the air, taste the grief, feel the love, and recognize yourself, often before you were ready.
That’s Toni.
Her work reminds us that Black life is never one-note. It is layered, complicated, tender, terrifying, beautiful. She wrote our history and our humanity with a precision that didn’t ask permission.
A few Toni lines to hold close today:
- “Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”
- “I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.”
- “Love is never any better than the lover.”
- “Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
- “Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names.”
Toni didn’t just tell stories. She taught us how to name what happened, and how to survive it without losing ourselves.
If you want to return to her work (or meet her for the first time), here are a few entry points:
- Beloved (for memory, haunting, and what we carry)
- The Bluest Eye (for beauty politics and girlhood)
- Song of Solomon (for lineage, flight, and becoming)
- Jazz (for longing, love, and the music of mess)
Audre Lorde: The Woman Who Told Us to Speak Anyway
Audre Lorde is the kind of writer who makes you sit up straighter.
She didn’t offer comfort that kept you quiet.
She offered truth that made you braver.
She reminded us that voice is not a luxury. It’s a lifeline. That we do not get liberated by being palatable. That silence doesn’t protect us—especially not Black women.
A few Audre lines that still feel like instruction:
- “Your silence will not protect you.”
- “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence… it is self-preservation…”
- “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
- “Without community there is no liberation…”
- “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
Audre didn’t just write essays and poems. She wrote permission slips—for rage, for tenderness, for community, for truth.
Where to start with Audre:
- Sister Outsider (essential—like a handbook for clarity)
- The Cancer Journals (for body, vulnerability, and survival)
- A Burst of Light (for living, insistently)
- Her speech/essay: “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” (short, powerful, unforgettable)
A Short Poem for Today
Two birthday candles.
Two women who made language a refuge.
Toni wrote memory into marrow—
Audre turned truth into a tool.
They didn’t give us pretty words.
They gave us usable ones.
Words for surviving.
Words for choosing ourselves out loud.
So today we read like ritual—
page by page,
we rise in love,
and we do not apologize for living.
Why This Matters (Especially Now)
Because we are living in a time that constantly tries to:
- rewrite history,
- silence truth-tellers,
- flatten Black stories,
- make us smaller, quieter, easier.
And these two women remind us: absolutely not.
They remind us that reading is not just a hobby.
It’s a practice. A return. A refusal.
Reading Morrison and Lorde is a way to remember that Black women have always been thinking, building, resisting, creating, mothering futures. It is a way to come back to ourselves—especially when the world is committed to taking us away.
Your Turn: Let’s Make This a TBGR Moment
Tell me in the comments:
What’s your favourite Toni Morrison or Audre Lorde book?
Or, what quote from either of them has stayed with you?
And if you haven’t read them yet, let this be your sign.
Not to “catch up.”
Not to perform being well-read.
But to be held by words that were written with us in mind.
Happy Birthday to Toni and Audre.
We’re still surviving by their sentences.
