What is the theme in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde?

Ideas are another theme in this book. Audre Lorde repeatedly emphasizes her belief that there are no new ideas—that there are only new ways of expressing the same ideas people have had throughout history. In Poetry Is Not a Luxury, she argues that one of poetry's primary functions is as a method of making the same old ideas be felt in new and different ways. Lorde often uses examples from ancient African civilizations in her essays to reinforce her views on a number of subjects, as giving them a cultural history makes them seem less radical.