Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde
Born	Audrey Geraldine Lorde February 18, 1934 New York City, New York
Died	Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands
Occupation	Poet, writer, activist, essayist
Genre	Poetry, non-fiction
Literary movement	Civil rights

Audre Lorde (/ˈɔːdri lɔːrd/; born Audrey Geraldine Lorde, February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992) was an American writer, radical feminist, womanist, lesbian, and civil rights activist. In her own words, Lorde was a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet". Her poems and essays focused on civil rights issues, feminism, and the expression of black female identity. Lorde is best known for technical mastery and emotional expression in her poetry, particularly the poems which express anger and outrage at civil and social injustices she observed throughout her life. She was a champion of intersectional feminism, and life-long explorer of her own identity and the universal identity of African-American women. She died of liver cancer in 1992, at the age of 58.

Life and work

Lorde was born in New York City to Caribbean immigrants from Barbados and Carriacou, Frederick Byron Lorde (called Byron) and Linda Gertrude Belmar Lorde, who settled in Harlem. Lorde's mother was of mixed ancestry but could pass for white, a source of pride for her family. Lorde's father was darker than the Belmar family liked and only allowed the couple to marry because of Byron Lorde's charm, ambition, and persistence. Nearsighted to the point of being legally blind, and the youngest of three daughters (two older sisters, Phyllis and Helen), Audre Lorde grew up hearing her mother's stories about the West Indies. She learned to talk while she learned to read, at the age of four, and her mother taught her to write at around the same time. She wrote her first poem when she was in eighth grade.

Born Audrey Geraldine Lorde, she chose to drop the "y" from her first name while still a child, explaining in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name that she was more interested in the artistic symmetry of the "e"-endings in the two side-by-side names "Audre Lorde" than in spelling her name the way her parents had intended.

Lorde’s relationship with her parents was difficult from a young age. She was able to spend very little time when her father and mother, who were busy maintaining their real estate business in the tumultuous economy after the Great Depression, and when she did see them, they were often cold or emotionally distant. In particular, Lorde’s relationship with her mother, who was deeply suspicious of people with darker skin than hers (which Lorde’s was) and the outside world in general, was characterized by “tough love” and strict adherence to family rules. Lorde’s difficult relationship with her mother would figure prominently in later poems, such as Coal’s, “Story Books on a Kitchen Table.”

As a child, Lorde, who struggled with communication, came to appreciate the power of poetry as a form of expression. She memorized a great deal of poetry, and would use it to communicate, to the extent that, “If asked how she was feeling, Audre would reply by reciting a poem.” Around the age or twelve, she began writing her own poetry, and began to connect with others at her school who were considered “outcasts” as she felt she was.

In 1954, she spent a pivotal year as a student at the National University of Mexico, a period she described as a time of affirmation and renewal, during which she confirmed her identity on personal and artistic levels as a lesbian and poet. On her return to New York, she attended Hunter College, worked as a librarian, continued writing and became an active participant in the gay culture of Greenwich Village. She furthered her education at Columbia University, earning a master's degree in library science in 1961. She also worked during this time as a librarian at Mount Vernon Public Library and married attorney Edwin Rollins; they divorced in 1970 after having two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan. In 1966, Lorde became head librarian at Town School Library in New York City, where she remained until 1968.

In 1968 Lorde was writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, where she met Frances Clayton, a white professor of psychology, who was to be her romantic partner until 1989.

Lorde’s time at Tougaloo College, like her year at the National University of Mexico, was a formative experience for Lorde as an artist. She led workshops with her young, black undergraduate students, many of whom were eager to discuss the civil rights issues of that time. Through her interactions with her students, she reaffirmed her desire not only to live out her “crazy and queer” identity, but devoted new attention to the formal aspects of her craft as a poet. Her book of poems, Cables to Rage, came out of her time and experiences at Tougaloo.

From 1977 to 1978 Lorde had a brief affair with the sculptor and painter Mildred Thompson. The two met in Nigeria in 1977 at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC 77). Their affair ran its course during the time that Thompson lived in Washington, D.C.

Last years

Audre Lorde battled cancer for fourteen years. She was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978 and underwent a mastectomy. Six years later, Lorde was diagnosed with liver cancer. As a result of her cancer, she chose to become more focused on both her life and her writing. She wrote The Cancer Journals which in 1981 won the American Library Association Gay Caucus Book of the Year Award. She featured as the subject of a documentary called A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde that shows Lorde as an author, poet, human rights activist, feminist, and lesbian. She is quoted in the film: "What I leave behind has a life of its own." "I've said this about poetry; I've said it about children. Well, in a sense I'm saying it about the very artifact of who I have been."

From 1991 until her death, she was the New York State Poet Laureate. In 1992 she received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle. In 2001 Publishing Triangle instituted the Audre Lorde Award to honour works of lesbian poetry.

Lorde died of liver cancer on November 17, 1992, in St. Croix where she had been living with Gloria I. Joseph. She was 58. In her own words, Lorde was a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet". In an African naming ceremony before her death, she took the name Gamba Adisa, which means "Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known".

Work

Audre Lorde (left) with writers Meridel Le Sueur (middle) and Adrienne Rich (right) at a writing workshop in Austin, Texas, 1980

Poetry

Lorde focused her discussion of difference not only on differences between groups of women but between conflicting differences within the individual. "I am defined as other in every group I'm part of", she declared. "The outsider, both strength and weakness. Yet without community there is certainly no liberation, no future, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between me and my oppression". She described herself both as a part of a "continuum of women" and a "concert of voices" within herself.

Her conception of her many layers of selfhood is replicated in the multi-genres of her work. Critic Carmen Birkle wrote: "Her multicultural self is thus reflected in a multicultural text, in multi-genres, in which the individual cultures are no longer separate and autonomous entities but melt into a larger whole without losing their individual importance". Her refusal to be placed in a particular category, whether social or literary, was characteristic of her determination to come across as an individual rather than a stereotype.

Lorde considered herself a "lesbian, mother, warrior, poet", and used poetry to get this message across. Her main goal was to empower black people and lesbians and to encourage everyone to be comfortable in their own skin. In 1968, Lorde published The First Cities, her first volumes of poems that has been described as a "quiet, introspective book," focusing mainly on personal issues and feelings.

Lorde's poetry was published very regularly during the 1960s — in Langston Hughes' 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in several foreign anthologies; and in black literary magazines. During this time, she was politically active in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements. Her first volume of poetry, The First Cities (1968), was published by the Poet's Press and edited by Diane di Prima, a former classmate and friend from Hunter College High School. Dudley Randall, a poet and critic, asserted in his review of the book that Lorde "does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit, in the bone".

Her second volume, Cables to Rage (1970), which was mainly written during her tenure as poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, addressed themes of love, betrayal, childbirth and the complexities of raising children. It is particularly noteworthy for the poem "Martha", in which Lorde poetically confirms her homosexuality: "[W]e shall love each other here if ever at all." Later books continued her political aims in lesbian and gay rights, and feminism. Cables to Rage, is thought to include Lorde's her first openly lesbian poem.

Nominated for the National Book Award for poetry in 1973, From a Land Where Other People Live (Broadside press) shows Lorde’s personal struggles with identity and anger at social injustice made universal. The volume deals with themes of anger, loneliness, and injustice, as well as what it means to be an African-American woman, mother, friend, and lover.

1974 saw the release of, New York Head Shop and Museum, which gives a picture of Lorde’s New York, both the New York of her childhood through the lens of her restricted childhood, and the New York of the civil rights movement: stricken with poverty and neglect, and in Lorde’s opinion, in need of political action.

Despite the success of these volumes, it was the release of Coal in 1976 that established Lorde as an influential voice in the Black Arts Movement (NORTON), and introduced her to a wider white audience as well. The volume includes poems from both The First Cities and Cables to Rage, and it unties many of the themes Lorde would become known for throughout her career: rage at racial injustice, a celebration of her black identity, and the call for an intersectional consideration of women’s experiences. Lorde followed Coal up with Between Our Selves (also in 1976) and Hanging Fire (1978).

In Lorde’s volume, The Black Unicorn (1978), she describes her identity within the mythos of African female deities of creation, fertility, and warrior strength. This reclamation of African female identity both builds and challenges existing Black Arts ideas about pan-Africanism, so where, “for writers like Baraka and Reed, African cosmologies furnished a repertoire of bold male gods capable of forging and defending an aboriginal black universe, for Lorde that warrior ethos is transferred to a female vangaurd capable equally of force and fertility.”

Lorde's poetry became more open and personal as she grew older and became more confident in her sexuality. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Lorde states "Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought…As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring ideas". Sister Outsider also elaborates Lorde's challenge to European-American traditions. Her feelings, expressed in interviews as well as her output speak to various audiences such as African-Americans, women, and lesbians.

Prose

The Cancer Journals (1980), derived in part from personal journals written in the late seventies, and A Burst of Light (1988), both use non-fiction prose to preserve, explore, and reflect on her diagnosis, treatment, and recovery from breast cancer. In both works, Lorde deals with Western notions of illness, treatment, and physical beauty and prosthesis, as well as themes of death, fear of mortality, victimization versus survival, and inner power.

Lorde’s deeply personal novel, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), described as a “biomythography,” chronicles her childhood into adulthood, developing her own personal narrative through the evolution of her sexual and self-awareness.

In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984), Lorde asserts the necessity of communicating the experience of marginalized groups in order to make their struggles visible in a repressive society. She emphasizes the need for different groups of people (particularly white women and African-America women) to find common ground in their lived experience.

In 1980, together with Barbara Smith and Cherríe Moraga, she co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher for women of color. Lorde was State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992.

Theory

Her writings are based on the "theory of difference", the idea that the binary opposition between men and women is overly simplistic: although feminists have found it necessary to present the illusion of a solid, unified whole, the category of women itself is full of subdivisions.

Lorde identified issues of class, race, age, gender and even health-this last was added as she battled cancer in her later years, as being fundamental to the female experience. She argued that, although the gender difference has received all the focus, these other differences are also essential and must be recognized and addressed. "Lorde", it is written, "puts her emphasis on the authenticity of experience. She wants her difference acknowledged but not judged; she does not want to be subsumed into the one general category of 'woman'". This theory is today known as intersectionality.

While acknowledging that the differences between women are wide and varied, most of Lorde's works are concerned with two subsets that concerned her primarily—race and sexuality. In Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson’s documentary A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde, Lorde says, "Let me tell you first about what it was like being a Black woman poet in the ‘60s, from jump. It meant being invisible. It meant being really invisible. It meant being doubly invisible as a Black feminist woman and it meant being triply invisible as a Black lesbian and feminist".

In her work "Erotic as Power" written in 1978, Lorde theorizes about the Erotic as a site of power for women only when they learn to release it from its suppression and embrace it. She proposes that the erotic needs to be explored and experienced wholeheartedly for that it is not only in reference to the sexual and sexuality but it is a feeling of enjoyment, love and thrill that is felt towards any task or experience that satisfies women in their lives; be it reading a book or loving one's job. Women have experienced difficulties when trying to embrace erotic as a source of power because it has been misnamed by men and has been mistaken for pornography . However, the erotic as power allows women to use their knowledge and power to face the issues of racism, patriarchy, and our anti-erotic society.

Contemporary feminist thought

Lorde set out to confront issues of racism in feminist thought. She maintained that a great deal of the scholarship of white feminists served to augment the oppression of black women, a conviction that led to angry confrontation, most notably in a blunt open letter addressed to the fellow radical lesbian feminist Mary Daly, to which Lorde stated she received no reply. Daly's reply letter to Lorde, dated 4½ months later, was found in 2003 in Lorde's files after she died.

This fervent disagreement with notable white feminists furthered her persona as an outsider: "in the institutional milieu of black feminist and black lesbian feminist scholars [...] and within the context of conferences sponsored by white feminist academics, Lorde stood out as an angry, accusatory, isolated black feminist lesbian voice".

The criticism was not one-sided: many white feminists were angered by Lorde's brand of feminism. In her 1984 essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House", Lorde attacked underlying racism within feminism, describing it as unrecognized dependence on the patriarchy. She argued that, by denying difference in the category of women, white feminists merely passed on old systems of oppression and that, in so doing, they were preventing any real, lasting change. Her argument aligned white feminists who did not recognize the importance of race as an issue with white male slave-masters, describing both as "agents of oppression".

Lorde's comments on feminism

As a pioneer in black feminism study, Audre Lorde is critical of feminists neglecting racial issues. In Audre Lorde’s “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” she writes: “Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation.” More specifically she states: “As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of color become ‘other’.” Self-identified as “a forty-nine-year-old Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of two,” Lorde is considered as “other, deviant, inferior, or just plain wrong,” as opposed to the supposed normative “white male heterosexual capitalist” social hierarchy. “We speak not of human difference, but of human deviance.” In this respect, Lorde’s ideology coincides with womanism, which “allows black women to affirm and celebrate their color and culture in a way that feminism does not.”

Audre Lorde and womanism

Audre Lorde’s criticism of feminists of the 1960s identified issues of race, class, age, gender and sexuality. Similarly, author and poet Alice Walker coined the term "womanist" in an attempt to distinguish black female and minority female experience from "feminism". While "feminism" is defined as "a collection of movements and ideologies that share a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve equal political, economic, cultural, personal, and social rights for women", by imposing simplistic opposition between "men" and "women", the theorists and activists during the 1960s and 1970s usually neglect the experiential difference such as race and gender factors among different social groups.

Womanism and its ambiguity

Womanism’s existence naturally opens various definitions and interpretations. Alice Walker’s comments on womanism that “womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender,” suggests that the scope of study of womanism includes and exceeds that of feminism. In its narrowest definition, womanism is the black feminist movement that was formed in response to the growth of racial stereotypes in the feminist movement. In a broad sense, however, womanism is “a social change perspective based upon the everyday problems and experiences of black women and other women of minority demographics, but more broadly seeks methods to eradicate inequalities not just for black women, but for all people,” where socialist ideology and equality is imposed. However, even though womanism is open to interpretation, one of the most common criticisms of womanism is its lack of a unified set of tenets. It is also criticized for its lack of discussion of sexuality in womanist literature.

Lorde actively strived for the change of culture within the feminist community by implementing womanist ideology. In the Journal “Anger Among Allies: Audre Lorde’s 1981 Keynote Admonishing the national Women’s Studies Association,” it is stated that Lorde’s speech contributed to communication with scholars’ understanding of human biases. While “anger, marginalized communities, and US Culture” are the major themes of the speech, Lorde implemented various communication techniques to shift subjectivities of “white feminist” audience. Lorde further explains that: “we are working in a context of oppression and threat, the cause of which is certainly not the angers which lie between us, but rather that virulent hatred leveled against all women, people of color, lesbians and gay men, poor people—against all of us who are seeking to examine the particulars of our lives as we resist our oppressions, moving towards coalition and effective action.”

Audre Lorde and critique of womanism

A major critique on womanism is the failure to explicitly address homosexuality within the female community. Very little womanist literature relates to lesbian or bisexual issues. Many scholars consider the lack of sympathy and reluctance to accept homosexuality accountable to the gender simplistic model of womanism. According to Lorde’s essay “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” “the need for unity is often misnamed as a need for homogeneity,” “a fear of lesbians, or of being accused of being a lesbian, has led many Black women into testifying against themselves.”

On the contrary, Audre Lorde is very open to her own sexuality and sexual awakening. In her famous "biomythography" (coined by Lorde: biography combined with mythology) Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, she writes “Years afterward when I was grown, whenever I thought about the way I smelled that day, I would have a fantasy of my mother, her hands wiped dry from the washing, and her apron untied and laid neatly away, looking down upon me lying on the touch, and then slowly, thoroughly, our touching and caressing each other’s most secret places.” According to scholar Anh Hua, Lorde turns female abjection—menstruation, female sexuality, and female incest with the mother—into powerful scenes of female relationship and connection, thus subverting patriarchal heterosexist culture.

With such a strong ideology and open-mindedness, Lorde’s impact on lesbian society is also significant. One of the attendee describes the process of Lorde’s speech in August 1978, how Lorde reads her essay “Uses for the erotic, the erotic as Power.” As it is described, “She asked if all the lesbians in the room would please stand. Almost the entire audience rose.”

Audre Lorde’s aim to redefine the difference among all social identities such as “age race class and sex” is deeply rooted in her work. Most of her theory coincides with the ideology commonly known “womanism” that emphasizes minority experience, but her major argument on homosexuality is not widely demonstrated in womanist writing.

Tributes

The Callen-Lorde Community Health Center is an organization in New York City named for Michael Callen and Audre Lorde, which is dedicated to providing medical health care to the city's LGBT population without regard to ability to pay. Callen-Lorde is the only primary care center in New York City created specifically to serve the LGBT community

The Audre Lorde Project, founded in 1994, is a Brooklyn, New York-based organization for queer people of color. The organization concentrates on community organizing and radical nonviolent activism around progressive issues within New York City, especially relating to queer and transgender communities, AIDS and HIV activism, pro-immigrant activism, prison reform and organizing among youth of color.

The Audre Lorde Award is an annual literary award presented by Publishing Triangle to honor works of lesbian poetry, first presented in 2001.

In 2014 Lorde was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display in Chicago, Illinois which celebrates LGBT history and people.

Works

• 1968: The First Cities
• 1970: Cables to Rage
• 1973: From a Land Where Other People Live
• 1974: New York Head Shop and Museum
• 1976:
• 1976: Between Our Selves
• 1978: Hanging Fire
• 1978:
• 1980: The Cancer Journals, Aunt Lute Books
• 1981:
• 1982:
• 1983: Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. The Crossing Press
• 1984: Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. The Crossing Press (reissued 2007)
• 1986:
• 1988:
• 1993:

Interviews

• "Interview with Audre Lorde," in Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis, ed. Robin Ruth Linden (East Palo Alto, Calif. : Frog in the Well, 1982.), pp. 66–71 ISBN 0-960-36283-5 OCLC 7877113

Biographical film

• A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (1995) Documentary by Michelle Parkeson.
• The Edge of Each Other's Battles: The Vision of Audre Lorde (2002). Documentary by Jennifer Abod.
• Audre Lorde - The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 (2012). Documentary by Dagmar Schultz.

See also

• African-American literature
• Black Feminism
• Womanism

External links

Profile

• Profile and poems at the Poetry Foundation
• Profile and poems written and audio at Academy of American Poets
• "Voices From the Gaps: Audre Lorde". Profile. University of Minnesota
• Profile at Modern American Poetry

Articles and archive

• "The enemy of silence". The Guardian 13 October 2008 by Jackie Kay
• Works by or about Audre Lorde in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• New York Times "Audre Lorde, 58, A Poet, Memoirist And Lecturer, Dies" 20 November 1992
• "Audre Lorde: Black, Feminist, Lesbian, Mother, Poet". The Crisis journal. March/April 2004