A self-described ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’, dedicating her life and her creative output to confronting and addressing the injustices of classism, homophobia, racism and sexism. She was best known for the technical mastery and emotional expression of her work, often drawing on her own experiences. She was melodic yet powerful, intense yet reassuring. She went on to become a leading poet and essayist who became a civil rights icon through her masterful work. This is the story of how one gifted poet became a social warrior…
These Strained Relations
Audre Lorde was born in New York City on February 18th, 1934 to Caribbean immigrants, her father Frederick from Barbados and her mother Linda from the Grenadian island of Carriacou. Her early life was marred by her near-sightedness, leaving Audre, the youngest of three daughters, legally blind. She grew up immersed in her mother’s tales of the West Indies, sparking her imagination into life. As a child, she wrote her first poems.
As she grew, however, Audre hardly ever saw her parents, both busy trying to maintain their real estate business in the difficult times after the Great Depression. Whenever Audre did see her parents, they were often cold or distant emotionally. Audre had the most trouble with her mother, who was deeply suspicious of people with darker skin than hers, which Audre had. It was a childhood of tough love and a strict adherence to family rules.
She struggled to communicate so her poems became her outlet, her way of expressing what she was going through. She once described herself as ‘thinking in poetry’. She memorised so much poetry as a child that when she was asking about how she was feeling, she would respond with a poem. As her teenage years dawned, she started to connect with others at her school who, like her, were outcasts. She felt as if she had found the love of a family for the first time in her life.
Yet there was a problem. Audre’s poems were far from usual. Her school’s literary journal rejected her first poem because it was ‘inappropriate’, so Audre was forced to seek out a magazine to have her work published. She participated in poetry workshops but was always made to feel unwelcome. The role of the outcast followed her around. She said of these tumultuous years:
[I felt as though I was not accepted because I] was both crazy and queer but [they thought] I would grow out of it all.
In 1954, she would spend what would prove to be a pivotal year as a student at the National University of Mexico, a time she described as a period of affirmation and renewal. It was there she first identified as a poet. And as a lesbian.
The Audre that would go on to become the warrior poet was born.
Identity
On her return to New York City, Audre attended Hunter College, graduating in the class of 1959. While there, she worked as a librarian and continued her writing. She also became active in the gay culture of Greenwich Village. She went on to earn her master’s degree in library science at Columbia University in 1961. The ‘60s was her decade. It was then her poetry started to be published regularly. And it coincided with her emerging social consciousness. It was then she became politically active in the movements of anti-war, civil rights and feminism.
But it was in 1968 when her life changed dramatically. Her first volume of poetry, ‘First Cities’, was published. She left her job as a head librarian and started teaching a poetry workshop. ‘First Cities’ was well-received, a quiet and introspective book, with poet and critic Dudley Randall saying of Audre:
[She] does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit, in the bone.
Her time at the poetry workshop in Mississippi was a formative experience for her as a poet. She led workshops with her young, black undergraduate students, many of whom were eager to discuss the issues of civil rights. It was then Audre reaffirmed her desire not only to live out her ‘crazy and queer’ identity, but also to devote her time to her life as a poet. She wrote about her experiences then in her work, ‘Cables to Rage’.
It was published in 1970, taking on the themes of betrayal, family and love, whilst also addressing her own sexuality in her work for the first time in the poem, ‘Martha’. She wrote, ‘We shall love each other here if ever at all.’ In 1972, Audre met her long-time partner, Frances Clayton.
Audre published her third volume of poetry, ‘From a Land Where Other People Live’ in 1973, earning critical acclaim, going on to be nominated for a National Book Award. Once more, she explored social issues as well as issues of identity and global issues. She dealt with issues of anger, loneliness and injustice, as well as what it means to be a black woman, mother, friend and lover. But it was the publication of ‘Coal’ in 1976 when Audre began to reach a larger audience. It established her as an influential voice of her day, uniting many of the themes she had written about previously: her rage at racial injustice, her celebration of her black identity, and her call for an intersectional consideration of women’s experiences.
She followed it up with ‘The Black Unicorn’ in 1978, exploring her African heritage. It is considered by many critics to be her greatest work. She spoke of her identity, her work becoming more open and personal the older she grew. She also became more and more confident in her sexuality. She once said:
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.
A New Sanctuary
Audre continued to teach throughout the 1960s and 1970s, fighting for the creation of a black studies department at the City University of New York. In 1980, together with Barbara Smith and Cherríe Moraga, Audre co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first American publisher for non-white women. Only one year later, she was among the founders of the Women’s Coalition of St Croix, an organisation dedicated to assisting women who have survived sexual abuse and intimate partner violence. Whilst in the late 1980s, she would establish the Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa, aiming to benefit black women who were affected by apartheid and other forms of injustice.
‘The black unicorn is greedy. The black unicorn is impatient. The black unicorn was mistaken for a shadow or symbol and taken through a cold country, where mist painted mockeries of my fury. It is not on her lap where the horns rests but deep in her moon-pit, growing. The black unicorn is restless. The black unicorn is unrelenting. The black unicorn is not free.’ The Black Unicorn (1978) – Audre.
Audre’s poetry focused on her discussion of difference, not only between groups of women but between conflicting differences within the individual. “The outsider,” she said, “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 used poetry to convey her message, powerful poems of protest and revolution.
I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and to share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often un-mitigating pain.
– Audre.
One of her most potent pieces of work is ‘Power’, a poem about the police shooting of a 10-year-old black child. The officer was acquitted. “A kind of fury rose up in me; the sky turned red,” she said when she learnt of the acquittal as she was driving one day. “I felt so sick. I felt as if I would drive this car into a wall, into the next person I saw. So I pulled over. I took out my journal just to air some of my fury, to get it out of my fingertips. Those expressed feelings are that poem.” Her poetry oozes ‘passion, sincerity, perception and depth of feeling’. Audre had become the figurehead for many liberation movements. Her work became defined by its call for social and racial justice, and for her depictions of her queer experience and sexuality. She once said:
My sexuality is part and parcel of who I am, and my poetry comes from the intersection of me and my words… [white, arch-conservative senator] Jesse Helms’s objection to my work is not about obscenity… or even about sex. It is about revolution and change.
Nature’s Force
Audre was also a noted prose writer as well as a poet. Her account of her struggle to overcome breast cancer and mastectomy, ‘The Cancer Journals’ (1980), is considered one of her most important pieces of work. She confronts the possibility of death itself. Writing about such was a transformative experience for her. She spoke openly of her decision not to wear prosthesis after undergoing her mastectomy:
Prosthesis offers the empty comfort of ‘nobody will know the difference’. But it is that very difference which I wish to affirm, because I have lived it, and survived it, and wish to share that strength with other women. If we are to translate the silence surrounding breast cancer into language and action against this scourge, then the first step is that women with mastectomies must become visible to each other.
‘The Caner Journals’ remains poignant and genuinely breathtaking to this day. She refused to be a victim. Instead, she labelled herself and all women who are survivors as… warriors. By taking life in her stride, Audre influenced many people of many different backgrounds. Allison Kimmich, of Feminist Writers, said of Audre:
Throughout all of [her] writing, both nonfiction and fiction, a single theme surfaces repeatedly. The black lesbian feminist poet activist reminds her readers that they ignore differences among people at their peril… instead, [she] suggests, differences in race or class must serve as a ‘reason for celebration and growth’.
In 1984, Audre started visiting a professorship in West Berlin at the Free University of Berlin. During her time in Germany, she became an integral part of the then-nascent Afro-German movement. Together, with a group of black female activists in Berlin, Audre coined the term ‘Afro-German’ and, consequently, gave rise to the black movement in Germany. Instead of fighting systemic issues through violence, Audre believed that language was a powerful form of resistance and encouraged the women of Germany to speak up instead of fight back. In 1984, she famously said:
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 crucible 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.
The Last Words
Sadly, just six years after her first diagnosis, Audre found out that her breast cancer had metastasised in her liver. Her battle with cancer informed the essay collection, ‘A Burst of Light’ (1989). That time, she chose to pursue alternative treatments rather than to opt for more surgery. She battled cancer for more than a decade and spent her final years living in the US Virgin Islands. She took on the African name, ‘Gamba Adisa’, meaning ‘she who makes her meaning clear’. In 1991, she was made the New York State Poet laureate.
Her imagination is charged by a sharp sense of racial injustice and cruelty, of sexual prejudice… she cries out against it as the voice of indignant humanity. Audre Lorde is the voice of the eloquent outsider who speaks in a language that can reach and touch people everywhere.”
– Mario Cuomo (then governor of New York).
Sadly, Audre lost her battle with cancer on November 17th, 1992. She was just 58. She was one of the most important poets who ever lived. She famously introduced herself to people always in the same way: “I am a black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” And she was. But what she represented is immeasurable. She could not be defined by one word. She was the voice of the many, the voice that united.
‘But my life is not portable now, said the trollop maiden. I need fixed light to make my witless orchids grow.’ The Trollop Maiden – Audre.
Audre was as concerned with class, gender and sexuality as she was with race. She valued the differences between humanity as strengths, not weaknesses, using her phenomenal creative talent to confront and address these issues and the injustices of classism, homophobia, racism and sexism. Her words were as mantras: ‘Your silence will not protect you’, and, ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’ She escaped definition, her work for all identities. “There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem,” she once said, “and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.” The riches she left behind continue to influence to this very day.
The future of our Earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference.
– Audre.
Today, she is remembered as a poet and as a warrior, valiantly fighting many battles with just her words. She could be considered the warrior poet, but she believed all women are warriors. She recognised that there is no perfect time to speak up, so speak up now and never hold your tongue. It was, perhaps, the greatest legacy she left behind.
Her words are as powerful today as they ever were.
While we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
– Audre.
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Image (click on it to enlarge): 1) Audre Lorde Image Credit: https://www.biography.com/writer/audre-lorde
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