Audre Lorde changed the way generations of feminists throughout the world think about intersectional identities, social justice, and the role of poetry in forging more equitable worlds. She was a ‘travelling cultural worker’ (as Gloria Joseph, one of Lorde’s partners, called her) who 32 years after her death, continues to travel through time, providing insights and provoking admiration for the beauty of her poetry and essays. She frequently maintained that ‘I am a Black, Lesbian, Feminist, warrior, poet, mother, doing my work’. That work continues to inspire today.
.
Lorde was born in Harlem in 1934, the youngest of three daughters. Her parents were working-class, hard-working, Catholic immigrants from Barbados and Grenada. Her childhood was marked by near-blindness; she did not speak until she was five years old. She attended Hunter College, where she earned a BA in 1959 and then Columbia University School of Library Science, where she was awarded a Master of Library Science a year later. She worked as a librarian until 1968, when she published her first book of poetry, after which she was in demand as a teacher in a number of colleges and universities before being appointed Professor of English at the City University of New York. Lorde won numerous awards for her poetry, essays, and civil rights activism. She was a visionary and is often called the ‘founding mother of Black feminism’.
For me, Lorde and fellow-poet Adrienne Rich (the two women were friends) changed my life. I started to read their poetry as a young, white feminist and budding historian at Auckland University, New Zealand. Lorde taught me to ‘check my privilege’; her writings exposed the whiteness of the socialist-feminist movements I belonged to.
I can still recall the shame I experienced when reading her poem ‘Who Said it was Simple’, which criticises the inability of so many white women to ‘see’ their own racialised and classed privileges. Lorde wrote the poem during the First Women’s March in New York City in 1970. As she explained in an interview,
I drove down with some women in the academic community who spent most of their time discussing who was going to take care of their little kids. And they stressed how difficult it was to get au pair girls, Mexican housemaids, live-ins, etc., to take care of their children. I was so absolutely horrified at their total inability to see the connection between this and the purpose of the March.
The poem begins by speaking about a ‘tree of anger’ that has ‘so many roots’. The poet’s rage focuses on the white feminists who, before they march for women’s freedoms, discuss
the problematic girls
They hire to make them free.
An almost white counterman passes
A waiting brother to serve them first
And the ladies neither notice nor reject
The slighter pleasures of their slavery.
But I who are bound by my mirror
As well as my bed
See causes in colour
As well as sex.
The poet rails against these women’s privilege, which lies in their skin colour (a ‘slighter pleasure’ despite their ‘slavery’ under patriarchy). As a feminist, she acknowledges her connection to these white women, as well as her distance from them, as a woman of colour. The poet also understands her ties to the Black man waiting his turn at the counter (who is served after the white women), but, as a lesbian-feminist, she is not ‘a brother’. Unlike the white feminists, who take it as a ‘given’ that they will be served first, the Black feminist is ‘bound by my mirror’, seeing racialisation and sexism as compounding influences in her marginalisation within patriarchy and white-dominated feminism. It is the intersectionality of identities that make her oppression particularly painful. Lorde forcefully challenges the racist, classist, and heteronormative politics of dominant feminist groupss and sections of Black Liberation movements.
Lorde develops this theme in her letter to white feminist Mary Daly. She reminds Daly that
to imply… that all women suffer the same oppression simply because we are women is to lose sight of the many varied tools of patriarchy. It is to ignore how those tools are used by women without awareness against each other.
In ‘Age, Race, Class, and Sex’, she observes that ‘some problems we share as women’ but ‘some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the streets, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons we are dying’. Lorde contends that feminists must unite in their fight against patriarchy, but she insists that ‘in order to come together we must recognize each other’. As she states in her most quoted essay, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’ (1984), women have been taught ‘either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change’. For Lorde, differences are strengths.
Lorde also speaks directly to Black male activists, observing that Black patriarchy is also problematic. As she told Rich, ‘Being an open lesbian in the Black community is not easy, although being closeted is even harder’. She pleaded with ‘Black america’ not to ‘repeat white america’s mistakes’ by ‘denying the oppressive nature of male privilege’. If men of colour accept the privileges assigned to them as men (by brutalising women, for example), they will be acting in service of ‘our destroyers’. Remember, she counsels, ‘One oppression does not justify another’.
Such reflections centre around Lorde’s views about the creative necessity of difference. She argues against a ‘melting pot’ melding of difference within oneself or Others. There is no need to prioritise one identity (say, skin colour) over another (say, gender or sexuality): hybridity is a strength. The ‘house of difference’ is crucial for creativity.
This is important because Lorde believes passionately in the power of language – specifically poetry – in struggles for recognition. When I was a young woman, this was a revelation. I had always identified as a socialist feminist, emphasising the materiality of oppressions: economy was everything; aesthetics, an add-on. But Lorde taught me the importance of poetry in making visible what is difficult to name. This is why the most influential essay for me was Lorde’s ‘Poetry is Not a Luxury’. In it, she states that
For women… poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams towards survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.
Contrary to poet W. H. Auden’s cynical contention that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, Lorde exclaims that ‘Poetry makes something happen, indeed. It makes you happen’. Poetry is crucial for social as well as personal transformations.
Finally, Lorde believes in centring sensuality: the body is celebrated as a source of power. This is eloquently expressed in ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’, where she writes that
The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information.
For Lorde, the erotic is
an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.
The erotic is not only a technique of the self, but a social practice. The ‘sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual’ establishes and cements connections with others. It makes us less afraid of our differences. Pleasure is political.
Lorde died on 17 November 1992 at her home in St Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, after fourteen years with cancer. Her lasting legacy is the reminder that survival and empowerment require us to ‘make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish’.
PS: If you only have time to read one book, try Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Penguin Modern Classics, 2019)
PPS: This blog does not talk about Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (Penguin Modern Classics, 2020). This book is incredible and, if you are interested, I write about it in my blog on Breast Cancer.