"There are lesbians, God knows... if you came up through lesbian circles in the forties and fifties in New York... who were not feminist and would not call themselves feminists." -- Audre Lorde
Audre Geraldine Lorde (February 18, 1934 — November 17, 1992) was a Caribbean-American writer, poet and activist.
"Art is not living. It is the use of living.""Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away.""Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.""Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.""Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.""But the question is a matter of the survival and the teaching. That's what our work comes down to. No matter where we key into it, it's the same work, just different pieces of ourselves doing it.""But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.""But, on the other hand, I get bored with racism too and recognize that there are still many things to be said about a Black person and a White person loving each other in a racist society.""Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.""I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.""I can't really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too?""I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.""I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.""I would like to do another piece of fiction dealing with a number of issues: Lesbian parenting, the 1960's, and interracial relationships in the Lesbian and Gay community.""I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't.""If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.""In discussions around the hiring and firing of Black faculty at universities, the charge is frequently heard that Black women are more easily hired than are Black men.""In other words, I would be giving in to a myth of sameness which I think can destroy us.""In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.""It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.""It's a struggle but that's why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.""It's possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we'll make it.""Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.""Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.""Our visions begin with our desires.""Part of the lesbian consciousness is an absolute recognition of the erotic within our lives and, taking that a step further, dealing with the erotic not only in sexual terms.""Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.""The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.""The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.""The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.""The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives.""The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.""The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.""There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.""There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.""We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other.""When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.""When I use my strength in the service of my vision it makes no difference whether or not I am afraid.""When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.""When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.""You know how fighting fish do it? They blow bubbles and in each one of those bubbles is an egg and they float the egg up to the surface. They keep this whole heavy nest of eggs floating, and they're constantly repairing it. It's as if they live in both elements.""Your silence will not protect you."
Lorde was born in New York City to Caribbean immigrants Frederick Byron Lorde (called Byron) and Linda Gertrude Belmar Lorde, who settled in Harlem. Nearsighted to the point of being legally blind, and the youngest of three daughters (her sisters named Phyllis and Helen), 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 name while still a child, explaining in 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.
After graduating from Hunter College High School and experiencing the grief of her best friend Genevieve "Gennie" Thompson's death, Lorde immediately left her parents' home and became estranged from her family. She attended Hunter College from 1954 to 1959 and graduated with a bachelor's degree. While studying library science, Lorde supported herself by working various odd jobs such as factory worker, ghost writer, social worker, X-ray technician, medical clerk, and arts and crafts supervisor, moving out of Harlem to Stamford, Connecticut and beginning to explore her lesbian sexuality.
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: she confirmed her identity on personal and artistic levels as a lesbian and poet. On her return to New York, Lorde went to college, worked as a librarian, continued writing and became an active participant in the gay culture of Greenwich Village.
Lorde 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. 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. and was teaching at Howard University. Lorde died on November 17, 1992, in St. Croix, after a 14-year struggle with breast cancer. 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".
Lorde's poetry was published very regularly during the 1960s ... in Langston Hughes's 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 at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, addresses 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. In 1980, together with Barbara Smith and Cherrķe Moraga, she co-founded Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher for women of colour. Lorde was State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992.
Lorde criticised feminists of the 1960s, from the National Organization for Women to Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, for focusing on the particular experiences and values of white middle-class women. 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 recognised 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'". In a period during which the women's movement was associated with white middle-class women, Lorde campaigned for a feminist movement conscious of both race and class.
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. She observes that black women's experiences are different from those of white women, and that, because the experience of the white woman is considered normative, the black woman's experiences are marginalised; similarly, the experiences of the lesbian (and, in particular, the black lesbian) are considered aberrational, not in keeping with the true heart of the feminist movement. Although they are not considered normative, Lorde argues that these experiences are nevertheless valid and feminine.
Lorde stunned white feminists with her claim that racism, sexism and homophobia were linked, all coming from the failure to recognise or inability to tolerate difference. To allow these differences to continue to function as dividers, she believed, would be to replicate the oppression of women: as long as society continues to function in binaries, with a mandatory greater and lesser, Normative and Other, women will never be free.
Lorde set out actively to challenge white women, confronting 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 the scathing open letter addressed to radical lesbian feminist Mary Daly, the reply to which she denied having received.
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 did not go only one way: many white feminists were angered by Lorde's brand of feminism. In her essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House", Lorde attacked the underlying racism of feminism, describing it as unrecognized dependence on the patriarchy. She argued that, by denying difference in the category of women, 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 with white male slave-masters, describing both as "agents of oppression".
In so doing, she enraged a great many white feminists, who saw her essay as an attempt to privilege her identities as black and lesbian, and assume a moral authority based on suffering. Suffering was a condition universal to women, they claimed, and to accuse feminists of racism would cause divisiveness rather than heal it. In response, Lorde wrote "what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority."
A contemporary of such feminist poets as Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich, Lorde also expressed her womanhood through poetry. While Plath and Rich were changing the traditions of both prose and poetry to render them more autobiographical, Lorde combined genres at will: to her, life was essential to text, so everything became autobiographical.
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.
Lorde's conception of her many layers of selfhood is replicated in the multi-genres of her work. Critic Carmen Birkle writes, "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.
Birkle, Carme. Women's Stories of the Looking Glass. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1996.
De Veaux, Alexis. Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2004.
Hall, Joan Wylie. Conversations with Audre Lorde. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004.
Byrd, Rudolph, Cole, Johnnetta Betsch, and Guy-Sheftall, Beverly. I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde New York: Oxford University University Press, 2009.
Lorde, Audre:
The First Cities (1968)
Cables to Rage (1970)
From a Land Where Other People Live (1973)
New York Head Shop and Museum (1974)
Coal (1976)
Between Our Selves (1976)
The Black Unicorn (1978, W.W. Norton Publishing)
The Cancer Journals (1980 Aunt Lute Books)
Kore Press
Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1981 Kore Books)
Chosen Poems: Old and New (1982)
A New Spelling of My Name (1983, The Crossing Press)
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984, 2007, The Crossing Press)
