Audre Lorde

Lorde, Audre (1934–1992), poet, essayist, autobiographer, novelist, and nonfiction writer, also wrote under the pseudonym Rey Domini. American writer Audre Lorde names herself as “a black feminist lesbian mother poet” because her identity is based on the relationship of many divergent perspectives once perceived as incompatible. Thematically, she expresses or explores pride, love, anger, fear, racial and sexual oppression, urban neglect, and personal survival. Moreover, she eschews a hope for a better humanity by revealing truth in her poetry. She states, “I feel 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 unmitigating pain.” Lorde was a prolific writer who continually explored the marginalizations experienced by individuals in a society fearful of differences.

Audrey Geraldine Lorde was born in New York City to laborer Frederic Byron and Linda Belmar Lorde, immigrants from the West Indies who had hoped to return until the depression dashed their plans. The youngest of three daughters, she grew up in Manhattan where she attended Roman Catholic schools, retreating silently into reading and the discovery of writing poetry. She wrote her first poem when she was in the eighth grade. Rebelling at the isolation and strict rules of her parents, she befriended others at Hunter High School who were also viewed as outcasts. After graduating from high school, she attended Hunter College from 1954 to 1959, graduating with a bachelor's degree. While studying library science, Lorde supported herself working various odd jobs: factory worker, ghost writer, social worker, X-ray technician, medical clerk, and arts and crafts supervisor. In 1954, she spent a pivotal year as a student at the National University of Mexico, a period described by Lorde as a time of affirmation and renewal because 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. During this time she also worked as a librarian at Mount Vernon Public Library and married attorney Edward Ashley Rollins; they later divorced in 1970 after having two children, Elizabeth and Johnathan. In 1966, Lorde became head librarian at Town School Library in New York City where she remained until 1968.

A turning point for Lorde was the year 1968. She received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and in spring of 1968 she became poet in residence at Tougaloo College, a small historically black institution in Mississippi. Her experiences as both teacher and writer of poetry virtually changed Lorde's life. 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 High School. This volume was cited as an innovative and refreshing rhetorical departure from the confrontational tone prevalent in African American poetry at the time. Dudley Randall, fellow 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.” Lorde's second volume, Cables to Rage (1970), which was mainly written during her tenure at Tougaloo, 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: “we shall love each other here if ever at all.” This collection was published in London but distributed in America by Randall's Broadside Press.

Her next volume of poetry, From a Land Where Other People Live (1973), was published by Broadside Press. There exists obvious personal and poetic growth in her expanding thematic scope and vision of worldwide injustice and oppression. Her subtle anger is fully developed yet she addresses other important concerns: the complexities surrounding her existence as an African American and as a woman, mother, lover, and friend. Anger, terror, loneliness, love, and impatience illuminate the pages of From a Land Where Other People Live as Lorde's personal experiences have now become universal. This volume was nominated for the National Book Award for poetry in 1973.

Lorde's New York Head Shop and Museum (1974) examines political and social issues and was often characterized as her most radical poetry yet. In this volume, Lorde takes the reader on a visual journey through her native New York City while presenting poetic images of urban decay, neglect, and poverty that confront its inhabitants every day. Lorde believed that political action was the necessary ingredient for change: “I have come to believe in death and renewal by fire.” Occasionally, New York Head Shop and Museum resembles the rebellious yet proud tone of many black poets of the 1960s.

Coal (1976) introduced Lorde to a wider audience because it was her first volume to be released by a major publisher, W. W. Norton. This volume compiles poetry from her first two books, The First Cities and Cables to Rage, but is significant also because it began Lorde's association with Adrienne Rich, one of Norton's most acclaimed poets, who introduced her to a larger white audience. Coal contains many themes similar to those found in New York Head Shop and Museum and demonstrates her superb metaphorical craft. In the title poem “Coal” she asserts and celebrates her blackness. Lorde is painfully aware that many strangers overlook her blackness by “cancelling me out.” Many of her poems in Coal are also an indictment of an unjust society that allows women to be treated unfairly, sometimes brutally, and this acknowledgment by Lorde intensifies her plea for cooperation and sisterhood among women.

Lorde's seventh book of poetry, The Black Unicorn (1978), also published by Norton, is widely considered the most complex yet brilliant masterpiece written during her prolific literary career. In this volume, Lorde spans three centuries of the black diaspora to reclaim African mythology as the basis for her themes about women, racial pride, motherhood, and spirituality. She also affirms her lesbianism and political concerns. Poet Adrienne Rich wrote: “Refusing to be circumscribed by any simple identity, Audre Lorde writes as a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a Lesbian, a feminist, a visionary.” In this remarkable work, Lorde opens up the myths of Africa to American readers and calls upon the female African gods to grant her wisdom, strength, and endurance.

Lorde's first work of nonfiction was The Cancer Journals (1980), which chronicles introspectively a very frightening ordeal with breast cancer from September 1978 to March 1979. The brief introduction and three chapters based on Lorde's personal diary detail the intermittent despair, hopelessness, and fear for her life and art. When confronted with the possibility of death, Lorde writes candidly that she wants “to write a piece of meaning words on cancer as it affects my life and my consciousness as a woman, a black lesbian feminist mother lover poet all I am.” After undergoing a radical mastectomy, Lorde's spirit still intact, she decides against wearing a prosthesis, rejecting the female physical ideal as presented by the male-dominated media. A Burst of Light (1988) is a continuation of this facet of Lorde's life as it recounts her second battle with the spreading cancer beginning in 1984. This brooding collection discusses Lorde's choice for a noninvasive treatment program utilizing meditation and homeopathy.

In 1982, Lorde cemented her reputation as a poet and expanded her prose writing with the publications of Chosen Poems: Old and New, a compilation of selections from her first five books and several new pieces, and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, a fictionalized account of Lorde's life as a child to a young adult. This autobiographical narrative also exhibits the tenuous, difficult relationship between a daughter and her mother.

As a noted feminist, Lorde painstakingly struggled against the limitations of the label, insisting that feminism is important to all factions of African American life. As a perceived outsider on many fronts, Lorde believed that bringing together divergent groups can only strengthen and heal a torn society: “When I say I am a Black feminist, I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my Blackness as well as my womanness, and therefore my struggles on both these fronts are inseparable.” These views are explored further in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984), published by Crossing Press. This nonfiction collection explores the fear and hatred existing between African American men and women, feminists, or lesbians and the challenge between African American women and white women to find common ground. Another crucial area of emphasis presented in Sister Outsider is the isolation found among African American women and their subsequent rejection of each other's trust, friendship, and gifts. Before her death in 1992, Lorde published Our Dead behind Us (1986), an influential volume of poetry that expresses many similar themes although more deeply and more expanded.

Audre Lorde, who wrote at a feverish pace throughout her literary career, remains an influential and serious talent. To Lorde, her writing was more than a choice or a vocation. It was a responsibility that was necessary for her survival and the survival of others. Her emotional precision blends rage, anger, and destruction with a luminous vision of hope, love, and renewal.

Bibliography

• Claudia Tate, ed., Black Women Writers at Work, 1983, pp. 100–116.
• Jerome Brooks, “In the Name of the Father: The Poetry of Audre Lorde,” in Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans, 1984, pp. 269–276.
• Joan Martin, “The Unicorn Is Black: Audre Lorde in Retrospect,” in Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans, 1984, pp. 277–291.
• Irma McClaurin-Allen, “Audre Lorde,” in DLB, vol. 41, Afro-American Poets since 1955, eds. Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis, 1985, pp. 217–222.
• Margaret Homans, “Audre Lorde,” in African American Writers: Profiles of Their Lives and Works—from the 1700s to the Present, eds. Valerie Smith et al., 1993, pp. 211–224.
• Allison Kimmich, “Writing the Body: From Abject to Subject,” A.B. Auto Biography Studies 13:2 (Fall 1998): 223–234.
• Anna Wilson, “Rites/Rights of Canonization: Audre Lorde as Icon,” in Women Poets of the Americas: Toward a Pan-American Gathering, ed. Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, 1999, pp. 17–33

Beverly Threatt Kulii

For more information on Audre Geraldine Lorde, visit Britannica.com.

The African-American poet Audre Lorde (1934-1992) wrote poetry exploring the relationships between lovers, children and parents, and friends in both a very personal and a socially relevant manner. She was a feminist poet who challenged racial and sexual stereotypes.

Audre Lorde was born in Harlem on February 18, 1934, to West Indian immigrants Frederick Byron and Linda Belmar Lorde. She was an introverted child who did not speak until she was five years old. When she began to communicate, she answered questions with poetry that she had memorized. The limitations of her poetic store forced her at 12 or 13 to compose her own verse.

Lorde attended a Catholic elementary school where she was the first African-American student. She suffered in an environment hostile to her own culture. The nuns, for instance, complained her braids, typical of most little African-American girls, were inappropriate for school.

At Hunter College High School she met Diane DiPrima, who like Lorde was already interested in being a poet. At 15 her first published poem, a tribute to her first love, appeared in Seventeen magazine because the adviser for the high school paper found it too romantic. While in high school Lorde also participated in John Henrik Clark's Harlem Writers' Guild. She credits John Clark, a African-American nationalist, with teaching her about Africa despite his distrust of her interracial and bohemian interests. In 1951 Lorde enrolled at Hunter College. After several years of working at odd jobs and attending classes, she received her B.A. in English literature and philosophy in 1959. In 1954 she had spent a year at the National University of Mexico.

In 1961 Lorde received a Master's in library science from Columbia University and worked as a librarian in the Mount Vernon Public Library (1960-1962), St. Clare's School of Nursing (1965-1966), and The Town School (1966-1968). In 1962 she married a white attorney, Edwin Ashley Rollins, and subsequently had two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan.

In 1967 Diane DiPrima urged her to prepare a manuscript for a first book to be published by Poets Press. Before The First Cities (1968) appeared in print, Lorde was offered a six-weeks' poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, an experience that was pivotal. It was her first trip to the Deep South and her first time teaching. Tougaloo exposed Lorde to an almost all-African-American environment in 1968 when African-American students were becoming militant. There she wrote all the poems of Cables to Rage (1970), realized teaching was far more fulfilling than library work, and met Frances Clayton, a white woman who later became her live-in lover when her children were seven and eight.

On her return to New York Lorde decided to end her marriage and embarked on a teaching career which included a year in the SEEK program of the City University of New York, a pre-baccalaureate program for disadvantaged students; a brief stint at Lehman College where she taught white education students a course on racism; about ten years (1970-1981) as an English professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice; and a full professorship at Hunter College from 1981 into the 1990s.

Lorde's poetry reflected the many contradictions of her life. She wrote a complex verse which was both intensely personal and militantly social. Perhaps the majority of her poems dealt with the emotions, both subtle and fierce, of relationships between lovers, children and parents, and friends. Often this work was nonracial in its presentation. At the same time, Lorde, whose politics reflected a paradoxical mixture of interracial socialism and African-American cultural nationalism, was acutely attuned to the oppressive conditions of American contemporary society. Her poetry was often aimed to slay the dragons of sexism and racism.

Much of Lorde's work concentrated on the victims of American urban life; the children destroyed by neglect and violence; and African-American women, who she felt were devalued by everyone including African-American men. Two of her most memorable poems were "Power, " which responded with rage to the killing of a ten-year-old boy by a New York policeman who was acquitted of murder, and "Need: A Choral Poem, " a striking piece in which the first person voices of two African-American women murdered by African-American men alternate with a chorus (Chosen Poems, Old and New [1982] ). The latter poem revealed a skill for dramatic rendering which is clear in other poems, such as "Martha" in Cables to Rage (1970), a poem which depicted the nightmarish recovery of a former lover who almost dies in a fatal car accident. Other poems, such as "Coal" in Coal (1976), were densely metaphoric.

Lorde's other works include From a Land Where Other People Live (1973), a volume which introduced the use of African mythology for feminist purposes in one poem, "The Winds of Orisha." (Lorde had originally included a lesbian erotic poem, "Love Poem, " but removed it when Dudley Randall, the publisher of Broadside Press, naively expressed puzzlement about its meaning. In this volume the poem "For Each of You, " a message to African-American people, concluded:

 Speak proudly to your children wherever you may find them. Tell them you are the offspring of slaves and your mother was a princess in darkness. 

New York Head Shop and Museum (1974) explored the harsh conditions of urban life. Between Ourselves was published in 1976, and The Black Unicorn (1978) exploited further a pantheon of Yoruba goddesses in the service of feminism. Our Dead Behind Us (1986) and Sister in Arms (1985) were continuations of Lorde's unique blend of the personal and political.

Lorde's prose includes Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1979); The Cancer Journals (1980), a record of her courageous struggle against breast cancer; Zami: A New Spelling of my Name (1982), an autobiography about growing up in the 1950s that Lorde called a biomythology, " "a fiction"; Sister Outsider (1984); and A Burst of Light (1988).

Lorde died on November 17, 1992 losing her 14-year battle to breast cancer. The New York state poet laureate, died at her home in the fashionable Judith's Fancy section of St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. She had spent seven years on the island, where she was known by an African name, Gamba Adisa, which reflected her advocacy of pan-African issues.

In June 1996, Lorde's life was committed to film. Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson's biographical film "A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde, " was made for the "Point Of View" series.

The film traced Lorde's life from birth through her battle with cancer. Griffin and Parkerson stitched together Lorde's many lives, from raising her two children to be "warriors, " to speaking at rallies, to leading university poetry workshops. Part of the stitching includes a brilliantly edited soundtrack of Lorde's voice, period sounds and music montages.

The film explored Lorde's attraction to the underground lesbian subculture of downtown New York when it was tiny, quiet and suppressed in the 1950s. Before American politics hit the streets, Lorde found being black, female and lesbian made her "triply invisible." Lorde tells Griffin and Parkerson her life was fundamentally changed witnessing civil rights clashes in the Deep South firsthand while teaching at Mississippi's Tougaloo College in the watershed year of 1968. Poetry, she realized, had to become public, political and expressive of change as much as of inner sensibilities.

Her colleagues Sonia Sanchez and Adrienne Rich perhaps best explained what made Lorde's evolution special. Like Neruda and Whitman before her, Lorde melded a passionate, erotic vision with an eloquent, bluesy verbal music toward explicit political ends.

Lorde's last battle was with breast cancer for 14 years, and the camera followed her from robust health until she was bald and raspy-voiced, though still talkative. Before she died, Lorde told the filmmakers something which encapsulates her personality: As motivation during cancer therapy, she would envision her cancer cells as white South African policemen. Apartheid's battle, at least, was finally won.

Further Reading

Lorde appears in the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Afro-American Poets Since 1955 (Volume 41). For further biographical and critical information, see also Lorde, Sister Outsider (1984); Claudia Tate, Black Women Writers At Work (1983); Mari Evans, Black Women Writers 1950-1980 (1984); Gloria T. Hull, "Living on the Line: Audre Lorde and Our Dead Behind Us" in Changing Our Own Words (1989); and Chinosole, "Audre Lorde and Matrilineal Diaspora" in Wild Women in the Whirlwind (1990). Also see Chicago Tribune, November 19, 1992; LosAngeles Times, November 19, 1992; and June 21, 1996, (Home Edition).

poet; novelist; activist

Personal Information

Born Audre Geraldine Lorde, February 18, 1934, in New York, NY; died of cancer, November 17, 1992, in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands; daughter of Frederic Byron (a real estate broker) and Linda (Belmar) Lorde; married Edwon Ashley Rollins (an attorney), March 31, 1962 (divorced, 1970); children: Elizabeth, Jonathan.
Education: Attended National University of Mexico, 1954; Hunter College (now Hunter College of the City University of New York), B.A., 1959; Columbia University, M.L.S., 1961.
Politics: Radical.

Career

Librarian in New York City, 1961-68; writer and lecturer, 1968-92. Professor of English and creative writing at City College of the City University of New York, 1968-70, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 1970, and Hunter College, 1980-93; Thomas Hunter Distinguished Professor at Hunter, 1987-93. Cofounder, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1980, and Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa (a political committee).

Life's Work

Poet, essayist, and lecturer Audre Lorde spent a lifetime exploring the pleasures and pain of being a black woman in America. Lorde's was an essential voice in African American letters. Her work bravely confronted some of the most important crises in American society: racism, homophobia, the insensitivity of the health care system, relations between the sexes, and parenthood. Fellow author Jewelle Gomez noted in Essence magazine that Lorde's work in several genres was "a mandate to move through ... victimization and create independent standards that will help us live full and righteous lives.... She was a figure all women could use as a grounding when they fought for recognition of their worth." At the time of her death in 1992, Audre Lorde was poet laureate of New York State--an honor bestowed upon her the prior year.

Lorde first made her literary name as a member of the black arts movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Along with other writers such as Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka, Lorde used poetry to confront both the joy she found in her intimate and familial relationships as well as her rage against the racism and discriminations she faced in her daily life. A unique blend of personal ruminations and reflections on global social issues, her writings deal with such topics as her own sexuality, her role as a parent, her unresolved feelings toward her mother, and significance of Africa as a cultural and psychic "fatherland" for blcak americans. Gomez wrote of Lorde: "There was an undeniable link between all parts of her self--feminist, Black woman, lesbian, activist, artist, friend, teacher and mother. Her insistence on being seen for her whole self and refusal to let one aspect of her being dominate or obscure the other made Audre Lorde's work and life an invaluable gift and a persistent necessity."

Lorde was born and raised in New York City's Harlem, but her parents both retained links with their Caribbean island home. Her father was from Barbados and her mother from Grenada. Before she was born, her parents left the economically depressed conditions on Grenada to move to New York City. The poet told Progressive magazine: "My mother had sisters working in New York. The dream in those days was to make some money in New York and return to the islands to open a little store or business. My parents came to New York, and then came the Depression and babies--I was born in 1934."

Lorde and her sisters grew up in an apartment at 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue. Her father found work as a real estate broker, and frugal living enabled him to send his daughters to Catholic school. Lorde recalled that she loved to read and often memorized passages of poetry that she found relevant to her experience. When other people's poetry no longer corresponded to the depths of her own feelings, she began to write herself. "I wrote poetry in the seventh or eighth grade and loved music," she told Progressive. "Some teachers encouraged me, and I expressed a lot of things about how I felt. I was one of the editors of our high-school magazine and wrote a love sonnet for the magazine. But a teacher said ... it couldn't be published. So I submitted it to Seventeen magazine and it was published there."

After graduating from New York's Hunter High School in 1951, Lorde spent a few years working in Manhattan and traveling in other parts of North America. A pivotal experience occurred when she visited Mexico and saw a more tolerant racial climate. "I'd always had the feeling I was strange, different, that there was something wrong with me," she told Progressive. "In Mexico I learned to walk upright, to say the things I felt. I became conscious that I hadn't the courage to speak up." Lorde returned to New York and earned a bachelor's degree at Hunter College--now a part of the City University of New York. She then took a master's degree in library science at Columbia University, finishing her studies in 1961.

Audre Lorde might have drifted into the financially comfortable, relatively obscure work of a community librarian. Instead she became engaged as a political activist, a feminist, and a writer. She married a white Brooklyn attorney in 1962 and lived with him for eight years before divorcing. Both Lorde and her husband remained actively involved with their son and daughter, who were born during this period.

Lorde began giving poetry readings and publishing her verse in the late 1960s, a very important time in the evolution of black American letters; a number of articulate, passionate poets and lecturers used their writings as a means to explore themes such as racism and empowerment. Lorde was among those who wrote and spoke openly about issues such as lesbianism, women's rights, and bigotry. Early poems such as "The American Cancer Society or There Is More Than One Way to Skin a Coon" and "The Brown Menace or Poem to the Survival of Roaches" deal with white America's not-so-subtle attempts to eradicate black culture.

Gomez vividly remembered Lorde's contribution to the black arts movement. "Activists, students and neighborhood folks flocked to church basements, community centers and theaters looking to the rhythm of poets like Nikki Giovanni, Jayne Cortez, Amiri Baraka and Audre for inspiration while we shaped our newly rediscovered black identities. Audre ... was the vision for our new beginning."

Her fame as a poet well established by the mid-1970s, Lorde began a long teaching career in a series of American universities, culminating in her being named Thomas Hunter Professor of English at Hunter College. Her third book of poetry, From a Land Where Other People Live, was nominated for a National Book Award in 1974 and is still considered one of the landmark works of black literature from the 1970s.

Late in 1978 Lorde was stricken with breast cancer. She was 44 at the time. The experience of undergoing a mastectomy brought her into contact with a whole new realm of feminist problems: against the "advice" of the health care workers who attended her, she refused to wear a prosthesis that would help to mask the results of the surgery. Instead she spoke and wrote openly about her operation in an attempt to share her particular experience with other women facing the same disease. At a time when one woman in ten might expect to contract breast cancer, Lorde's was among the pioneering written works about the personal, emotional side of the ordeal. Her book on the subject, The Cancer Journals, was published in 1980 and remains in print today.

Her first illness opened new paths of self-expression for Lorde. Although she continued to write and publish poetry, she also finished a novel/memoir in 1982 entitled Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. In addition, she contributed numerous essays on political and health care topics to left-wing and black-audience periodicals. Recognizing that other women writers needed a forum for their works, Lorde helped to launch Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980 and a political committee called Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa. She remained active with both ventures until her death.

On February 1, 1984--two weeks before her 50th birthday--Lorde was diagnosed with liver cancer. The condition is very serious and usually results in death within two years. Once again Lorde was confronted with an American medical establishment with its routines and callous disregard for feelings. Doctors told her to have surgery right away; otherwise she would soon die a terribly painful death. In her 1988 book A Burst of Light, Lorde chronicled her decision not to accept the strategy of her New York tumor specialist, as well as her subsequent treatment in Europe with homeopathic medicine and meditation. "Out of this personal fight came political policy," wrote Gomez. "Her ground-breaking book, written relatively early in her struggle with cancer, helped to restimulate the feminist movement's attention to women's health care."

Lorde underwent experimental treatment in Germany and Switzerland, and she lived much longer than American doctors had predicted. One lasting ramification of her health problems was a change in her home address. A resident of New York City most of her life, she decided to move to the United States Virgin Islands, where the warmer weather might be more congenial to her cure. For the remainder of her life she traveled between her home in St. Croix and destinations in America at which she taught, lectured, or engaged in her political or publishing activities.

Reflecting on her return to her Caribbean roots, Lorde told Progressive: "One of the salvations of the Virgin Islands is the recognition of these islands' connection to Caribbean life. At the same time, the Virgin Islands are in a very anomalous position. They are a colony receiving manna from the United States, but on the other hand the United States puts us down. We are neither fish nor fowl. Actually, that is a favorite position of mine, the outsider--there is strength in that, you can see both directions at once."

Lorde continued writing and speaking on important political and social issues as her health deteriorated yet again in the late 1980s. Following the devastation caused to St. Croix by Hurricane Hugo in 1989, she helped organize relief efforts in the American cities where she was so well known. She taught at Hunter College as often as she could, and she received honorary doctorate degrees from several colleges, including Oberlin and Haverford. Also in 1989 her work A Burst of Light won the American Book Award for nonfiction.

Perhaps the highest honor bestowed upon Lorde came in 1991. That year she won New York's Walt Whitman Citation of Merit, an award that recognizes the recipient as poet laureate of New York State. The honor came even as Lorde was struggling with spreading cancer and kidney disease, but she was pleased nonetheless. In an interview granted shortly before her November 1992 death from cancer-related causes, Lorde told Progressive: "Poetry is the conflict in the lives we lead. Poetry as an art intensifies ourselves, alters and underlines our feelings. It is most subversive because it is in the business of encouraging change."

In her book The Cancer Journals, Lorde wrote of black women: "We have been sad long enough to make this earth either weep or grow fertile." Through her own distinguished body of work, Audre Lorde nurtured that fertility--in herself and in other women of all races and creeds.

Awards

National Endowment for the Arts grants, 1968 and 1981; National Book Award nominee for poetry, 1974, for From a Land Where Other People Live; Borough of Manhattan President's Award for literary excellence, 1987; American Book Award, 1989, for A Burst of Light; Walt Whitman Citation of Merit, 1991 (recipient becomes poet laureate of New York); several honorary degrees.

Works

Writings

• The First Cities (poetry), Poets Press, 1968.
• Cables to Rage (poetry), Broadside Press, 1970.
• From a Land Where Other People Live (poetry), Broadside Press, 1973.
• The New York Head Shop and Museum (poetry), Broadside Press, 1974.
• Coal (poetry), Norton, 1976.
• Between Our Selves (poetry), Eidolon, 1976.
• The Black Unicorn (poetry), Norton, 1978.
• The Cancer Journals (nonfiction), Spinsters Ink, 1980.
• Chosen Poems Old and New, Norton, 1982.
• Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (fiction), Crossing Press, 1982.
• Sister Outsider (nonfiction), Crossing Press, 1984.
• Our Dead Behind Us (poetry), Norton, 1986.
• A Burst of Light (nonfiction), Firebrand Books, 1988.
• Also author of fiction under pseudonym Rey Domini; contributor to poetry anthologies and magazines.

Further Reading

Books

• Black Literature Criticism, Gale, 1992.
• Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches from "Contemporary Authors," Gale, 1989, pp. 364-66.
• Christian, Barbara, editor, Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers, Pergamon, 1985.
• Evans, Mari, editor, Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, Doubleday, 1984.
• Hall, Donald, editor, Claims for Poetry, University of Michigan Press, 1982, pp. 282-85.
• Tate, Claudia, editor, Black Women Writers at Work, Continuum, 1984.

• American Poetry Review, March/April 1980, pp. 18-21.
• Denver Quarterly, Spring 1981, pp. 10-27.
• Essence, January 1988, pp. 46-48, 107, 112; May 1993, pp. 89-90, 142-43.
• New York Times, November 20, 1992, p. A-23.
• Progressive, January 1991, pp. 32-33.
• Utne Reader, March/April 1993, p. 20.

— Anne Janette Johnson

Quotes:

"I am deliberate and afraid of nothing."

"Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded..."

"Lorde" redirects here. For the feudal rank, see Lord.

Audre Lorde

Audre Geraldine Lorde (February 18, 1934 - November 17, 1992) was a Caribbean-American writer, poet and activist.

Contents 1 Life 2 Career 3 Theory 4 Lorde and Contemporary Feminist Thought 5 Poetry 6 Bibliography 7 See also 8 Notes 9 External links 9.1 Biographical information

Life

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 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, that she was more interested in the artistic symmetry of the "e"-endings in the the two side-by-side names "Audre Lorde" than in spelling her name the way her parents had intended.^{[1] [2]}

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 homosexuality.

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,^[3] 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, DC ^[4] and was teaching at Howard University. ^[5] Lorde later became romantically involved with Gloria Joseph, her partner until Lorde's death. 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".^[6] In an African naming ceremony before her death, she took the name Gamba Adisa, which means "Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known".

Career

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 Cherrie Moraga, she co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher for women of colour. Lorde was State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992.^[7]

Theory

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'".^[8] 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 which 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 and Contemporary Feminist Thought

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 which led to angry confrontation, most notably in the scathing open letter addressed to radical lesbian feminist Mary Daly.^[9]

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".^[10]

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"^[11], 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".^[12]

Thus did she enrage 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.^{[citation needed]} In response, Lorde wrote "what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority."^[13]

Poetry

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".^[14] She described herself both as a part of a "continuum of women"^[15] and a "concert of voices" within herself.^[16]

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".^[17] 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.

Bibliography

Birkle, Carme. Women’s Stories of the Looking Glass. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1996. . ISBN 3770530837. OCLC 34821525. 

De Veaux, Alexis. Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2004. . ISBN 0393019543. OCLC 53315369. 

Hall, Joan Wylie. Conversations with Audre Lorde. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. . ISBN 1578066425. OCLC 55762793. 

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. . ISBN 9780195341485. 

Keating, AnaLouise (1996). Women Reading Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. ISBN 1566394198. OCLC 33160820. 

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). ISBN 0393044394. OCLC 2074270. 
• Between Our Selves (1976). 
• The Black Unicorn (1978, W.W. Norton Publishing). ISBN 0393045080. OCLC 3966122. 
• The Cancer Journals (1980 Aunt Lute Books). 

Kore Press

• Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1981 Kore Books) Uses of the Erotic. ISBN 9781888553109. 
• Chosen Poems: Old and New (1982). ISBN 0393015769. OCLC 8114592. 
• Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1983, The Crossing Press. )
• Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984, 2007, The Crossing Press). 
• Our Dead Behind Us (1986). ISBN 039302329X. OCLC 13870929. 
• A Burst of Light (1988, Firebrand Books). ISBN 0932379400. OCLC 17619136. 
• The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance (1993). ISBN 0393311708. OCLC 38009170. 

See also

• Audre Lorde Project, an organization in New York City named for Audre Lorde
• Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, an organization in New York City named for Michael Callen and Audre Lorde.
• Teaching for social justice
• Black Feminism
• Black lesbianism
• Womanism
• Critical social theory
• Black women’s literature
• Literary criticism
• African-American literature

Notes

1. ^ Parks, Rev. Gabriele (3 August 2008). "Audre Lorde". Thomas Paine Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. http://www.tpuuf.org/?p=130. Retrieved 9 July 2009. 
2. ^ Lorde, Audre (1982). Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Crossing Press. 
3. ^ "Audre Lorde". Poets.org. http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/306. Retrieved 9 July 2009. 
4. ^ de Veaux, Alexis (2004), A Biography of Audre Lorde, W.W. Norton & Co., p. 174, ISBN 9780393329353 
5. ^ Thompson, Mildred (Spring 1987). "Memoirs of an Artist". SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women IV (1): 41-44. 
6. ^ Tharps, Lori L. (September 2004). "Speaking the Truth". Essence. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1264/is_5_35/ai_n6198441. Retrieved 2007-03-17. 
7. ^ "Audre Lorde 1934 - 1992". Enotes.com. http://www.enotes.com/poetry-criticism/lorde-audre. Retrieved 2009-07-09. 
8. ^ Birkle 202.
9. ^ Lorde, Audre (1984). Sister Outsider. Berkeley: Crossing Press. p. 66. http://books.google.com/books?id=r3Ct8Qw3de8C. 
10. ^ De Veaux 247.
11. ^ Sister Outsider 110-114.
12. ^ De Veaux 249.
13. ^ Sister Outsider 132.
14. ^ The Cancer Journals 12-13.
15. ^ The Cancer Journals 17.
16. ^ The Cancer Journals 31.
17. ^ Birkle 180.

External links

• Works by or about Audre Lorde in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Biographical information

• Maximum Files
• Biography
• A Tribute to Audre Lorde
• Voices From the Gaps: Audre Lorde
• The Edge of Each Other's Battles: The Vision of Audre Lorde - a documentary by Jennifer Abod
• Audre Lorde's Life - Modern American Poetry

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Audre Lorde

v • d • e Works by Audre Lorde Collections of poems: The First Cities · Cables to Rage · From a Land Where Other People Live · New York Head Shop and Museum · Coal · Between Our Selves · The Black Unicorn · Chosen Poems: Old and New · Our Dead Behind Us · Need: A Chorale for Black Woman Voices · The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance Prose: The Cancer Journals · Zami: A New Spelling of My Name · Sister Outsider · A Burst of Light

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