I do not have to be you

Audre Lorde​ described herself as a ‘Black lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’; she was also a socialist, a writer, a teacher. But she is best known today for slogans taken from her poems, essays and speeches: ‘Your silence will not protect you’; ‘There is no hierarchy of oppression’; ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’ She is often included among the leading figures of the civil rights era and Black feminism – Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Diane Nash, Angela Y. Davis, Assata Shakur, Kathleen Cleaver – yet her influence was felt not at the height of the movement but during its nadir in the late 1970s, when the possibility of social revolution had disappeared.

Lorde’s poetry, and eventually her prose, came to prominence just as would-be revolutionaries were learning to live with the new dispensation. Different tactics were required, political relationships had to be rebuilt and new alliances considered. In the early years of retreat, Lorde offered a politics that dealt in the realities of survival as well as the necessity of defiance: she refused to give ground to white feminists or to a Black nationalism that assumed women’s subservience. Her critique of 1960s feminism and Black liberation bore none of the scars of the era’s internecine battles.

Lorde’s recent return to popularity, as an Instagram favourite and inspiration to the Black Lives Matter movement, has brought renewed attention to her work but has also, at times, had the effect of de-contextualising it. Alexis Gumbs’s biography, Survival Is a Promise, considers Lorde’s legacy as much as her life. Alexis De Veaux’s Warrior Poet, published in 2004, was a more traditional biography, though her account ended in 1986, six years before Lorde’s death from cancer at the age of 58. Gumbs argues that because Lorde’s legacy is now secure, she has been able to write a different kind of book, what she calls a ‘quantum biography where life in full emerges in the field of relations in each particle’. She is interested in Lorde’s poetry, she explains, not for its aesthetic or historical significance but as evidence of Lorde’s philosophy: a vision of the natural world that includes, but does not elevate, the human.

There was little in Lorde’s early life to suggest she would come to be regarded as the voice of Black feminism. She was born in New York City in 1934 to parents from Grenada and Barbados. Her fair-skinned mother, Linda, who often passed as Hispanic, didn’t let Lorde and her two older sisters play with the Black children from their neighbourhood. The family was Catholic and the girls attended a parochial elementary school. The other pupils were nearly all white. Her parents were often absent, spending long hours keeping their real estate business going during the Depression. Despite this, Lorde was accepted to Hunter College High School, a competitive, fully-funded institution for ‘intellectually gifted young ladies’. Again, most of her peers were white, but Lorde made lifelong friends among the other ‘outsiders’, including Diane di Prima, who shared her love of Romantic poetry.

Lorde broke off relations with her family after graduating from high school and moved to Mexico for a year to escape what she later called the stifling political environment in America. (Anti-communism was on the rise, and Lorde had briefly been involved in the campaign to save the Rosenbergs.) After returning to New York in 1954, she was interviewed by the FBI about the activities of some of her friends and about her time abroad. But this was the extent of her activism. She saw herself, above all, as a poet (‘Spring’ had been published by Seventeen magazine when she was still a teenager). She began going to meetings of the Harlem Writers Guild, though according to De Veaux she found the male-dominated atmosphere, and its Black nationalist politics, off-putting.

She wanted to go to Sarah Lawrence College, but it was too expensive, so she settled instead for a public college in New York. She often had to pause her studies to earn money, working in a factory, as a social worker, an X-ray technician and a medical administrator. She had her first relationship with a woman in 1952 and became part of the lesbian scene in the East Village. In 1961, she was awarded a master’s degree in library science from Columbia, and took a job as a librarian. The following year, as an act of rebellion as much as anything else, she married Edwin Rollins, a white, gay legal aid lawyer; they had two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan.

In January 1964 Negro Digest published ‘Suffer the Children’, inspired by the racist bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama the previous year, which had killed four girls. It was an elegy rather than a protest poem:

Those who loved them remember their child’s laughter.
But he whose hate has robbed him
Of their good
Will come to weep by night above their graves.

Di Prima, by now a poet and publisher herself, offered to publish a collection of Lorde’s poems. First Cities came out during the firestorm of 1968, and achieved some success, though apart from ‘Suffer the Children’ it made almost no reference to the politics of the day. In his review, Dudley Randall wrote that the poems were ‘quiet, introspective’: ‘She does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit in the bone.’ Lorde’s unwillingness to wave the Black flag at the height of the Black Power insurgency made her distinctive among her peers. The same year, Nikki Giovanni, who was nine years younger, published ‘My Poem’, which begins:

i am 25 years old,
black female poet,
wrote a poem asking
nigger can you kill
if they kill me
it won’t stop
the revolution

In an interview, Lorde described poetry as ‘an expression, with love, of some piece of the world in which the poet lives’. But she also made clear that her world was expanding: ‘Up to now my poetry has been intensely personal … I am moving to wider concerns.’

The publication of First Cities led to new opportunities. In 1968 the National Endowment for the Arts provided a grant for a poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. Tougaloo, known for its role in the civil rights movement, had been rocked by protests the year before Lorde arrived, which may have influenced the panel’s choice of poet. But if she was selected for being less radical than other more famous poets, the decision backfired: at Tougaloo, she became involved in a political community for the first time since the Rosenberg campaign. One of her first acts was to organise a writing workshop for students, many of whom were active in civil rights politics. Since she had no teaching experience and no formal training in poetics, the workshop became a forum for discussing and transcribing the lives of the students.

At Tougaloo, Lorde also met Frances Clayton, who became her partner, and co-parent, for the next two decades. Her marriage to Rollins had always been open, but the relationship with Clayton led to its end and to Lorde’s decision to come out publicly as a lesbian. She returned to New York shortly before Martin Luther King was assassinated and began teaching in public schools and colleges. In 1969 Black and Puerto Rican students at the City College of New York demanded that public colleges change their admissions procedures to ensure that student intake reflected the racial composition of the city’s high schools. As a result, New York’s public colleges implemented an ‘open admission’ policy, allowing entry to working-class students of colour whatever their grades. Among the students’ other demands was a call for an expansion of the curriculum, which enabled Lorde, who was then teaching at City College, to introduce courses in Black and women’s studies.

Through these courses she met writers such as Toni Cade Bambara and June Jordan. Bambara included two of Lorde’s poems in her treatise on Black feminism, The Black Woman (1970). A recommendation from Gwendolyn Brooks led to Broadside, a Black publishing house, putting out Lorde’s From a Land Where Other People Live in 1973. It was a finalist for the 1974 National Book Award for poetry, alongside collections by Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker and Allen Ginsberg. Rich and Ginsberg were awarded the prize jointly, but sticking to an agreement between the three women nominees, Rich invited Lorde to join her onstage, where she read from their co-authored statement denouncing ‘patriarchal competition’:

We, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and Alice Walker, together accept this award in the name of all the women whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world, and in the name of those who, like us, have been tolerated as token women in this culture … poetry – if it is poetry – exists in a realm beyond ranking and comparison.

Unlike her first book, the poems in From a Land Where Other People Live commented on contemporary politics. In ‘Who Said It Was Simple’, the speaker observes the interplay of race and class in an everyday scene. A group of white women, meeting for lunch before a feminist march, discuss ‘the problematic girls/they hire to make them free’. The Black waiter who tries to serve them is usurped by the ‘almost white counterman’. The ‘ladies’ pay no attention, but the speaker, who is ‘bound by my mirror/as well as my bed’, sees ‘causes in colour/as well as sex’.

The poems in this collection had a new authority: ‘I am deliberate/And afraid/Of nothing.’ In ‘Power’, about a New York City detective getting away with the murder of a Black child, this authority is combined with maternal rage: ‘The difference between poetry and rhetoric/Is being ready to kill/yourself/instead of your children.’ The first and second stanzas describe the predicament of trying to write poetry in a state of horror (‘his shattered black/face off the edge of my sleep … my stomach churns’) while the third stanza adopts a tone that is almost startlingly detached to describe the murder:

A policeman who shot down a ten-year-old in Queens
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood
and a voice said ‘Die you little motherfucker’ and
there are tapes to prove it. At his trial
this policeman said in his own defence
‘I didn’t notice the size nor nothing else
only the colour.’ And
there are tapes to prove that, too.

Lorde’s friendship with Barbara Smith, a prominent Black feminist and lesbian, drew her into the orbit of the Combahee River Collective. By the mid-1970s, many Black women activists had grown tired of trying to agitate within the broader feminist and civil rights movements. The Combahee River Collective splintered from the National Black Feminist Organisation in 1974. Even among radical Black feminist organisations, the collective was notable for its defence of Black lesbians and its willingness to organise. But the main thrust of its political activity was consciousness raising, debate and discussion; mainstream politics were moving firmly to the right.

Lorde wrote about US imperialism in Grenada, and American complicity with apartheid South Africa, but most of her writings concern relations between individuals: between progressive Black men and Black women, between white feminists and Black feminists, between straight women and lesbians. Like James Baldwin, she thought social revolution required a reckoning of all relationships, including the individual’s relationship to herself. As she writes in ‘Learning from the 1960s’: ‘If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed only against the external conditions of our oppression is not enough … we must recognise the despair oppression plants within each of us.’

This was a pivot away from the ‘identity politics’ that the Combahee River Collective espoused in their 1977 statement. Although she attended Combahee consciousness raising retreats, Lorde never invoked the terminology of identity politics. She was more preoccupied with the way difference is mediated:

You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognise that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work towards that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognise our sameness.

Gumbs celebrates Lorde as a ‘multigenerational healing force’ as well as a ‘hybrid dancer, ancient avatar, portal icon, altar smoke’. De Veaux’s Lorde is a more complicated figure, one who could be angry and controlling. She transgressed personal boundaries. She could be difficult to deal with, even mean. In her romantic relationships, she sometimes replicated the heterosexual dynamics she elsewhere decried. Clayton refused to be interviewed for De Veaux’s biography because (in De Veaux’s words) she ‘wanted nothing more to do with Audre Lorde’.

Gumbs seems determined to soften De Veaux’s portrait. She writes compellingly of Lorde’s childhood and through close readings of the poems makes the case that Lorde continued to be affected by the suicide of her friend Genevieve Johnson, the first woman she fell for. She is good on the isolation Lorde experienced at points in her teaching career, in mainstream publishing and on the conference circuit. Elsewhere she is less convincing. Regarding the issues raised by De Veaux, Gumbs offers: ‘There are differing opinions on how Audre navigated intimate boundaries.’

De Veaux notes that Lorde tended to have affairs with younger women who idolised her and that she misled her partners, promising monogamy while hiding her affairs. Lorde’s ‘sexual aggressiveness’, she writes, ‘was part of a need to control every aspect of her connection to other women’. Gumbs seems reluctant to recognise this at times, but pointing out the contradictions in Lorde’s character is valuable (as well as honest).

Throughout her book​ , Gumbs struggles with questions prompted by the notion of ‘a Black feminist ethic’: ‘what is the substance of Black sisterhood?’ and ‘how do sisters disagree?’ She writes at length about Lorde’s relationship with June Jordan. Lorde and Jordan were contemporaries, born two years apart in Harlem to West Indian parents. They met as teachers at City College and moved in the same literary circles. In 1982, however, they had a public falling-out over Zionism and antisemitism. In the wake of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatila massacre, Adrienne Rich, who was friends with both women, joined six other Jewish feminists in declaring support for Zionism and for Israel’s right to exist (she was later active in anti-Zionist organisations). Jordan wrote a response repudiating Rich, which she sent to the journal Woman News as well as to Smith. According to Gumbs’s account, Smith intervened to stop the publication of Jordan’s letter, arguing that it would further divide Black and Jewish women. She also wrote a response to Jordan, signed by Lorde and others, informing her that her letter would be censored and criticising her ‘insensitivity to Jews’. Jordan replied that they had acted ‘in a wrong and cowardly fashion … May you live well with that.’

There was no further correspondence between Lorde and Jordan. Gumbs describes her disappointment on learning about this collapse in Black feminist sisterhood, but it shouldn’t have come as a shock: Lorde often wrote about divisions between Black women. ‘For so long,’ as put it in ‘Scratching the Surface’ (1978), ‘we have been encouraged to view each other with suspicion, as eternal competitors, or as the visible face of our own self-rejection.’ In her essay ‘Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred and Anger’, from 1983, she expanded this argument:

From [birth] we have been steeped in hatred – for our colour, for our sex, for our effrontery in daring to presume we had any right to live. As children we absorbed that hatred, passed it through ourselves, and for the most part, we still live our lives outside of the recognition of what that hatred really is and how it functions. Echoes of it return as cruelty and anger in our dealings with each other.

At a conference of Black writers at Howard four years earlier, Lorde had chosen not to speak in defence of Smith, who had been subjected to homophobic comments after giving a paper. Lorde apologised afterwards and Gumbs suggests that, as the younger of the two, Lorde was unsure ‘how to vocally navigate sisterhood in an explicitly anti-feminist, homophobic space’. This seems generous, although such events were certainly fraught. Smith herself described the hostile atmosphere at the conference: ‘Nothing was said by anyone [about the comments] it was that vicious.’

Lorde wrote the poem ‘A Litany for Survival’ the same year:

and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.

In 1979, presented with another opportunity to speak out, Lorde did not hold back. She was one of only two women of colour invited to talk at a conference celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of The Second Sex. Lorde used her lecture to upbraid the organisers; it was later published as ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’:

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 crucibles 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 stand alone, unpopular, and sometimes reviled, and how 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.

Lorde had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978 and in 1980 finished her first book of non-fiction, The Cancer Journals. With Gloria Joseph, a professor of African studies who became her final partner, Lorde moved in 1986 to St Croix in the US Virgin Islands, where she died in November 1992. Gumbs is right to say that we shouldn’t hold up Lorde ‘as an example of how life should be lived’ but should instead consider what her work has to say about learning ‘from our own mistakes, our contradictions, our terrors’. Lorde could be sharp with those who looked up to her, but Gumbs relates many instances of her generosity and affection. Her characterisation of Lorde as a Black feminist activist misses the mark, however. Lorde maintained her distance from organised activism: unlike Smith or Jordan, she never had to persuade her comrades about a strategy, tactic or new idea, lose an argument in order to maintain a relationship or undergo any of the tricky experiences that make politics the complicated business that it is. Her poetry and essays offer something else: a reflection of that work, an analysis of its tensions and a language for its losses and aspirations.