by Jacquelyn Pope
from Callaloo, Spring 2007
"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," wrote Audre Lorde in her essay, "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action." Poet, activist and icon, Lorde profoundly shaped the women's and gay liberation movements of the 1970s and 1980s, and her words resonate powerfully today. This comprehensive biography, the first about Lorde to be published, fully renders Lorde's life and legacy, providing a vivid account of the development of her activism and documenting the evolution of her ideas over the course of her working life.
Organized chronologically, Warrior Poet is divided into two parts, which cover "two lives." As Alexis DeVeaux explains in her introduction, Lorde's first life was determined by "the three themes of escape, freedom, and self-actualization," and this part comprises most of the book, covering her childhood, adolescence, and coming of age as a poet, mother, an out lesbian, and later as a public figure. Lorde's "second life," covered in a single chapter and a five-page epilogue, began in 1978 after she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy; in DeVeaux's words, "the impact of cancer performed a transfiguration not only of Lorde's physicality but of her personality, creativity, and social activism" (xii). The book concludes in 1986, when Lorde moved to St. Croix to live with the scholar and activist Gloria Joseph, thus returning to the Caribbean her parents had emigrated from; it was the place where she would die at the age of fifty-eight. The symmetry of this return aside, DeVeaux notes that a compelling reason why she ended the narrative at that point is because she "did not wish to overemphasize" Lorde's long struggle with cancer (xiv).
Born in Harlem in 1934, the youngest of three daughters, Audre Lorde was reared in a strict household that, ironically perhaps, did much to spur her drive and ambition.
Her parents were Catholics with strong work ethics and definite ideas about how their daughters should behave. Lorde's mother in particular was emotionally distant, a light-skinned woman who constantly disparaged dark-skinned people. Alienated from her parents, different in temperament and interests than her two sisters, Lorde was driven to become an excellent student, thereby gaining a certain measure of freedom. Her academic success led to admission to Hunter High School, where she forged friendships with other serious, iconoclastic students. She had crushes on other girls and on female teachers, experiencing "mixed feelings" about her sexuality. She also began publishing poems. By graduation life at home had become intolerable, and Lorde found a job, moved in with a friend, and later began studies at Hunter College. She dropped out of Hunter in 1952, leaving New York and traveling to Mexico, where she had brief but significant relationships with women, developing "a deeper sense of herself as lesbian" (53). She remained largely closeted, though, returning to New York, her studies, and a complex social life that included sexual relationships with women and men. In 1962 she married Ed Rollins, a white, gay lawyer; they had a daughter and a son before the marriage fell apart in 1970.
By then Lorde had begun a relationship with Frances Clayton, a white academic Lorde met when the two were exchange instructors at Tougaloo College. Lorde's commitment to Clayton (though not to monogamy) led her to live openly as a lesbian for the first time. Together they formed a new household, sharing responsibilities for parenting Elizabeth and Jonathan, Lorde's children. They purchased a house on Staten Island, where they had more trees and space than in Manhattan, but where, initially, the family was the frequent target of racist and homophobic antagonism.
With her domestic life more settled than it had ever been before, Lorde was able to devote herself more fully to her writing and to feminist activism. DeVeaux provides skillful outlines of the developments of the tumultuous 1970s, a task that is complicated by the intricacies of Lorde's personal relationships. As Lorde's poetry gained recognition and her involvement with feminist organizations increased, the public and private aspects of her life began to come together as they never had before. DeVeaux deftly sketches the decisions and events that were pivotal in Lorde's political life, as well as her evolving disillusionment and anger with the race and class assumptions of the white majority of the women's movement. As she began to define herself explicitly as a Black feminist lesbian, Lorde wrote about anger, the erotic, and about the transformative power of poetry in formative essays that quickly became touchstones of feminist thought. Her poetry, too, had become explicitly concerned with power, often taking the social struggles and tragedies of the time as its subject, rather than the more generalized and conventionally "literary" material of her first collections. Though Lorde was critical of white feminists, she had become accustomed to being a voice of authority among them. As she became involved with the developing Black feminist movement, working with groups such as the Combahee River Collective, she was forced to come to terms with a dynamic that was complicated in ways that were quite different. The other women were younger than she was, and this fact was accentuated by Lorde's persona as a mother figure. Their ideas about sexual relationships ran counter to her own experience, and "unlike the groups of white women Lorde primarily interacted with, she had no racialized upper hand [. . .] in their company" (218). Despite these differences, Lorde continued to work with younger Black feminists, including Barbara Smith, who with Lorde co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980. The first press run by women of color, for women of color, in the United States, it would have a defining role in expanding the women's movement to include the voices of all women. DeVeaux provides good capsule histories of these groups and valuable context for the development of women's presses and journals at that time, including political differences, personal misunderstandings, and continual financial struggles that were exacerbated by the unleashing of Reaganomics.
By the 1980s Lorde was well-established as a poet, and her other publications expanded her reputation. The Cancer Journals, an intimate account of living with the disease and the fear it engenders, was published in 1980. A landmark work that sparked discussion of the disease among large groups of women, it was also an act of reinvention, as Lorde drew from African mythologies and the African-based spirituality she had been exploring in poems for some time, linking them with her experience as a cancer survivor. Lorde's only work of fiction, an autobiographically-based work titled Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, appeared in 1982 and expanded her explorations of African and Caribbean spiritualities and aesthetics, as well as female-centered notions of home, culture, and community. Lorde coined the term "biomythography" to describe Zami, claiming it was an entirely new genre. According to DeVeaux, "Zami was Lorde's most comprehensive treatment of her identities: it illustrated that, however much these identities were shaped by living in America, they were deeply non-Western in concept. The singular impact of Zami was—and remains—its ability to connect with multiple racial and ethnic populations of lesbian, gay, heterosexual, and academic readers in and beyond the United States" (314).
In 1984, doctors found a tumor on her liver, which they presumed had metastasized from the breast cancer she had eight years earlier. Lorde battled the depression this recurrence caused, in part, by traveling extensively again. She moved to St. Croix in 1986, having "found the spiritual home she'd spent a lifetime searching for" (361). Shortly before her death in 1992, Lorde took the name "Gamba Adisa," meaning "warrior" and "she who makes her meaning known." These names were particularly apt, as Warrior Poet makes clear: throughout her life Lorde was unflinchingly direct and fiercely uncompromising, in both her public and personal lives. Warrior Poet provides a provocative portrait of Audre Lorde's public life, and supplies important insights into her private life, though it also raises questions that are not always addressed. For example, how did her two children react to their mother's public persona, and to the increasing amount of time she spent away from home? How did her mother and sisters respond? How was the period of estrangement with her mother and sisters repaired? Throughout her life, Lorde suffered from periods of depression, loneliness, and a certain amount of writerly paranoia, but maintained vital friendships, often over great distances. The book provides plenty of evidence that Lorde could be quite charming and inspire great loyalty, but also that she could be controlling, insisting on the primacy of her point of view. DeVeaux does not shy away from providing negative personal details about her subject, such as Lorde's regular use of amphetamines, her capacity for violence against those she loved, or her tendency to sexualize friendships. Without these humanizing details, the book would have run the risk of presenting Lorde as an icon, diminishing the power of her multiple struggles and multiple identities. DeVeaux's acknowledgement that her book is "the story of the story" of Lorde's life, and that "competing truths, or 'facts,' are useful to shaping complexities rather than absolutes" (xiii) are useful to keep in mind. Audre Lorde's story is undeniably complex—it is also an extraordinarily compelling one of self-invention, survival and tenacity. She took the lifelong sense of being an outsider and transformed it into a highly evolved theory of difference that enabled her to articulate the complexities of oppression, in the United States and in the wider world. Alexis DeVeaux has done an excellent job of bringing Lorde's life—or lives—into sharply defined focus.
WORKS CITED
Lorde, Audre. "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action." Sister Outsider. New York: Crossing Press, 1984. 40-44.
About the Author
Jacquelyn Pope is a writer and translator whose work has appeared most recently in The New Republic, Partisan Review, Gulf Coast, and Callaloo.
Texas A&M University
Editor: Charles H. Rowell
Managing Editor: Kyle G. Dargan
Copyright © 2007 by Charles H. Rowell
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
