Audre Lorde Overview

Almost from the beginning Audre Lorde questioned the fundamental tag of identity: her name. As a chubby, unruly five-year-old, she dropped the "y" from "Audrey," enjoying the aesthetic balance that "Audre Lorde," with its double "e," created on her blue-lined notebook... [more]

Almost from the beginning Audre Lorde questioned the fundamental tag of identity: her name. As a chubby, unruly five-year-old, she dropped the "y" from "Audrey," enjoying the aesthetic balance that "Audre Lorde," with its double "e," created on her blue-lined notebook paper. Later in life she would adopt an entirely new appellation, Gamba Adisa, meaning "she who makes her meaning clear." Clarification came as a result of Lorde's radical remaking of herself, her claiming of a new political and sexual identity, which she signalled in the title of her 1982 autobiography, "Zami: A New Spelling of My Name." Self-described as "introverted" and "hypersensitive" in childhood, Lorde was lit from within by an intensity of the kind people typically attributed to "little wild black girls who were determined to live." She needed a special language -- poetry -- to express her excess of feeling. "I used to speak in poetry," she explained. "I would read poems, and I would memorize them. People would say, well, what do you think, Audre. What happened to you yesterday? And I would recite a poem and somewhere in that poem there would be a line or a feeling I was sharing." When other people's poems failed to capture what she wanted to say, she began to compose her own. Seventeen magazine published her first effort, a piece which had been rejected by her high school journal as too romantic. Lorde published her first book, "The First Cities," in 1968, the year that saw the beginning of her transformation from librarian to poet and activist. Her second book, "Cable to Rage"(1970), appeared in the year she terminated an eight-year marriage and came out as a lesbian. The book speaks to modern social injustices from a feminist perspective. Lorde continued throughout her life to represent lesbian communities by speaking about sexuality in a direct and personal voice. "I would like to enter a woman the way any man can, and to be entered -- to leave and to be left -- to be hot and hard and soft all at the same time in the cause of our loving," she wrote. Her next few books, including "From a Land Where Other People Live"(1973), confronted racism and sexism in stylistically dense and uncompromising language: "I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds/and a dead child dragging his shattered black/face off the edge of my sleep." Lorde believed it was her 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." Critics agree that few books pursue the expression of pain and rage as poetically as "The Cancer Journals"(1980), Lorde's chronicle of her 14-year battle with breast cancer. Breaking the taboos against women speaking out about their experience of their own bodies, Lorde criticized the predominantly male, white medical profession, which she felt forced sexist values and standards upon female patients. Her decision to live without an artificial breast after her mastectomy put her at the center of an emotional and political debate. Lorde's cancer brought about her premature demise in 1992. She had earned her place on the American political poetry platform when "identity" was the buzzword of the day. Of all the identities Lorde fought to assert in her short lifetime -- mother, lesbian, librarian, activist -- she held poet to be the most dear: "I cannot be simply a black person, and not be a woman, too, nor can I be a woman without being a lesbian. I write for myself and my children and for as many people as possible who can read me. When I say myself, I mean not only the Audre who inhabits my body but all those feisty, incorrigible Black women who insist on standing up and saying I am, and you can't wipe me out, no matter how irritating I am." [show less]