Last Thursday, February 18, was the birthday of Audre Lorde. This semester, I am teaching a course focused on poetry and social justice, so I think about Audre Lorde’s writing all the time. In thinking about Audre Lorde’s writing all the time, this semester is really no different from all of my other semesters. When I grapple with complicated truths or question poetry’s vitality, I return to Lorde.
In thinking about intersectionality, I return to Lorde. Lorde self-described as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” She was also a prose writer, public speaker, activist, womanist. Near-sighted to legal blindness from her birth in 1934, Lorde was diagnosed with cancer in 1978 and battled breast cancer and then liver cancer during the last years of her life, until her death in 1992. Lorde’s writing reflects the private and public realities of intersectional identity, speaking to race, gender, sexuality, and health and disability. Lorde doesn’t let readers accept a patriarchal monolith, nor does Lorde let readers settle for a feminist monolith.
In the introduction to The Cancer Journals, first published in 1980, Lorde begins with excerpts from her journal. On January 26, 1979:
I could die of difference, or live—myriad selves.
On April 16, 1979:
The enormity of our task, to turn the world around . . . I must be content to see how really little I can do and still do it with an open heart.
On October 3, 1979:
I am defined as other in every group I’m a part of. 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.
On July 10, 1980:
I dreamt I had begun training to change my life, with a teacher who is very shadowy. I was not attending classes, but I was going to learn how to change my whole life, live differently, do everything in a new and different way. I didn’t really understand, but I trusted this shadowy teacher. Another young woman who was there told me she was taking a course in ‘language crazure,’ the opposite of discrazure (the cracking and wearing away of rock). I thought it would be very exciting to study the formation and crack and composure of words, so I told my teacher I wanted to take that course. My teacher said okay, but it wasn’t going to help me any because I had to learn something else, and I wouldn’t get anything new from that class. I replied maybe not, but even though I knew all about rocks, for instance, I still liked studying their composition, and giving a name to the different ingredients of which they were made. It’s very exciting to think of me being all the people in this dream.
Lorde ends her introduction on August 29, 1980, writing:
I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I’ll be sending messages on a ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side. When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less important whether or not I am unafraid . . .
I have found that battling despair does not mean closing my eyes to the enormity of the tasks of effecting change, nor ignoring the strength and the barbarity of the forces aligned against us. It means teaching, surviving and fighting with the most important resource I have, myself, and taking joy in that battle. It means, for me, recognizing the enemy outside and the enemy within, and knowing that my work is part of a continuum of women’s work, of reclaiming this earth and our power, and knowing that this work did not begin with my birth nor will it end with my death. And it means knowing that within this continuum, my life and my love and my work has particular power and meaning relative to others.
It means trout fishing on the Missisquoi River at dawn and tasting the green silence, and knowing that this beauty too is mine forever.
Keep in mind that these passages from The Cancer Journals aren’t even the “most quoted” or “most inspirational” passages from this one particular book—they are just chronological excerpts from the introduction.
If you already know Lorde’s work, I am preaching to the choir. But I suspect that there are still readers out there who, by accident of education (or as a result of the intersectional and institutional oppressions and biases that Lorde herself describes so well), have not read Lorde, or have not read enough of her.
If you already love her, return to her this week to belatedly celebrate her birthday and life now and throughout the rest of the year. If you could get to know her work better, support Aunt Lute books, “a not-for-profit, multicultural women’s press publishing since 1982,” by purchasing a special edition of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals as a print book or e-book here. Read the “definitive and complete” The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. Read Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press Feminist Series).
And if you have read her and decided that she “isn’t your thing” (a phrase I have heard writers and readers use to ward off and dismiss any possibility of confronting their own privilege, fragility, or biases), you don’t have to wait until you “are no longer afraid,” either.
Question “the difference between poetry and rhetoric” as you read “Power.” Think of Lorde’s dream about “language crazure” as you read “Coal” and “Never to Dream of Spiders.” In “Who Said It Was Simple,” recognize that “there are so many roots to the tree of anger / that sometimes the branches shatter / before they bear.” Then in “Sisters in Arms,” recognize “the deep wry song of beach pebbles / running after the sea.”