Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: December’s Prologue

Feature photo of the author credit: Camilo Godoy

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde is a monthly analysis of works by queen mother Audre Lorde as they apply to our current political moment. In the spirit of relying on ancestral wisdom, centering QTPOC voices, wellness, and just generally leveling up, we believe that the Lorde has already gifted us with the tools we need for our survival.

I’d been hoping that by the time I reached the end of this experience I would have some sort of profound realization to share with you. There’s a comfort from epiphanies and tidy endings that I crave even though life keeps revealing the impossibility of that wish. Like so many other people I’ve been chirping about the end of 2020 as if the transition from one year to the next will magically suture the open wounds from this year. If anything, this year has made the unresolved issues from other difficult years resurface in spectacular fashion. There has been grief for the actual lives lost, but there has also been grief for the growing pains and the relational shifts occurring with loved ones, as I leave behind a self that was no longer serving me.

This year, one of the hardest of my entire life, was made so much brighter by reading and immersing myself in Audre Lorde, and by having this space to share with you all. As I’ve said before, reading Audre Lorde is a continuous reckoning that is always loving but not without its frictions. I’ve circled around the poem “Prologue” for months, unsure how I was meant to engage with it, but compelled by a larger force to not put it down. Even the beginning of the poem might give a clue as Lorde wrestles with her own tensions:

Haunted by poems beginning with I
seek out those whom I love who are deaf
to whatever does not destroy
or curse the old ways that did not serve us
while history falters and our poets are dying
choked into silence by icy distinction
their death rattles blind curses
and I hear even my own voice becoming
a pale strident whisper

Part of what Lorde is contending with is her work as a writer, the issues of voice and community that come up for each of us who have truths to share that, by nature, are inconvenient and uncomfortable. The pressures of those communities — chosen or otherwise — so often lead to the sort of icy silencing she mentions, because of how exhausting it is to keep holding tight to that truth.

One of the things I didn’t and couldn’t have expected was the blowback I would get for not traveling to be with my family of origin during this still ongoing pandemic — that a decision made out of deep love and concern for everyone’s health has been seen by some as selfish and self-serving. I’ve been called on repeatedly to defend myself and the choices I’ve made. It’s more painful than surprising, and while the hurt is still tender, this has also led to much deeper understandings of all the things we’re each carrying and how this pandemic has caused us all to grapple with the things we try to bury.

At night sleep locks me into an echoless coffin
sometimes at noon I dream
there is nothing to fear
now standing up in the light of my father sun
without shadow
I speak without concern for the accusations
that I am too much or too little woman
that I am too black or white
or too much myself
and through my lips come the voices
of the ghosts of our ancestors
living and moving among us

In writing this essay it’s occurred to me that maybe this particular poem was waiting for me to be ready for it. I had to get to the point of not merely analyzing Lorde’s words but attempting to live them. Looking over this year’s previous selections, there’s a recurring emphasis on resilience and on using your voice and your work in service of what you know to be right and just. This is part of Audre Lorde’s larger ethos, but it’s also what I most needed to receive.

The above lines resonate in an acute way — one of my greatest fears is that I’m “too much.” Insert whatever adjective you’d like and it would probably be something I worry about. Lorde’s focus on “too much or too little woman,” and “too black or white” get at the core of the matter. I think about all the ways that we’ve been taught these lessons of too much and not enough, and how we reinscribe the refrains on ourselves and on one another. And it was hard to fight the impulse that, in going against what others wanted me to do and who they wanted me to be for them, that I was wrong to make the choices I did. But as I sit with the pain of transitioning through the paradigm shifts of 2020, there is joy in knowing this pain feels better than the pain of the old world order.

Hear
the old ways are going away
and coming back pretending change
masked as denunciation and lament
masked as a choice
between eager mirrors that blur and distort
us in easy definitions
until our image
shatters along its fault

For me, “Prologue” maps out Lorde’s traumas and vulnerabilities, both in the moment of writing in the early 1970s and their roots in her early childhood experiences. Her crystalline ability to pierce through to the core of any issue shines through here, as she remains firm in the righteousness of her chosen path.

The pain Lorde feels is evident; but so, too, is the understanding that she’s a part of something bigger than the present moment. I always sense the spectre of death when I read the following lines, but I don’t find it morbid so much as communing with life’s many cycles and the import of our actions during our limited time in this realm.

Hear my heart’s voice as it darkens
pulling old rhythms out of the earth
that will receive this piece of me
and a piece of each one of you
when our part in history quickens again
and is over:

This is where I understood the futility of wanting a neat ending to this series.

There’s no way to wrap this up pretty nor orderly. Much like the many revelations and past traumas unearthed by these last 12 months, what I’m left with is mostly jagged edges and realizations that there’s so much more work to do, so much more to learn.

Somewhere in the landscape past noon
I shall leave a dark print
of the me that I am
and who I am not
etched in a shadow of angry and remembered loving
and their ghosts will move
whispering through them
with me none the wiser
for they will have buried me
either in shame
or in peace.

There’s much I will carry with me in the aftermath of this experience, and this lasting image of the dark print, “the me that I am and who I am not” is certainly one of them.

Lorde’s declaration here is one of her clearest reminders that what comes after us is not what others proclaim our works and our lives to be. Instead it’s our ability to live out our truths, to raise our voices in service of what needs to be said. Others can and will say what they want, but if we’re able to muster even part of Audre Lorde’s resolve, then we too will rest easy.

As we leave each other, I want to say that the opportunity for this column could not have come at a better time. When I began with a sort of simple desire to deepen my knowledge of one our queer ancestors, there was no way to know where this experiment would lead. More than anything, I’m grateful to those who read and engaged with Lorde’s words — and with me, as I’ve attempted to grapple with them this year. Thank you for journeying with me. I hope that this final column, this “prologue,” speaks to the new beginnings and also the continued lessons we may receive from Audre Lorde’s incomparable legacy.

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: November’s Sister Love

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde is a monthly analysis of works by queen mother Audre Lorde as they apply to our current political moment. In the spirit of relying on ancestral wisdom, centering QTPOC voices, wellness, and just generally leveling up, we believe that the Lorde has already gifted us with the tools we need for our survival.

As much as I love reading Audre Lorde’s brilliance on its own, it’s an entirely different experience to read her in conversation with someone else. In some ways it helps to put Lorde in context as a more revealing look at who she’s dialoguing and thinking with, it gives an immediacy to her writing.

This month I’ve been reading her letters with Pat Parker in Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989. A birthday gift from my partner, I approached the letters as a welcome reprieve from the stress of the election and the renewed surges in Covid cases across the country. The letters between the two poets are funny, frank, and intimate above all else.

Their relationship is a testament to the enduring and life-affirming power of queer kinship. The correspondence spans 16 years, the ongoing resistance against Apartheid in South Africa, turbulent US politics at home and abroad, and the emergence of the AIDS crisis. The political and social climate they endured eerily aligns with the same genre of issues that have defined this year in particular, with the specific precarity of Black queer lives at the forefront.

This hilarious interlude from one of Pat Parker’s letters is one of my favorites, an explanation of sorts for her delay in responding to Lorde:

“Once upon a time there was this woman named Audre and she met this woman named Pat And she faithfully wrote her a letter. And for a long time she waited, but there was no answer. So Audre who knew that Pat lived in the land of the poet-killers assumed that her friend must be dead: for she knew that that was the only reason Pat hadn’t answered her letter. She knew that Pat wasn’t one of those ‘lazy n***.’ And one day out of the great smoggy blue a letter came and lo and behold it was from Pat and Audre rejoiced, for she knew that her friend wasn’t dead, but alas she had to admit and realized that her friend was indeed a ‘lazy n***.’ And the moral of this dyke tale, children, is that Pat Parker is alive and well but just a little more crazier.”

During the period of this collection of letters, both Lorde and Parker were diagnosed with breast cancer that went on to claim both of their lives — Pat Parker in 1989 and Audre Lorde in 1992. Yet even as they faced their own mortality, both encouraged the other and found moments of humor and triumph. In a 1986 letter, Lorde proudly informed Parker:

“Health wise I’m hanging in, gained 10 pounds which makes me feel really good (I was not born to be insubstantial and that’s how I was feeling last Feb when I saw you).”

Parker playfully responds, praising Lorde’s weight gain and saying she appeared “flat out skinny” and that Parker was ready to break out “chitterlings and hog maws” to help her regain weight. Yet the humor doesn’t mask Parker’s concerns and theories about her own diagnosis, as she speculates her anger, and primarily anger at their shared forms of oppression, led to her cancer:

“Why am I angry? Who am I angry at? And what can I do to change it? […] From the monumental thought of overthrowing the system and ridding my life of capitalism, racism, sexism, classism, to the smalles nuisance of getting Marty [Pat Parker’s partner] to put the toilet paper on the spool with the sheets unfolding outward, there is simply too much for me to handle. […] Sister love, sister love, sister love. We are not talking anything simple or easy here.”

Through it all, their enduring love attests to the power and beauty of Black queer sisterhood.

In particular, Lorde is attentive to her needs in a way that feels especially present as we move our actions back indoors, burrowing into colder weather and, arguably, an even more present sense of the increasing risk of Covid as cases rise to the worst numbers we’ve seen since the start of the pandemic. And while I’m leery of easy metaphors and making each moment a teachable one — I do think there’s a resonance between this season, this time we’re living in, and the attention that must be paid to what our inner selves for our collective survival.

Parker and Lorde’s relationship is like a mapping from inside out, directing us on how to build a life based on principles, writing the narratives you need to see out in the world and also radical love, vulnerability, and community as what makes it all possible. Sister Love is a window into a bygone era of coalitional politics that’s all too easy to romanticize in such a way that obscures the incredible amount of work it took to sustain their efforts. But it was without a doubt the best kind of work, with both Lorde and Parker mentioning organizations like Gente Latina de Ambiente and bygone lesbian/feminist publications such as Amazon Quarterly and off our backs. And while economic struggles were also discussed, it’s in the spirit of sharing resources. Lorde, as the older, more established poet, regularly tried to get Parker published in a journal or scheduled to perform at an event. She would also tuck bills into her letters for Parker. They both made sure to mention and promote the other and their work whenever possible, understanding that a spirit of competitiveness would never serve their shared cause of queer freedom and prosperity. Lorde laid it out explicitly:

“I have always loved you, Pat, and wanted for you those things you wanted deeply for yourself. Do not think me presumptuous—from the first time I met you in 1970 I knew that included your writing. I applaud your decision [to quit her job and write full-time]. I support you with my whole heart and extend myself to you in whatever way I can make this more possible for you. I hope you know by now that I call your name whenever I can and will continue to do so.”

Their sameness and shared sense of Black, lesbian identities reflected their most intimate selves, the fiery personalities and poetry both came to be known for. Their relationship teetered with multiple combustible elements, and what I love is seeing how they address whatever tensions arise head on, making it plain how much they loved and needed the other. One of Lorde’s letters speaks to this tension and this need with beautiful clarity:

“When I did not receive an answer to my letter last spring, I took a long and painful look at the 15 years we have known each other and decided that I had to accept the fact that we would never have the openness of friendship I always thought could be possible being the two strong Black women we are, with all our differences and sameness. Then your card came from Nairobi, and I thought once again maybe when I’m out there next spring Pat and I will sit down once and for all and look at why we were not more available to each other all these years.”

The balance Lorde strikes between love, candor, and vulnerability genuinely startles me; how much more “real” would our relationships be if we were able to state what we desire from the other in utter vulnerability?

It has felt hard to state how much I’ve been missing my family lately — both originary and chosen. For weeks now I’ve semiconsciously opted to power through, convincing myself that the experience of the sudden lockdown this spring had prepared me for the sharp wave of loneliness that’s appeared. But in reading Sister Love I came across a necessary reminder that it’s in articulating what we’re feeling that we’re able to name our pain and reclaim ourselves from it. Parker’s words perfectly capture this realization:

“Started seeing a therapist with Marty and individually and it’s proved to be quite helpful despite my resistance. It’s hard for us strong Black women types to admit we’re fucking falling apart at the seams as you must well know.”

Ultimately, what I appreciate more than anything is how Lorde and Parker illustrate the importance of never losing sight of our work as artists and creators, what we put into the world, nor losing sight of each other. At each turn, they encouraged each other to speak her truth and the importance that each woman’s work carried.

In a particularly loving exchange where Lorde affirms Parker’s recent decision to quit her job and write full time, Audre Lorde gifts her with a timely message that speaks to the need to hold steady — and guard fiercely — the shared space inside ourselves as the place where we can live and flourish:

“Things you must beware of right now–
A year seems like a lot of time now at this end—it isn’t.
It took me three years to reclaim my full flow. Don’t lose your sense of urgency on the one hand, on the other, don’t be too hard on yourself—or expect too much.
Beware the terror of not producing.
Beware the urge to justify your decision.
Watch out for the kitchen sink and the plumbing and that painting that always needed being done. But remember the body needs to create too.
Beware feeling you’re not good enough to deserve it
Beware feeling you’re too good to need it
Beware all the hatred you’ve stored up inside you, and the locks on your tender places.”

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: October’s Dead Is Behind Us

Photograph of author by Camilo Godoy

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde is a monthly analysis of works by queen mother Audre Lorde as they apply to our current political moment. In the spirit of relying on ancestral wisdom, centering QTPOC voices, wellness, and just generally leveling up, we believe that the Lorde has already gifted us with the tools we need for our survival.

A friend once told me that the time around Halloween is when the veil between this world and the next slips away, and our connection to the spirit world is at its highest. (This was before either of us had seen Coco.) It’s a reminder I carry with me, a wisdom I call upon that speaks to the multiple worlds we all inhabit, and the connections that defy common conceptions of time and space.

In her poetry collection Our Dead Behind Us, Audre Lorde contradicts the very claim of her title by revealing all the ways we carry our dead alongside us, within us, into our everyday and into the future. It’s a necessary re-framing of grief and time; and, true to form, Lorde is always in time. This collection feels sankofic; a look backwards, an engagement with history while the feet are pointed forward, headed into the future.

As the end of the longest year in history inches closer, I’ve been challenging myself to sit with the many losses that have characterized 2020, to reframe them as not a lack or a “negation of” — but as a series of ongoing paradigm shifts. Death takes on many forms; it’s not only the transition from this plane to another, but encompasses these shifts — within relationships, understandings of ourselves and others, and ways of being in the world. The poem “Mawu” speaks perfectly to this sense of reckoning and acceptance:

“Released / from the prism of dreaming / we make peace with the women / we shall never become / I measure your betrayals / in a hundred different faces / to claim you as my own / grown cool and delicate and grave / beyond revision / So long as your death is a leaving / it will never be my last.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about an experience I had last year. During a sacred ritual with
some ordained elders, one Baba came up to me and said, “You have a grandmother who walks with you. She’s here with you now. And every day.”

I hadn’t shared anything about my grandmother throughout the ritual, hadn’t even said Nana’s name aloud in the days before. But then he told me she was with me, always, and it was as if I fell into an alignment, like he offered a shape to her in the present moment. I hadn’t even read the poem “Call” by then, and yet I was embodying it:

“I am a Black woman    stripped down / and praying / my whole life has been an alter / worth its ending / and I say Aido Hwedo is coming.”

To be Black in this world is to be intimate with a kind of living death. It’s an intimacy no one craves, and yet Black people know better than most that Lorde speaks truth to power in saying “we were never meant to survive.” Whether we lose a grandmother or an aunt, or whether it’s Breonna Taylor, who we only come to recognize in the aftermath of her death, each loss feels personal and tethered to the next. And while we need to attend to the ways in which we #SayHerName, I think it’s important to evoke all those who are gone, especially those who die unnatural deaths borne from racism, queer and transphobia, unequal access to healthcare, and the numerous other ways this world actively tries to kill us.

Lorde, as prescient as ever, offers writing as an act of remembrance, of both engaging with the dead and affirming the truth of our living in “Learning to Write”:

“I am a bleak heroism of words / that refuse / to be buried alive / with the liars.”

I think this sentiment is one she also reaffirms beautifully in “Burning the Water Hyacinth:”

“Plucking desire / from my palms / like the firehairs of a cactus / I know this appetite / the greed of a poet / or an empty woman / trying to touch / what matters.”

Like so many people, for me part of grappling with the torrent-of-everything that is 2020 is acknowledging that this year is an accumulation of misdeeds, misrecognitions, and unaddressed issues all surfacing at once. Under each of the issues we’re contending with is the question of how we got here, and what do we do now that we are still here, certainly for the foreseeable future. The above lines from “Burning the Water Hyacinth,” about attempting to “touch what matters,” could be a banner proclamation for so many of us. Touch (or the lack thereof) has forcibly organized how we engage with one another, show love and affection, and attempt to bridge the distances furthered by the many multiple pandemics of 2020.

What Audre Lorde has demonstrated time and again is that touching what matters is the kind of touch that doesn’t reach wide but rather burrows deep, fingers submersed in the earth in order to get at the root of it all. This extended period of time we’ve currently spent with ourselves has propelled some of the deepest self-reflection we’ve allowed ourselves in years. Like how it took me getting into my thirties and the force of global pandemics to really write about the relationship that shaped most of my twenties. As hard as it is to admit, the death of that relationship was so acute, it took nearly seven years of reflection — rehashing the worst moments, doubting myself, hearing her voice each time I failed or misstepped, and discovering and rediscovering that familiarity — before I finally was able to put the worst of it to rest.

I’m no longer who I was before that relationship. And the process of confronting the myriad implications of that experience is ongoing. As Lorde states in the poem “Outlines”:

“When women make love / beyond the first exploration / we meet each other knowing / in a landscape / the rest of our lives / attempts to understand.”

After my first true heartbreak, it took several years post-mortem to realize I’d been living in response to that experience. My relationship with her was the most toxic I’d ever experienced and yet its ending felt like a death to me, one that foreclosed a future I saw for myself, for us. The self I inhabited was one formed against the sharpness of that loss, one I projected to convince myself — but really to convince her — that I was the antithesis of who she thought I was. From “Stations”:

“Some women wait for themselves / around the next corner / and call the empty spot peace /but the opposite of living / is only not living / and the stars do not care.”

There’s no easy resolution here.

It would be an empty filler to simply gesture at 2021 as a healing balm for all the dying and living we’re experiencing right now. Most years, Halloween season is a deeply welcomed comfort — an annual communion across the veil that fortifies me. I can’t say I feel that same fortifying power this year, certainly not in any way that offers a sense of assurance.

But what I’m realizing is that the ritual I’ve developed in this column, communing with Audre Lorde for these last ten months, has at least instilled a belief in me that our archival, ancestral engagement is part of our lineage of survival. She details this lineage pristinely in “On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verazzano Bridge:”

“I am writing these words as a route map / an artifact for survival / a chronicle of buried treasure / a mourning / for this place we are about to be leaving / a rudder for my children your children / our lovers our hopes braided / from the dull wharves of Tompkinsville / to Zimbabwe Chad Azania / […]History is not kind to us / we restitch it with living / past memory forward / into desire / into the panic articulation / of want without having / or even the promise of getting. / And I dream of our coming together / encircled driven / not only by love / but by lust for a working tomorrow / the flights of this journey / maples uncertain / and necessary as water.”

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: September’s Afterimages

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde is a monthly analysis of works by queen mother Audre Lorde as they apply to our current political moment. In the spirit of relying on ancestral wisdom, centering QTPOC voices, wellness, and just generally leveling up, we believe that the Lorde has already gifted us with the tools we need for our survival.

There’s so much that can be said, that seeks articulation in the wake of the Breonna Taylor verdict. After the ravages of this year, the anger and fear that comes along with the decision to value property over a Black woman’s life feels to me like an unbearable weight. The pain is raw and too tender to try and explicate now; the fear that I am safe nowhere, the Black women in my family of origin and family of choice are safe nowhere. It’s a fact we’ve known but one that feels all the more threatening in the wake of continuing injustice for Black women.

At the same time, we’re faced with the utter devastation that has ravaged the West Coast. As I write this, I’m curled under a sweater and blanket in an unseasonably cold apartment whose heat hasn’t been turned on yet. The cold is a result of the hazy gray saturating the sky in upstate New York and so much of the country as the smoke from the fires moves farther and farther east. Whether for the best or the worst of reasons, we are all connected to each other. The pain of others, of our Earth is viscerally real.

There’s an immediacy to the recent razing of the West Coast that demands our attention. As it should. Especially knowing that the devastation, we’ve learned, was not only preventable but premeditated. Like so much of the pain and loss of 2020, it simply did not have to be this way.

I wrestled more with this month’s choice of focus than I have any other. I was captivated by Audre Lorde’s startling use of imagery as much as I was disturbed by the pain and discomfort she stirred up. The poem “Afterimages” is Lorde’s juxtaposition of nature, violence, and loss.

In one vignette there is a white woman standing near the Pearl River in Mississippi after a hurricane, stilled by shock at all she’s lost to the storm. In the over vignette we are still in Mississippi, but decades earlier when the body of young Emmett Till is found.

however the image enters
its force remains

I can’t even begin to explain how tired I am of being made to bear witness to Black death and to the destruction of Black life. But I think what’s different here, what Lorde witnessed with the highly publicized account of Till’s murder was the power of the image. I suspect that for most of us Emmett Till is perhaps the first image of Black death and murder we encounter, at least on a nationwide scale. His mother crying over his distorted face in that open casket is one I will never forget. But what’s happened in our complete saturation cycle of images and videos of Black death is a numbness, or at least an uneasy sense that this is commonplace. I’ve seen on Twitter and elsewhere multiple comments on the use of Breonna Taylor’s name and image to promote everything from sporting events to social media influencers, yet she was denied her life and — in the aftermath — any sense of justice. The fires ravaging the Western U.S. are growing to be expected each year. Our climate crisis grows more and more perilous and again we are uneasy in how commonplace it is.

In each of these instances, it’s not that these atrocities happen — it’s the scale that is newsworthy. What’s just as important here is that Lorde’s calling into question so many crises that have been “naturalized” in one sense or another. The destruction of nature itself is utterly violent and completely unnatural. The disregard for Black life, the casual and frequent murders of Black people are utterly violent and completely unnatural.

A white woman stands bereft and empty
a black boy hacked into a murderous lesson
recalled in me forever
like a lurch of earth on the edge of sleep
etched into my visions
food for dragonfish that learn
to live upon whatever they must eat
fused images beneath my pain.

It’s not nearly as simple as the water which characterizes both of these figures. What Lorde does here is draw our attention to how we become inured to these violences, these assaults on nature — both the environment(s) we inhabit and our human nature, our shared humanity.

The Pearl River floods through the streets of Jackson
A Mississippi summer televised.
Trapped houses kneel like sinners in the rain
a white woman climbs from her roof to a passing boat
her fingers tarry for a moment on the chimney
now awash
tearless and no longer young, she holds
a tattered baby’s blanket in her arms.
In a flickering afterimage of the nightmare rain
a microphone
thrust up against her flat bewildered words
“we jest come from the bank yestiddy
borrowing money to pay the income tax
now everything’s gone. I never knew
it could be so hard.”
[…]

I inherited Jackson, Mississippi.
For my majority it gave me Emmett Till
his 15 years puffed out like bruises
on plump boy-cheeks
his only Mississippi summer
whistling a 21 gun salute to Dixie
as a white girl passed him in the street
and he was baptized my son forever
in the midnight waters of the Pearl.

What strikes me most about these lines from the poem, and its title, is that Lorde is once again demanding that we don’t look away. We are bombarded with so many of these images now and so many of these videos, data visualizations, and more of these devastations. But what Lorde is articulating is that we must register them as the individual losses they are.

Each incident haunts her as each of the incidents this year haunts me and I’m sure haunts most of us. But after this news cycle, after the fires die down, we cannot seek to erase the after images. We have to do all we can to ensure that these atrocities do not continue.

His broken body is the afterimage of my 21st year
when I walked through a northern summer
my eyes averted
from each corner’s photographies
newspapers protest posters magazines
Police Story, Confidential, True
the avid insistence of detail
pretending insight or information
the length of gash across the dead boy’s loins
his grieving mother’s lamentation
the severed lips, how many burns
his gouged out eyes
sewed shut upon the screaming covers
louder than life
all over
the veiled warning, the secret relish
of a black child’s mutilated body
fingered by street-corner eyes
bruise upon livid bruise

[…]

and wherever I looked that summer
I learned to be at home with children’s blood
with savored violence
with pictures of black broken flesh
used, crumpled, and discarded
lying amid the sidewalk refuse
like a raped woman’s face.

When she says she learned to “be at home with children’s blood,” I think Lorde is giving us a warning. We cannot naturalize this. The unnatural nature of the hurricanes she writes about, the fires we know continue on today, and the open killing of Black people all over this country are anything but natural disasters. We need to stay attuned, not only to the fact that these things keep happening, but to the ways in which we’re conditioned to passively consume Black death and the ravaging of our planet.

Within my eyes
the flickering afterimages of a nightmare rain
a woman wrings her hands
beneath the weight of agonies remembered
I wade through summer ghosts
betrayed by vision
hers and my own
becoming dragonfish to survive
the horrors we are living
with tortured lungs
adapting to breathe blood.

I think about the relationship between blackness and land a lot. As the descendant of enslaved people, that relationship used to be so fraught, more of a weariness of strange fruit than anything else. But in pushing beyond my initial discomfort, I came to realize that the problem isn’t the land but what humans do to it. There is a disposability, a capitalist consumption of land and labor and Black people and Indigenous folx, for anything and anyone that supplants the unquenchable hunger for our lives.

Audre Lorde implores us to bask in the difference, yet in “Afterimages” she articulates her own struggles with the task that she herself requires. It is anything but easy to witness so much of your own people’s destruction, wear your voice thin by decrying the injustices, and then watch that destruction ripple into others. While the differences are there, what Lorde so beautifully and achingly makes clear is that one person’s ruin will soon lead to another’s.

We can no longer adapt to breathing blood.

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: August’s New Spelling of My Name

“Once home was a far way off a place I had never been to but knew well out of my mother’s mouth. She breathed exuded hummed the fruit smell of Noel’s Hill morning fresh and noon hot, and I spun visions of sapadilla and mango as a net over my Harlem tenement cot in the snoring darkness rank with nightmare sweat. Made bearable because it was not all. This now, here, was a space, some temporary abode, never to be considered forever nor totally binding nor defining, no matter how much it commanded in energy and attention. For if we lived correctly and with frugality, looked both ways before crossing the street, then someday we would arrive back in the sweet place, back home.”

“But it was so typical of my mother when I was young that if she couldn’t stop white people from spitting on her children because they were Black, she would insist it was something else. It was so often her approach to the world; to change reality. If you can’t change reality, change your perception of it.”

“I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell. There were no mothers, no sisters, no heroes. We had to do it alone, like our sister Amazons, the riders on the loneliest outposts of the kingdom of Dahomey. We, young and Black and fine and gay, sweated out our first heartbreaks with no school nor office chums to share that confidence over lunch hour. Just as there were no rings to make tangible the reason for our happy secret smiles, there were no names nor reason given or shared for the tears that messed up the lab reports or the library bills. […] We did it cold turkey, and although it resulted in some pretty imaginative tough women when we survived, too many of us did not survive at all.”

“In a paradoxical sense, once I accepted my position as different from the larger society as well as from any single sub-society—Black or gay—I felt I didn’t have to try so hard. To be accepted. To look femme. To be straight. To look straight. To be proper. To look ‘nice.’ To be liked. To be loved. To be approved. What I didn’t realize was how much harder I had to try merely to stay alive, or rather, to stay human. How much stronger a person I became in that trying.”

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: July Is a Black Unicorn

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde is a monthly analysis of works by queen mother Audre Lorde as they apply to our current political moment. In the spirit of relying on ancestral wisdom, centering QTPOC voices, wellness, and just generally leveling up, we believe that the Lorde has already gifted us with the tools we need for our survival.

The language of our time traffics in a lot of terminology that’s so commonplace, the words can lose their potency. I think a lot about the term intersectionality in particular, a brilliant distillation by Kimberlé Crenshaw of the multiple positionalities of marginalized folks. What sometimes gets lost in the use of this term is how absolutely exhausting it is to straddle multiple places and boundaries. Intersectionality is active, requiring a constant calibration between the various identity places you hold, choosing which parts of yourself to emphasize or not. An intersection is a geography — but it is also a place of in-betweens.

For me right now, that in-between is the pandemic within the pandemic, the ongoing issues facing Black people, especially Black queer and trans folks. Dwindling news coverage means dwindling urgency and hope for the reckoning we know we need, but fear will continuously be signaled at and never fully delivered.

What I love most about Audre Lorde’s The Black Unicorn is how she’s able to crystallize the experience of intersectionality — the feelings of exhaustion, fury, disgust, and hope.

In the title poem, she writes:

The black unicorn is greedy.
The black unicorn is impatient.
The black unicorn is mistaken
for a shadow
or symbol
and taken
through a cold country
where mist painted mockeries
of my fury.
It is not on her lap where the horn rests
but deep in her moonpit
growing.
The black unicorn is restless
the black unicorn is unrelenting
the black unicorn is not
free.

I’m still angry. I’m still exhausted. The ways in which the outrageousness of this moment have begun to take on a sense of normalcy are both necessary and frightening. Breonna Taylor’s murderers still walk free. And let’s be real, they’re probably running around without masks. Lorde’s own sense of depletion, of restlessness and barely concealed fury are evident in this poem. But so, too, is her unwavering belief in our magic. I keep re-reading this poem trying to conceive of what she means by the Black unicorn.

I want to know how were these terms used then, in 1978 when The Black Unicorn was first published. Was Audre Lorde referring to herself as a unicorn? To all Black people? A defining characteristic of the unicorn is its solitary nature. While Lorde’s unicorn is an obvious reference to race, blackness is also a subversion here, because blackness itself is inherently a tether. It’s a tether to the histories of time and space and race that have come to define our journeys on this plane.

The themes of solitude and of a belonging so enmeshed with violence and grief resonate throughout the collection. In the poem “Outside,” Audre Lorde lays bare this tension in beautifully tender verse. She writes:

In the center of a harsh and spectrumed city
all things natural are strange.
I grew up in a genuine confusion
between grass and weeds and flowers
and what colored meant
except for clothes you couldn’t bleach
and nobody called me nigger
until I was thirteen.
Nobody lynched my mama
but what she’d never been
had bleached her face of everything
but very private furies
and made the other children
call me yellow snot at school.
And how many times have I called myself back
through my bones confusion
black
like marrow meaning meat
and how many times have you cut me
and run in the streets
my own blood
who do you think me to be
that you are terrified of becoming
or what do you see in my face
you have not already discarded
in your own mirror
what face do you see in my eyes
that you will someday
come to
acknowledge your own?
Who shall I curse that I grew up
believing in my mother’s face
or that I lived in fear of potent darkness
wearing my father’s shape
they have both marked me
with their blind and terrible love
and I am lustful for my own name.
Between the canyons of their mighty silences
mother bright and father brown
I seek my own shapes now
for they never spoke of me
except as theirs

I read this collection backward and forward, trying to figure out what compelled me to choose it for this month’s focus. Arguably the biggest difficulty of a series like this is determining which piece(s) speak to the present moment we’re in. What I love about The Black Unicorn is Audre Lorde’s continued insistence that our plight as Black people, as queer people, as women is forever a timely issue.

We are more than talking points, more than a trending Twitter topic. The issues we bring to light are at the center of our lives and our attempts to survive our inheritances. I found myself both nodding and wincing at the vulnerability and longing throughout Lorde’s writing. So often as queer Black women we’re required to perform our pain so our humanity can be rendered as real. And while it’s important to remember Audre Lorde is a product of a time that demanded such performances, she nonetheless refused to make herself palatable. Lorde’s message is a challenge for white people to be better and to do better by those whom they oppress.

In “Power,” Audre Lorde continues enacting the need for poetry with this reminder: “The difference between poetry and rhetoric / is being / ready to kill / yourself / instead of your children.” She goes on to write:

The policeman who shot down a 10-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 that. At his trial
this policeman said in his own defense
“I didn’t notice the size or nothing else
only the color.” and
there are tapes to prove that, too.
Today that 37-year-old white man with 13 years of police forcing
has been set free
by 11 white men who said they were satisfied
justice had been done
and one black woman who said
“They convinced me” meaning
they had dragged her 4’10″ black woman’s frame
over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval
until she let go the first real power she ever had
and lined her own womb with cement
to make a graveyard for our children.
I have not been able to touch the destruction within me.
But unless I learn to use
the difference between poetry and rhetoric
my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold
or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire
and one day I will take my teenaged plug
and connect it to the nearest socket
raping an 85-year-old white woman
who is somebody’s mother
and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed
a greek chorus will be singing in ¾ time
“Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.”

Lorde lives in the in-betweens: between power and disempowerment, fury and sorrow, hope and longing, life and death. The activeness and the labor of her intersectional living take their toll; it requires an intimacy with the precariousness of a life in the between. In “A Song for Many Movements,” Lorde writes:

Nobody wants to die on the way
caught between ghosts of whiteness
and the real water
none of us wanted to leave
our bones
on the way to salvation […] Broken down gods survive
in the crevasses and mudpots
of every beleaguered city
where it is obvious
there are too many bodies
to cart to the ovens
or gallows
and our uses have become
more important than our silence
after the fall
too many empty cases
of blood to bury or burn
there will be no body left
to listen
and our labor
has become more important
than our silence.
Our labor has become
more important
than our silence.

In the same year that this volume was published, Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer for the first time and underwent a mastectomy. Her cancer is likely traced to the dangerous factory work she undertook as a young woman struggling to make ends meet and speaks to the very heart of intersectionality — because of her numerous intersections, she took the only work available to her, forced to focus on a measure of immediate security at the expense of a longer, healthier life. At the same time, I think of a unicorn as an inherently fragile creature. Always beautiful and majestic, I always understood them as endangered and in need of protection.

My need to read hope and happy endings into Audre Lorde’s work is more evidence of my own fear of my precarity and of my own death. While I do think hope is at the crux of Lorde’s beliefs, it’s a radical hope that we make an impact and force a change on this world while we inhabit it. One of her most well-known works, “A Litany for Survival,” is heartening in that soothes as much as it emboldens.

Here’s the poem in full:

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children’s mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours;
For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.
And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
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.

What are your interpretations of The Black Unicorn?

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: June’s Uses of Anger

“The connections between African and African-Americans, African-Europeans, African-Asians, is real, however dimly seen at times, and we all need to examine without sentimentality or stereotype what the injection of Africanness into the sociopolitical consciousness of the world could mean. We need to join our differences and articulate our particular strengths in the service of our mutual survivals, and against the desperate backlash which attempts to keep that Africanness from altering the very bases of current world power and privilege.”

“How are we persuaded to participate in our own destruction by maintaining our silences? How is the American public persuaded to accept as natural the fact that at a time when prolonged negotiations can […] terminate an armed confrontation with police outside a white survivalist encampment, a mayor of an American city can order an incendiary device dropped on a house with five children in it and police pin down the occupants until they perish? Yes, African-Americans can still walk the streets of America without passbooks—for the time being.”

“Like the volcano, which is one form of extreme earth-change, in any revolutionary process there is a period of intensification and a period of explosion. We must become familiar with the requirements and symptoms of each period, and use the differences between them to our mutual advantage, learning and supporting each other’s battles.”

“But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies.”

“For anger between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth.”

“For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth. It is not the anger of Black women which corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all unless we meet it with what we have, our power to examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will live and work; our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support our choices.”

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: May’s Burst of Light

“There is a persistent and pernicious despair hovering over me constantly that feels physiological, even when my basic mood is quite happy. I don’t understand it, but I do not want to slip or fall into any kind of resignation. I am not going to go gently into anybody’s damn good night!”

“[H]ow do I want to live the rest of my life and what am I going to do to insure that I get to do it exactly or as close as possible to how I want that living to be? I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes — everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!”

“How do I hold faith with sun in a sunless place? It is so hard not to counter this despair with a refusal to see. But I have to stay open and filtering no matter what’s coming at me, because that arms me in a particularly Black woman’s way. When I’m open, I’m also less despairing. The more clearly I see what I’m up against, the more able I am to fight this process going on in my body that they’re calling liver cancer. And I am determined to fight it even when I am not sure of the terms of the battle nor the face of victory.”

“It is the bread of art and the water of my spiritual life that remind me always to reach for what is highest within my capacities and in my demands of myself and others. Not for what is perfect but for what is the best possible. And I orchestrate my daily anticancer campaign with an intensity intrinsic to who I am, the intensity of making a poem. It is the same intensity with which I experience poetry, a student’s first breakthrough, the loving energy of women I do not even know, the posted photograph of a sunrise taken from my winter dawn window, the intensity of loving.”

“I make, demand, translate satisfactions out of every ray of sunlight, scrap of bright cloth, beautiful sound, delicious smell that comes my way, out of every sincere smile and good wish. They are discreet bits of ammunition in my arsenal against despair.”

“How has everyday living changed for me with the advent of a second cancer? I move through a terrible and invigorating savor of now — a visceral awareness of the passage of time, with its nightmare and its energy. No more long-term loans, extended payments, twenty-year plans. Pay my debts. Call the tickets in, the charges, the emotional IOU’s. Now is the time, if ever, once and for all, to alter the patterns of isolation. […] I am not ashamed to let my friends know I need their collective spirit—not to make me live forever, but rather to help me move through the life I have. But I refuse to spend the rest of that life mourning what I do not have. If living as a poet — living on the front lines — has ever had meaning, it has meaning now. Living a self-conscious life, vulnerability as armor.”

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: April’s Arithmetics of Distance

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde is a monthly analysis of works by queen mother Audre Lorde as they apply to our current political moment. In the spirit of relying on ancestral wisdom, centering QTPOC voices, wellness, and just generally leveling up, we believe that the Lorde has already gifted us with the tools we need for our survival.

This is dedicated to those who are just trying to make it through every day. Those peeling themselves out of bed, climbing uphill through daily tasks, Zoom catch-ups, and yet another day of being indoors. This month’s entry is not a call to action, but instead it’s a balm, a reminder that among the many things we must classify as essential, poetry is essential too. Last month, when I decided to focus on “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” it wasn’t in anticipation of all we might distance ourselves from, but rather because poetry can sustain us through each and every one of our circumstances.

We now find ourselves living in an era of indefinite social distancing, a phrase new to most people that’s become part of our everyday vocabulary. A way of neatly summing up the necessary actions and inactions we must take as a measure of care, and as part of a global community. Social distancing often feels like a series of “don’t”s that organize where we go and with whom we interact. Faced with an unprecedented global pandemic, many seem to find themselves spurred to action in a crisis, feeling the urge to do, to move. But as my partner recently said to me, being still is also an action.

It’s been gratifying on an almost cellular level to find that queen mother Audre Lorde can so frequently speak to the times and the places in which we find ourselves. Her final book of poetry, The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance, is no exception. Penned from 1987 to 1992, The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance emerged in Lorde’s last years as she contended with metastasized breast cancer that would ultimately end her life in November 1992. With those years spent between Berlin, St. Croix, and the United States as Lorde traveled, taught, and sought treatments for her cancer, each poem visits themes of death, family, desire, and womanhood.

In an interview from Berlin, Lorde said she wrote The Marvelous Arithmetics because she didn’t expect she would have another book. She said upon reviewing her journals and collections, “ there was a shape that was emerging. And it was exactly that, of […] how difference alters, in other words, how perspective alters the ways in which you perceive difference. From place to place.” She goes on to explain that she chose to call this process “arithmetics” because arithmetic comprises “the basic ways in which you combine numbers. I want to talk about the basic ways that distance alters the way we see. Mathematics frequently deals with theoretical relationships. But arithmetic deals with a kind of pragmatic actuality.”

Audre Lorde said 🗣 Stay In The House

For those who are like me — who have found the abrupt distancing from family, from friends, from loved ones, from sources of income and other forms of support to be overwhelming and isolating — let Lorde’s message soothe and embolden you. Even while facing certain death and the uncertainty of what comes after, Lorde lived what she wrote, confronting the fullness of her emotions and experiences to poetically transform them into something beautiful and healing.

Rushing headlong / into new silence / your face / dips on my horizon / the name / of a cherished dream / riding my anchor / one sweet season / to cast off / on another voyage / No reckoning allowed / save the marvelous arithmetics / of distance (from “Smelling the Wind”)

I love those last two lines about reckoning and distance. I think this is Lorde’s acknowledgement of the pain of any sort of rupture. Here I think to the platitudes offered when people don’t know what else to say in the face of pain: “This too shall pass.” Or, “time heals all wounds.” Rather than looking beyond the pain of the rupture, rather than looking into a future that resembles something we consider normal, Lorde asks us to consider what this rupture can teach us. How we might settle into the discomfort of distance.

There is a timbre of voice / that comes from not being heard / and knowing   you are not being / heard   noticed only / by others   not heard / for the same reason. / The flavor of midnight fruit   tongue / calling your body through dark light / piercing the allure of safety / ripping the glitter of silence / around you / dazzle me with color / and perhaps I won’t notice / till after you’re gone / your hot grain smell tattooed / into each new poem   resonant / beyond escape   I am listening / in that fine space / between desire and always / the grave stillness / before choice. (From “Echoes”)

When I first read this poem I thought that surely Lorde was referencing the voices of marginalized folks who too often go unheard, often brought together by our shared experiences of being ignored. And while this may be true, further readings got me thinking that these verses could also be read as a confrontation with one’s self, with one’s unspoken or unacknowledged desires.

One thing that has become apparent to me in the midst of this pandemic is that so many people are uncomfortable being alone with themselves. Distance in this case is the space they put between themselves and the mirror, clinging to whatever can provide the “allure of safety.” The poem’s sexual and sensual overtones are apparent, but I wonder if what is also at play is the choice between giving into those desires or making a more difficult, less safe choice of facing that which has gone unheard, perhaps within one’s own mind.

Through the core of me / a fine rigged wire / upon which pain will not falter / nor predict / I was no stranger to this arena / at high noon / beyond was not an enemy to be avoided / but a challenge / against which my neck grew strong / against which my metal struck / and I rang like fire in the sun.

I still patrol that line / sword drawn / lighting red-glazed candles of petition / along the scar / the surest way of knowing death is a fractured border / through the center of my days. (from “The Night Blooming Jasmine”)

This is yet another example of how Lorde’s living aligned so seamlessly with her writing. While Lorde speaks explicitly to her terminal cancer here, pain is no foreign concept to her as a Black lesbian woman and mother. For many of us, too, this pandemic hasn’t necessarily borne new pains as much as it has reopened old wounds. The feelings of loss, isolation, depression, and more that many of us are now facing aren’t theoretical or buried in some far-off past; they are proximal and constant.

Lorde’s bravery in facing her own pain, in deeply acknowledging death at the center of her days provides me with a measure of hope that my own pain is something I can face.

New Year’s Day 1:16 AM / and my body is weary beyond / time to withdraw and rest / ample room allowed me in everyone’s head / but community calls / right over the threshold / drums beating through the walls / children playing their truck dramas under the collapsible coatrack / in the narrow hallway outside my room

How hard it is to sleep / in the middle of life. (from “The Electric Slide Boogie”)

As hard as I’ve resisted the (mostly capitalist) imperatives to keep on moving, keep on working, etc. — what’s beautiful about this poem is the reminder that life goes on. I’m finding this refrain really helpful in gaining new perspectives on the circumstances under which we now live. Yes, there is death, and loss, and pain. But there is life, there is beauty, too, in the urges we feel to connect, to see and be seen, and to reach out and hold each other.

What poetry are you finding or creating to address our new reality? Please let us know in the comments.

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: March’s Poetry Is Not a Luxury

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde is a monthly analysis of works by queen mother Audre Lorde as they apply to our current political moment. In the spirit of relying on ancestral wisdom, centering QTPOC voices, wellness, and just generally leveling up, we believe that the Lorde has already gifted us with the tools we need for our survival.

Comfort, like so much other aid we seek, is in short supply. The relentless nature of election cycle coverage, of coronavirus and rampant xenophobia, are the symptoms, not the disease, of apocalyptic thinking that has come to organize so much of our daily lives. In the time between when this piece is written and when it’s published, who knows what the stakes will be. No longer a threat, the reality of a global pandemic has fully exposed how deeply unprepared the people who allegedly govern us are for such a situation; our very lives the potential casualties to their political hubris. Too often those who stand on the same side of justice fights fall prey to a divisiveness that threatens us almost as much as the ill we’re fighting.

One of the biggest lessons of Audre Lorde’s work, I believe, is the beauty and strength of coalitional politics. Building a coalition, a mix of people that spans races, genders, ages, and beliefs, is an inherently fraught process. But it’s also necessary work. How we go about the task of making this world inhabitable for us all matters. How is it possible to achieve freedom, from all forms of oppression, if we do not work together?

Queen Mother Lorde doesn’t divorce our need to feel from our need to act.

Audre Lorde’s life stands as a testimony to this, but she also delineates the cornerstone of her approach in the essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury.” Here, she defines poetry as “the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover their desperate wish for imagination without insight.”

On first encounter with this essay, I resisted it, feeling unable to detach my understanding of poetry from that shit I wrote really badly in my teens. I couldn’t conceive of poetry as an approach, as an articulation, largely for the reasons she explains here: We’re so often taught to understand poetry as being purposefully opaque; one of the form’s primary objectives is not to directly state the meaning of your words. Reading that type of poetry can certainly bring on a particular sense of discomfort, but what Lorde lays out for us is the potential and proximity borne out of a shared poetic language. It’s an understanding of each other and of what each of us must do to better our circumstances.

“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt.”

I think that how a task, a movement, is executed is just as important, if not more so, than the fact that it’s executed at all. This gets muddied, and fairly quickly, when we begin to turn that gaze on our justice movements. The fuzzy outline is easy enough for most of us to agree on, but the fine point, contoured work of details is usually where the fabric begins to fray and thin out, to the detriment of those most vulnerable. Although Lorde specifically names women in the next passage, I think we can interpret these words for all marginalized peoples:

“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hope and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”

I need a movement that can hold my anger. I need a movement that can hold my contradictions. I shouldn’t have to qualify my rage when speaking out about injustice. We don’t have time or need to entertain tone policing and calls for respectability. Rage and condescension are not the same thing, yet often both are aimed at the wrong target. Our current political climate has crystallized this for me. The venom hurled between some on the left at others on the left is as baffling as it is sad and a waste of energy better spent elsewhere.

I take Lorde’s words to heart when she says “Possibility is neither forever nor instant. It is also not easy to sustain belief in its efficacy.” I believe movements, like people, require immense amounts of patience and fluidity. From the individual to the collective, we need to reflexively resist the stasis fashioning itself as ethical purity, self-righteousness, and over-assuredness that your method is the method. As the term “movement” implies, we have to always stay in motion, stay open to critique and also to better ways of carrying out the work of liberation. As she cautions:

“When we view living in the european mode, only as a problem to be solved, we then rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for those were what the white fathers told us were precious. But as we become more in touch with our own ancient, black, non-european view of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and therefore lasting action comes.”

Lorde doesn’t divorce our need to feel from our need to act. I find myself tempted to read disavowal into what she is saying. But as with so much of her writing, Lorde instead extends an invitation to move closer to one another, to reject the comfort of putting distance between our thoughts and our actions.

“Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of ‘it feels right to me.’ We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”

How will you bring poetry into your freedom practice? How are you finding space for your full self, beyond problem-solving and productivity, in the midst of our present circumstances? Drop a note in the comments!

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: February’s Revolutionary Hope

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde is a monthly analysis of works by queen mother Audre Lorde as they apply to our current political moment. In the spirit of relying on ancestral wisdom, centering QTPOC voices, wellness, and just generally leveling up, we believe that the Lorde has already gifted us with the tools we need for our survival.

Well friends, with February comes Black History Month and, for me, a mix of frustration and… frustration. While I certainly take advantage of any and all opportunities to celebrate being Blackity Black Black Black, the longstanding framing of any sort of history is straight men doing things. And when it comes to Black history, ours is often framed as “the first Black person to be in a white space” as opposed to a centuries long legacy of continuously disturbing the peace.

Black History 101 notes that the month-long commemoration was borne out of Carter G. Woodson’s desire to honor Fredrick Douglass’ and Abraham Lincoln’s birth month. What may be lesser known is that Black History Month is for us, for Black folks. Woodson’s focus was on community uplift and in generating a foundational, empowering knowledge in our own history. So often, approaches to history are about these lone figures divorced from the radicality and community of their time. I am a firm believer that our internal, intra-community work should begin by focusing on our own knowledge and healing. As Toni Morrison, Black genius and recent ancestor, once said: “the function, the very serious function of racism… is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again your reason for being.”

This is what I mean about centering Blackness as part of a practice of self and communal liberation. If the lesson of last month’s “Uses of the Erotic” was self-confrontation as an act of radical love, then February’s selections tell us to turn that unwavering gaze to our communities as an act of “revolutionary hope.” I’m pairing Lorde’s 1984 conversation with James Baldwin and, arguably, her best-known speech, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” in the hopes of generating a community conversation between Black queer folks, not unlike that of Baldwin and Lorde.

In “Revolutionary Hope,” the eternal brilliance of Audre Lorde and James Baldwin graced Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts with what can only be deemed a calling in. Their discussion covered intra-racial violence, sexism, homophobia and more as they sought out the origins of so much Black marginalization.

James Baldwin: Du Bois believed in the American dream. So did Martin. So did Malcolm. So do I. So do you. That’s why we’re sitting here.

Audre Lorde: I don’t, honey. I’m sorry, I just can’t let that go past. Deep, deep, deep down I know that dream was never mine. And I wept and I cried and I fought and I stormed, but I just knew it. I was Black. I was female. And I was out – out – by any construct wherever the power lay. So if I had to claw myself insane, if I lived I was going to have to do it alone. Nobody was dreaming about me. Nobody was even studying me except as something to wipe out.

This conversation takes place three years before Baldwin passed away. I’m still surprised that, so late in his life, Baldwin remained invested in ideas of an American dream whose farce had been disproved so many times over. What’s so beautiful about Lorde’s response is the firmness of her rebuttal and the way she identifies her strategy for living — to fiercely and openly carve out a place for herself at whatever the cost. Whether she survived or didn’t, it would be in the fullness of her truth as an out Black lesbian.

JB: We are behind the gates of a kingdom which is determined to destroy us.

AL: Yes, exactly so. And I’m interested in seeing that we do not accept terms that will help us destroy each other. And I think one of the ways in which we destroy each other is by being programmed to knee-jerk on our differences. Knee-jerk on sex. Knee-jerk on sexuality…

JB: I don’t quite know what to do about it, but I agree with you. And I understand exactly what you mean. You’re quite right. We get confused with genders – you know, what the western notion of woman is, which is not necessarily what a woman is at all. It’s certainly not the African notion of what a woman is. Or even the European notion of what a woman is. And there’s certainly not [a] standard of masculinity in this country which anybody can respect. Part of the horror of being a Black American is being trapped into being an imitation of an imitation.

For both Baldwin and Lorde, the beauty is in the rigor. Their disagreements and differing positionalities are apparent throughout the conversation; but what is also constant is their clear love and respect for one another, the type of fierce, queer love that requires folks to challenge and better each other. One particular instance that stands out to me is how Lorde doesn’t allow the overlaps of Blackness and queerness to obscure some internalized misogyny that Baldwin makes apparent throughout “Revolutionary Hope.”

AL: But we have to define ourselves for each other. We have to redefine ourselves for each other because no matter what the underpinnings of the distortion are, the fact remains that we have absorbed it. We have all absorbed this sickness and ideas in the same way we absorbed racism. It’s vital that we deal constantly with racism, and with white racism among Black people – that we recognize this as a legitimate area of inquiry. We must also examine the ways that we have absorbed sexism and heterosexism. These are the norms in this dragon we have been born into – and we need to examine these distortions with the same kind of openness and dedication that we examine racism.

I first happened upon this conversation in the early days of Tumblr(!), and now, so many years and reads later, I realize that what has most intrigued me is how these two could hold one another to task in such a way that it deepened and didn’t end the conversation. It’s a methodology-in-action that is the prequel to “The Master’s Tools.”

In that speech, Lorde recounts an experience at an NYU humanities conference and the relegation of Black feminists and lesbians to one panel within the entire conference. Although the subjects of her critique are White feminists, particularly at the moment of feminism becoming a permanent fixture in academia, her critique echoes the cautions she voiced against Baldwin’s belief in the American Dream. She famously warns against Black folks’ adopting the methods of their oppressors.

“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 take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

Within both readings, Lorde’s position remains constant: Our power and our freedom lie in our ability to embrace our differences as the source of our collective strength. She goes on to say:

“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of differen[t] strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.”

I think it’s easy to fall prey and misread “The Master’s Tools” as a critique that’s brutal as it is beautiful in its truth. But much like the Baldwin conversation, the framework of revolutionary hope is crucial. As with all liberation struggles, the commonality is a belief that we can do better, that we can live freely and openly, that we can do right by one another. For this Black History Month and beyond, I hope we can take our cue from Lorde and do the difficult work of calling each other in as Black people, as queer folks, and as members of so many divergent and overlapping communities.

Here’s one last quote to meditate on, for good measure:

“Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”

Have you enacted your own reckonings with yourself and your community? What does that look like for you? What have your experiences been? Please let me know in the comments!

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: January’s Uses of the Erotic

Welcome to Autostraddle’s new series, Year of Our (Audre) Lorde, a monthly analysis of works by queen mother Audre Lorde as they apply to our current political moment. In the spirit of relying on ancestral wisdom, centering QTPOC voices, wellness, and just generally leveling up, we believe that the Lorde has already gifted us with the tools we need for our survival.

For a while now, I’ve referred to the Gregorian calendar date as “The year of our Audre Lorde 20___ ” in response to fuckery big and small occurring around the world. I meant it mostly in jest but also to invoke the spirit of a woman whose work continues to ripple outward with such a profound impact on the communities I belong to. This moment, this year is not any more urgent than the time in which Lorde sat down to write. Queer lives, Black lives, and those of all other marginalized folks remain under threat. Precarity is still a frayed tie that binds us.

But we are still here. Still alive. I realized that, personally, I have spent the last few years bracing for whatever comes, never anticipating that the peace, the joy, and the pleasure I so craved were in fact things that I deserved. Lorde speaks to a heaviness not unlike this, a longing for something other than the world she had, but she also loosens herself from these psychic holds, favoring our supreme ability to fully claim our own freedom.

Thus, in the YEAR OF OUR AUDRE LORDE TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY, in the spirit of relying on ancestral wisdom, centering QTPOC voices, wellness, communal healing, resolutions, and just generally leveling up, I vow to deeply engage with the Queen Mother’s work, allowing it to saturate my every day for the entirety of the year. I want this to be an exercise in deep reading, deep listening, and deep living. I’m not interested in reading her because I “should”; I’m interested because what little I’ve already encountered lets me know she, like so many of our ancestors, has gifted us with the tools we need for our survival.

For our first installation, in her essay “The Uses of the Erotic,” Lorde challenges us to understand that life-force she deems as “the erotic” beyond the realm of the sexual, and to harness it as a source of our divine power in all aspects of our lives.

I first came across “The Uses of the Erotic” as part of a performance art fellowship. It was a couple of years ago, just before I came out, and just when I’d been looking for a way to get out of my head and into my body. Lorde was one of many authors we were asked to both read and embody, and she was integral to an experience that helped open me up to the fullness of my queer desire and my artistic capabilities. It was the perfect queerdo, POC, intergenerational space I needed to move from “not really straight” and “I guess I’m an artist” to “yeah I’m definitely fucking queer” and “I will write, paint, and dance all over your shit.”

I will write, paint, and dance all over your shit. (Picture taken by Jenny Koons, of the performance 125th & FREEdom.)

Lorde explains that “the erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.” What continues to stay with me is her imperative that we not look away. That we stand face to face with this chaos of feelings and move into a space of action.

As part of the performance fellowship, I was terrified at the prospect of putting my body in plain sight, with all of the writerly, wallflower-esque tropes abounding. But the thing I most dreaded turned into an experience that shifted how I move through the world, at least for a time. We brought our ritual to the street with a closing intervention moving east to west, across Manhattan, for five hours. The fear I felt at being so visible morphed into a kinetic, communal vibration that pulsated between the onlookers on 125th St and each of us in the ensemble. But like most transcendent feelings, it hasn’t lasted. In some ways it almost feels surreal now, to think that I was able to bring my full self into view like that. That woman is someone I want to return to, someone I need to feel again.

Bring your full self into view. (Picture taken by Jenny Koons, of the performance 125th & FREEdom.)

So in recognition of this January/ New Year vibration, I’m inviting y’all to join me in meditating on “The Uses of the Erotic.” Stand in front of a mirror reciting Lorde’s words over and over. Make them an incantation. Chant them while nourishing yourself — cooking, bathing, doing a masturbation meditation. Envision your erotic power filling your body to brim and spilling over into a manifestation of all you need and deserve to not only live but thrive.

I’ve pulled some choice quotes that I’ll keep on repeat for the rest of this month. I’m trying my best not to look away:

“Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, “It feels right to me,” acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding. […] The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.”

Saying “it feels right to me” is the act of trusting yourself, which seems so elegantly straightforward and yet so profound because it goes against everything we’re taught about how to be in this world. Keeping this on repeat!

“Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.”

I read this and wept. Like a full-on ugly cry. This image of Lorde dancing is just so beautiful, and I cannot remember the last time I danced this way.

“For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.”

I find this especially powerful because I get so easily caught up in the #hustle that is being a working artist. I love working consistently, but I also need to remember why I do this work and to feel more inspired again.

“When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.”

While this is a clear moment of more binary approaches to gender, I think a more inclusive approach to womanhood and marginalized genders offers a look at how each of those traditions and histories offer us opportunities for reclamation and empowerment, especially in community with one another.

“In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.”

One of the best lessons a therapist gifted me with was the framing that a lot of my pain (depression, anxiety, etc.) comes from trying to survive in a world literally not built for my Blackness or my queerness. I think this lesson from Lorde is similar in that it offers a light away from these states and this way of existing that drains our eros, our erotic energy, our spirits, and offers a way back to feeling more whole.

What rituals, meditations, and other tools will you employ to center Lorde’s work? Leave a comment about how you’ll mark this Year of our Audre Lorde below!