Poetry and Revolution: Audre Lorde’s Prayers to the World

Sometime in the 1970s, probably at an event in the San Francisco Bay Area, I heard Audre Lorde read a poem.  I don’t remember the poem, but do remember her reading of it demanded my attention.  I was slightly familiar with her work up to then, mostly because of my female friends, gay and straight, whose bookshelves often included a couple of her books.  In addition, the Kitchen Table Press, which she helped found, was an inspiration to my friends and I who hoped to write and publish something ourselves someday.  The two books of Lorde’s I was most familiar with were From a Land Where Other People Live and New York Head Shop and Museum.  The former was nominated for a National Book Award and the second had an intriguing title with poems that demanded both an intellectual and emotional reaction.

Lorde’s place in the book of American letters was long ago assured.  Despite her insistence on her identification as a lesbian and a Black woman, the power of her work and its ultimately universal nature guaranteed that her place would not be denied.  At the time of Lorde’s decision to identify as such, doing so was not just an act of militancy, it was also a potential death knoll for one’s career in the field of letters. Lorde wasn’t just Black, she was also a woman who defined herself as a lesbian; all of this at a time when being Black was still reason enough for academia and the world of writers and publishers to shut one out.  God forbid one also came out as a gay person of any gender.  The latter identity caused waves and created anger among quite a few of her Black male colleagues, whose understanding of gender and sexuality did not include lesbians at the time.

There’s a new biography of Lorde out in the world.  Titled Survival is a Promise:The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, it is by no means a conventional biography.  Yes, Lorde’s life—from her childhood that began in Harlem in 1934 to her death in St. Croix in 1992—is chronicled, albeit not in a linear or even traditional sense.  The author of the book, Alexis Pauline Gumbo, is a poet, author and (as she writes in her bio at the book’s end) a queer Black feminist love evangelist.  The text itself combines those impulses and lifework with Lorde’s life work, thereby creating a piece of poetic prose that brings to life Audre Lorde’s vitality, creative spirit, love of the planet earth and its inhabitants.  It is also a description of her anger at those who would destroy those things and her approach to dealing with those phenomena and the humans behind them.  As the title suggests, the text is also about Lorde’s approach and attitude towards survival: as a Black woman, as a lesbian, as an antiwar and anti-racist and on a very personal level, as a person with cancer.

The eternal life referred to is a reference to that life almost every human aspires: to be remembered after one leaves their physical body.  That is a reason we have children, whether we are conscious of that fact at the moment of birth or not.  It is certainly the reason artists create art, musicians create music and writers write—all in the slight hope some part of what we create will carry on into history.  Ideally, the works we create will do more than be a mark of time or a notation.  In addition, one hopes they will effect the human consciousness going forward.  It is this reviewer’s understanding of this biography that the author Gumbo believes Audre Lorde has done (and continues to do) this very thing.

The reader is welcomed into Lorde’s life as uncovered by her biographer.  Her father who was distant, died when Audre was nineteen and uncertain how to express his love.  Her mother whose sternness was her means of survival.  A librarian in the public library branch in Harlem whose mentoring and encouragement of Audre’s reading and writing when she was young. Lorde’s first crush and Lorde’s lovers.  Her successes and frustrations, from the first science fiction story published in Seventeen magazine while she was in high school to the difficulties being published in the white-dominated world of Hunter College and beyond.  Then there are the biographer Gumbo’s contemplations of Lorde’s works and her emotions.  The latter are accompanied by insights drawn from Gumbo’s life and understanding.  The images she draws are reminiscent of an impressionist painting filled with light that force the viewer to perceive the shadows—shadows that seem to make the light possible.

Survival is a Promise is a work of prosaic prowess.  Poetic in its sensibilities, it tells a tale of a life, a time, a heart, a mind and a soul.  As I read it, I entered into a reality that was clearly set in the lifespan, surroundings and books of Audre Lorde; it was also something that included her love of the earth’s mysteries, her hopes and fears for humanity and her determination to survive the obstacles we exist with.  Reading Survival is a Promise is a sublime experience.

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