New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000

15. Remembering Audre Lorde (1993)

15 Remembering Audre lorde (1993) The phone rings. It is Lisa, one of the graduate students with whom I work: “Barbara, I have bad news.” Silence. “Audre Lorde just died in St. Croix.” I am stunned, unprepared, though I should not be. Audre has had breast cancer for many years. I know she now lives in St. Croix, my ancestral home, where the sun and the sea are invigorating her. The islands, her mother’s islands, would save her body, I had hoped. Lisa repeats: “Audre died in St. Croix.” Silence. Then I say, “I will never see her again.” I will always hear her, though. Audre left for us her work—words that manyAfricanAmerican women had been too afraid to speak.We had been taught that silence was golden, that it could protect you. Yet, as our daily lives and statistics proclaimed, we were steadily being attacked from within our homes as well as from without. Audre Lorde refused to be silenced, refused to be limited to any one category, insisted on being all that she was: poet, black, mother, lesbian, feminist, warrior, activist, woman. As I grieve her passing on, I cannot help but think of the irony that we split her into her separate parts: so many white feminist/lesbians respond only to her lesbianism; blacks to her race activism; literary critics to her poetic craft; mother goddess followers to her African goddesses. Ah—Audre—if there is any tribute we can give you, it is to acknowledge all those parts of yourself without which you would not be you. Love is a word, another kind of open As the diamond comes into a knot of flame I am Black because I come from the earth’s inside First published in The Women’s Review of Books 10, no. 6 (March 1993): 5–6. now take my word for jewel in the open light1 I remember the first time I met Audre. It was 1968. Both of us were working in the SEEK program at City College, New York, a program designed to prepare apparently uneducable Blacks and Puerto Ricans for college .We were demanding our rights, insisting on structural transformation of the educational system. I’d read some of her poems and was inspired by their sinewy sound and honesty. In love with language, we talked about poetry, about protest, about social change. I was just beginning to realize the sexism within the Black Power Movement and was grappling for the words to express it. Unity was the call word of the day, even if it was a false unity. The black revolutionaries we thought ourselves to be could not be fragmented by such trivia. I did not then know that Audre was a lesbian. In 1968, to be a black person and to be a homosexual (James Baldwin notwithstanding) was to be against the revolution, to be tainted by white evil. By the time I’d moved to California, in 1971,Audre had published “Love Poem,” which was clearly about sexual love between women. Like Martin Luther at Wittenberg when he’d seceded from the powerful Catholic Church by tacking his precepts up on a church door, Audre, the librarian, had tacked her poem up on her office door for all to see. I heard the reverberations from coast to coast. Her insistence on speaking as her entire self, whatever the consequences, became a model for many women who had begun to realize that when the words “Black Liberation” were spoken they were not referring to us, precisely because we were women. Likeotherwomen,I hadbeen mute,silencedbythe blackrhetoricofthe period.Audre’s courage, her honesty, reminded us that we could not act for ourselves or others if we could not transform our own silence into speech: if we speak we are afraid that our words will be used against us And if we do not speak we are still afraid So, it is better to speak knowing we were never meant to survive.2 It is 1978. I am listening to the radio on a Saturday as I clean the house. I have a child, am married, yet might as well be a single mother. I am writRememberingAudre Lorde 15 ing a book on black women novelists and am known as a feminist, yet feel troubled about European-American feminism. Its puritanical tendencies do not relate closely enough to many people’s lives...