Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (review)

For those interested in any number of late twentieth-century liberation movements, from second-wave feminism to the struggle for GLBT equality, Alexis De Veaux provides valuable insight into the life and work of Audre Lorde in the first ever biography of the self-described "black, feminist, lesbian, mother, poet warrior." De Veaux offers a generally sympathetic approach to Lorde's contributions within a variety of liberation movements while deftly maneuvering through the challenge of summarizing someone who exhibited a multiplicity of interests, activisms, and achievements. The style is reminiscent of Annie Cohen-Solal's thorough portrait of Jean-Paul Sartre, insofar as it presents a well-researched and thoroughly documented portrait of a multifaceted and public intellectual while successfully uncovering the human being who gave rise to the poetry and prose that Lorde made her life's work.

De Veaux frames Lorde's life as pivoting upon her diagnosis of breast cancer, which led to a fourteen year battle with the disease. Lorde documented the moment herself within the work, The Cancer Journals, but De Veaux is careful to not reduce Lorde's final fourteen years to the disease. Instead De Veaux explains through quoting Lorde's son, "After she was diagnosed with cancer in 1978, her life took on a kind of immediacy that most people's lives never develop" (225). While Lorde's openness about her struggle with cancer and the meaning of her subsequent mastectomy was itself revolutionary, De Veaux highlights how the struggle with cancer provided Lorde with the focus to make her contributions to the broader idea of liberation more poignant.

Lorde was a poet by trade and refused to consider herself a theoretician, yet De Veaux successfully makes use of the tropes that inhabit Lorde's most significant collection of prose writings, Sister, Outsider, to provide a psychological portrait of the warrior poet. First and foremost, De Veaux constantly vacillates between Lorde as sister, both in terms of her familial relations and in the broader sense as a member of black, feminist, and GLBT communities, and Lorde as outsider, alienated from the strict Caribbean values of her immigrant parents, a black woman inhabiting predominantly white feminism, a lesbian deeply at odds with the homophobia within the black community, and a lesbian who refused to turn her back on men, as exhibited by her open relationship with her husband and the son her marriage produced (219).

Through her poetry and her prose, Lorde relies on her personal experiences in order to make sense of the intersections of oppressions, both those which are imposed from without and from within. DeVeaux's description of Lorde's life and loves is punctuated with the poetry and prose that were both born of her life's events and gave rise to them. Lorde's experience of pregnancy, examined through her poem, "Now That I Am Forever with Child" displays the intimate openness of Lorde's reflection on herself through her writing, and De Veaux makes use of it to underscore the meaning and import of Lorde's relationship with her husband and the understanding of motherhood that came from it (79). Likewise, in Lorde's prose, many essays begin with a statement situating her personal position, describing her outsider position as the impetus for the reflection. De Veaux quotes Lorde's essay "Learning from the Sixties," that "[a]s a black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage there was usually some part of me guaranteed to offend everybody's comfortable prejudices of who I should be" (64). Just as her poetry is intimately personal, such statements indicate that Lorde's social criticism was no mere exercise in theoretical gamesmanship but was born of the deeply personal desire for liberation that motivates many authors engaged in social struggle.

Of greatest interest to the scholar of feminist philosophy is how Lorde's willingness to speak of her personal pain and anger results in confrontations between Lorde and her fellow feminists over the importance of race, class, and sexuality. Lorde repeatedly and...