“In my mother’s house, there was no room in which to make errors, no room to be wrong,” Lorde remembered in her 1982 book Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.Ī hybrid of autobiography, mythography, and fiction, Zami is a sensory revelation, an erotic meditation, and a portrait of the artist as a “fat, Black, nearly blind, and ambidextrous” girl growing up in pre-Stonewall New York. Lorde told Adrienne Rich: “My mother had a strange way with words if one didn’t serve her or wasn’t strong enough, she’d just make up another word, and then that word would enter our family language forever, and woe betide any of us who forgot it.” Young Audre thrived underneath and in spite of her mother’s accusative, watchful eye. Her mother’s influence was the strongest. “Poetry was something I learned from my mother’s strangenesses and from my father’s silences,” she remembered in a 1980 interview for The American Poetry Review. Under their forbidding gaze, however, she developed a poetic sensibility.
They “spoke all through my childhood with one unfragmentable and unappealable voice,” she remembered. Lorde devoted her career to building bridges across social divides as well as nurturing the distinct voices of Black feminist writers who responded to the raw physicality of her imagery and her now famous rallying cries, such as, “Your silence will not protect you.”īorn in New York City in 1934, Audre Lorde was the daughter of strict Grenadian parents. Her life emblematized the concept of intersectionality, a term coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw to describe the ways in which distinct social identities, such as race and gender, are mutually constitutive. She was unique in her determination to speak and write without shame, but at the same time wholly representative, embodying the complexities of a contemporary radical Black feminist identity. Lorde treated her body-the range of her corporeal needs, fears, and desires-as a resource of political and creative information, a platform from which she communicated her worldview. Eminently faithful to the tenet that the personal is political, she wrote fearlessly from the landscape of her most intimate self.
To her readers, colleagues, and admirers, she offered a radical and liberating vision of the world in her work. A self-described Black lesbian mother warrior poet, Audre Lorde lived a life of possibility.
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