Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde was a great poet who was much loved for her honesty and strength. There's part of a speech called, 'The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House', that Audre Lorde gave in 1979, that sounds so 2020. Lorde said; "Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of colour to educate white women – in the face of tremendous resistance – as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival."
Audre Lorde, who was the daughter of Caribbean immigrants, was born in New York in 1934. As a child Lorde had serious problems with her eye sight and also had trouble speaking clearly. She became interested in poetry and developed an ability to memorize and recite. She began writing her own poetry before she was a teenager.
Of her poetic beginnings Lorde commented in Black Women Writers: “I used to speak in poetry. I would read poems, and I would memorize them. People would say, well what do you think, Audre. What happened to you yesterday? And I would recite a poem and somewhere in that poem would be a line or a feeling I would be sharing. In other words, I literally communicated through poetry. And when I couldn’t find the poems to express the things I was feeling, that’s what started me writing poetry, and that was when I was twelve or thirteen.”
Le Document recommends the book, Your Silence Will Not Protect You which is a collection of speeches, essays, poems and interviews published by Silver Press. Here is an extract from the essay called, ‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury’: "Women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power … They are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare."
After graduating from Hunter college in 1959, Lorde found employment as a librarian. She later became, 'Writer In Residence' at a college in Mississippi, and would eventually become a Professor at a University in Berlin. Knowing that it would be hard to get her own work published, Lorde and fellow writer, Barbera Smith set up, Kitchen Table: Women of Colour Press and began publishing books aimed at promoting the writing of women of colour of all racial/ethnic heritages, national origins, ages, socioeconomic classes, and sexual orientations.
In 1978 Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer, Lorde's battles with cancer inspired the essay collection, 'A Burst of Light'. Lorde saw women like herself who had undergone a mastectomy, as warriors rather than victims. In the book, Journals, Lorde explained her decision not to wear a prosthesis after undergoing a mastectomy... “Prosthesis offers the empty comfort of ‘Nobody will know the difference.’ But it is that very difference which I wish to affirm, because I have lived it, and survived it, and wish to share that strength with other women. If we are to translate the silence surrounding breast cancer into language and action against this scourge, then the first step is that women with mastectomies must become visible to each other.”
In the last few years of her life she would receive the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit and made The New York State Poet Laureate. Governor Mario Cuomo said Audre Lorde was, "the voice of the eloquent outsider". Although Lorde died in 1992 - her thoughts and ideas, and her way with words, will continue to inspire and move millions of people from all over the world.
Text and painting © Harry Pye 2020
