Lorde, Audre

Source:

 African American National Biography

Lorde, Audre

(18 Feb. 1934–17 Nov. 1992),

poet, writer, and activist, was born Audrey Geraldine Lorde in Harlem, New York City, the youngest of three daughters of Frederic Byron Lorde, a laborer and real estate broker from Barbados, and Linda Bellmar, from Grenada, who sometimes found work as a maid. Lorde's parents came to the United States from the Caribbean with hopes of earning enough money to return to the West Indies and start a small business. During the Depression the realization that the family was going to remain exiled in America slowly set in. Growing up in this atmosphere of disappointment had a profound impact on Lorde's development, as questions of identity, nationality, and community membership occupied her mind.

Ironically, this woman whose living and reputation derived from her skillful use of words had to struggle as a child to acquire speech and literacy. She was so nearsighted that she was considered legally blind. Moreover, her mother feared that she might be retarded, and her first memories of school were of being disparaged for being mentally slow. Either out of fear of her mother, a severe disciplinarian, or because of an undiagnosed speech impediment, Lorde did not begin to talk until she was four years old and was uncommunicative for many years thereafter.

Lorde received her early education at two Catholic institutions in Harlem, St. Mark's and St. Catherine's. In her fictionalized biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), she recalls the patronizing racism of low expectations, the overt racism of bigotry, and the oppressive learning environment that stifled her creativity. The West Indian dialect and the unusual idioms that she heard at home taught her that words could be used in different and creative ways. Freedom to construct words and sentences as she chose, however, was a right that she would have to fight for. Alternate spellings of her name and the adoption of new names were merely the most visible symbols of her struggle for self-definition. If Lorde was to be a rebel and a contrarian, words would become her weapons of choice.

Lorde began writing poetry in the seventh or eighth grade. At Hunter College High School she met another aspiring poet, Diane de Prima, and they worked together on the school literary journal, Scribimus. However, when the school refused to print a love sonnet Lorde had written about her affection for a boy, she sent the poem to Seventeen magazine, where it was published. After graduating from high school in 1951, Lorde worked and studied intermittently until 1959, when she received a BA degree from Hunter College. During much of the 1950s Lorde supported herself as a factory worker and an X-ray technician and in a number of other unsatisfying positions.

A pivotal experience occurred in 1954, when Lorde spent a year at the National University of Mexico. Although she had had a brief lesbian encounter while working at a factory in Connecticut, it was in Mexico that she began to free herself of the feelings of deviance that had inhibited her sexuality. When she returned to New York the next year, she immersed herself in the “gay girl” culture of Greenwich Village, and she continued to develop her craft as a member of the Harlem Writers Guild, which brought her into contact with such poets as Langston Hughes. It was also during this period that she became involved with the beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka).

In 1961 Lorde received an MLS degree from Columbia University's School of Library Service, and in March 1962 she married Edward Ashley Rollins, a white attorney from Brooklyn. They were married for eight years and had two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan, before divorcing in 1970. She held a number of posts at different libraries before becoming the head librarian at Town School Library in New York City, where she served from 1966 to 1968.

Lorde's life took a dramatic turn in 1968 when she received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, resigned her position as a librarian, and accepted a post at Tougaloo College in Mississippi as poet-in-residence. While she was working at this historically black college, Lorde's first book of poetry, The First Cities (1968), received critical acclaim for its effective understatement and subtlety. It was at Tougaloo College that Lorde met Frances Clayton, who would become her companion for nineteen years. Lorde's second book, Cables to Rage (1970), captures the anger of the emerging Black Power movement and contains the poem “Martha,” in which Lorde first confirms her homosexuality in print. From this point on, Lorde observed that different groups (blacks, feminists, lesbians, and others) wanted to claim aspects of her life to aid their cause while rejecting those elements that challenged their prejudices. Of this tendency, Lorde said in an interview: “There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself—whether it's black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc.—because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else. But once you do that, then you've lost” (Carla M. Hammond, Denver Quarterly 16, no. 1 [1981], 10–27).

During the 1970s Lorde returned to New York, where she entered a productive period of writing, teaching, and giving readings. Her third book, From a Land Where Other People Live (1973), was nominated for the National Book Award for poetry. It was followed in rapid succession by New York Head Shop and Museum (1974), Coal (1976), Between Ourselves (1976), and The Black Unicorn (1978). In these works Lorde develops her central themes: bearing witness to the truth, transforming pain into freedom, and seizing the power to define love and beauty for oneself. Never does her work trade in clichés, employ hackneyed metaphors, or evoke saccharine sentiment. Lorde found a new voice in poetry that struck like a hammer but sounded like a bell on issues of race, gender, sexuality, and humanity.

Late in 1978, at the age of forty-four, Lorde was stricken with breast cancer. She had a mastectomy but refused to wear a prosthesis to hide the effects of the surgery. Instead, she chose to face her ordeal openly and honestly by incorporating it into her writing. In many ways The Cancer Journal (1980) helped women “come out of the closet” about this disease. Confronted with her own mortality, she published the autobiographical Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), which is essentially the story of her early life, and Sister Outsider (1984), a collection of speeches and essays. In Burst of Light (1988), which won the American Book Award for nonfiction, Lorde explains that “the struggle with cancer now informs all my days, but it is only another face of that continuing battle for self-determination and survival that black women fight daily, often in triumph.” Her final book of poems, The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance, was published posthumously in 1993.

In an effort to help other women writers, Lorde cofounded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980. She taught courses on race and literature at Lehman College and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and she was the Thomas Hunter Professor of English at her alma mater, Hunter College, until 1988. Lorde's highest accolade was bestowed in 1991, when she received New York's Walt Whitman Citation of Merit, an award given to the poet laureate of New York State.

Six years after her mastectomy Lorde was diagnosed with liver cancer. She sought treatment in America, Europe, and Africa before moving to St. Croix in the Virgin Islands with her companion, Gloria I. Joseph. Shortly before her death in November 1992 Lorde underwent an African ritual in which she was renamed Gambda Adisa, which loosely translated means “Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known.”

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