Audre Lorde: Trauma Theory and Liberal Multiculturalism

Abstract

A becomes important in politics to degree that it points to real processes about which society cannot even reach agreement on how they are to be conceived or interpreted, much less resolved, or to events that introduce which can no longer or not yet be contained within historical unities or narrative continuities through which society proposes to define itself. And perhaps there can be no genuine democracy unless society respects and provides room for emergence of questions of this type--questions raised problems and antagonisms that society generates. Indeed we may well ask: What is question of identity--the question of identity--today? --John Rajchman, Question of Identity (60) Almost every critic who has written on Audre Lorde has made argument that her work is transformational. AnaLouise Keating, who has written prolifically on Lorde, says that by speaking out [Lorde] begins constructing world she envisions; that is, she creates discourse enabling her to invent world in which those truths can materialize (157). (1) The majority of these arguments, however, have focused on Lorde's prose, and studies that do address her in large part approach it from angle of content only, rarely paying close attention to its form. While I agree that Lorde can produce or at least alternative language, particularly in midst of ever-strengthening hegemonic discourse of US liberal multiculturalism, (2) I argue that it is formal qualities of Lorde's poems and their use of what I define below as traumatic aesthetics that can be truly transformational allowing readers to become aware of limitations of dominant liberal multicultural discourse and its ways of representing identity and subjecthood. The poems speak to issues of political importance as defined Rajchman in that they are able to linguistically represent something which can no longer or not yet be contained within historical unities or narrative continuities through which [US] society proposes to define itself (60). Communication requires entering into and utilizing that preexists speaker. She cannot communicate without recourse to commonly shared discourse, and if she is able to use it to communicate ideas, it is only because that is at point at which it can express those ideas. I would argue, however, that one of functions of lyric is to speak dominant rhetoric differently, to open up different forms of expression and description. This, of course, does not mean that it does not have its own formal and communicative rules, only that those rules are not same as everyday, often narrative-based, communication. I mentioned that little work has been done on formal qualities of Lorde's poetry. There are, however, few notable exceptions. Amitai F. Avi-Ram has studied Lorde's use ofapo koinou, figure of speech in which a single word or phrase is shared between two distinct, independent units, to draw connections between Lorde and modernist poets and to argue that she uses this trope to develop new language which allows for an alternative constitution of subject in poetry (193, 206, 207). Lexi Rudnitsky employs similar methodology, reading syntactic ambiguity of Lorde's work in relation to her multiple identity positions, but arguing that Lorde's disruption of traditional syntax and grammar has the pointed objective ... of complicating subject position, undermining monolithic categories of identity, and demonstrating that difference can be source of creativity (476). Finally, Sagri Dhairyam examines Lorde's fraught relation to modernist poetic forms both because she has inherited them from white male tradition and because they invite readers to perform their own interpretations of Lorde's identity--often resulting in limited and exclusionary readings. …