Audre Lorde: Vignettes and Mental Conversations

Abstract

Audre Lorde, African American, is a writer. She is a professor of English at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where in 1987 she became the first woman to be Thomas Hunter Professor. So important is she to the students at Hunter that when they established a women's poetry centre there, the students named it after Lorde. She has published thirteen volumes of work and in 1974 her book of poetry, From A Land Where Other People Live (Lorde, 1973) was nominated for the National Book Award. She is also a lesbian, feminist and activist poet, who dedicates her work to an acceptance, understanding and use of difference in the struggle to change the world. Seemingly simple, this work is practically, intellectually and emotionally enormous because it involves the creation of new ways of seeing and being from within the interstices, the very fabric, of our current social realities. She is a poet and as such there is both an aural and visual quality to all her work including her essays and biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Lorde, 1982a). The texture of her writing, the rhythms and tones of her voice and the economy, precision, yet multiplicity of meaning of her words, are those of the poet. To fully comprehend her, to feel the impact of her work, one needs to hear her, if not in the person then to be able to conjure up her voice. To hear how she delivers the words that we can see on the written page. How then is it possible to write in connection with Lorde in the absence of the voice and when, for much of the time, I find her poems beyond the bounds of my comprehension? Surely it is both audacious and partial, and can only lead to a one-sided and superficial engagement with her work. Well that might be the case if this were an exercise in literary criticism, but it is not. Rather it is part of a longer piece which