“Wear me”: Audre Lorde’s Poetic Performance Towards Survival, Healing and Transformation

Abstract

Audre Lorde, who publicly identified herself as a black lesbian feminist warrior poet in the America of the 1970s and 1980s, asserts the importance of poetry for marginalized subjects, particularly for black women, and of their resistance against silence. This paper seeks to pay detailed attention to her poetry, particularly to methodology, form, and effect, in relation to her political philosophy of poetry and with the help of a Butlerian lens of performance. The question underlying this paper is what exactly Lorde ‘does’ in and through her poetry as one of the rare twentieth-century poets who proclaim the revolutionary or transformational power of poetic language. Lorde’s idea of ‘poetry’ as expressed in her essays and interviews, which is inseparable from or almost synonymous with her politics of emotion/the erotic, can be summarized as the politics of self-restoration toward the survival, healing, and self-empowerment of black women. Focusing on six of Lorde’s poems in The New York Head Shop and Museum (1974) and The Black Unicorn (1978), and frequently employing Judith Butler’s terms from her performativity theory of gender and identity, this paper examines how Lorde’s non-conformist poetic performance resignifies the hegemonic force of white-normative, Eurocentric heterosexism. I look particularly at how her poetry redefines the imaginary, love, and identity and redirects internalized oppressions to empower black female lesbian subjects, focusing on her parodic recontextualization of symbolism, her self-reflexive poetic performance of the lesbian erotic; and her spiritual, ritualistic performance of identity and emotion toward the personal and social, psychic and discursive survival and transformation of black/lesbian women.