Even if you don’t know who Audre Lorde is, you’ve probably encountered her ideas in the world or, at the very least, scrolled past them on social media. Lines from her poems and essays are just as likely to appear in an Instagram post as on a protest sign or in a pamphlet for an academic conference: “We were never meant to survive.” “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” “Your silence will not protect you.”
Lorde’s most oracular line, however, is not as popular, though she said it frequently into her later years. “What I leave behind has a life of its own.” She knew that her work was shifting consciousness. Expanding it. And that it would outlive her.
Lorde rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s as one of the most lauded thinkers and multigenre writers of her time. She penned ferocious essays on lesbian parenting and healing Black self-hatred. She traveled extensively and wrote about what she saw, connecting the struggles of Black women living under apartheid in South Africa to the United States’ invasion of Grenada and articulating new visions of feminism. She insisted that the women’s movement consider the needs and political realities of Black women and that the Black nationalist and civil rights movement address its homophobia and not ignore its gay and lesbian brethren.
Lorde brought her entire self to any setting that she was in. In 1982, at age 48, she published “Zami,” a genre-fluid memoir that detailed her coming of age as a lesbian in downtown New York in the 1950s and the relationships that shaped her consciousness as an adult. Lorde described herself as a “Black lesbian feminist warrior poet” as a means of making all her identities known simultaneously. She made the road as she walked it.
“I will never be gone,” Lorde once wrote. “I am a scar, a report from the frontlines, a talisman, a resurrection.” Lorde viewed her work, her life — even herself — as compost, dense matter to enrich the soil that future generations of writers, activists and artists would grow from. She saved everything she could, including her childhood poems, party fliers and all her journals, trying to ensure that she would not fall into the same obscurity as other Black feminist scholars. But she could not account for the ways her ideas would become co-opted and distilled into platitudes.
One of her most potent revelations came late in life, as she received a terminal cancer diagnosis. She realized that she needed to prioritize rest, eliminate sugar from her diet and work more deliberately so as not to exhaust herself. She came to understand that tending to the self — particularly against the backdrop of an apathetic, anti-Black, misogynistic society — was the ultimate act of preservation. And yet this powerful notion of self-determination became popularized as self-care, denatured to mean splurging on facials and binging on Netflix.
A new biography, “Survival Is a Promise,” published in late August, offers a new framework to consider Lorde’s lifelong activism and legacy. Written by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, an independent scholar and celebrated poet in her own right, the book is a “cosmic biography” — it expands our understanding of Lorde’s thought by drawing out how presciently and intensely she engaged with ecology and the environment. “The earth is telling us something about our conduct of living,” as Lorde wrote in an open letter to the Black lesbian feminist journal Aché in 1990. She was asking us to consider that our fight for rights was meaningless if we didn’t have a habitable home to enact them upon. A few years earlier, in an interview with the filmmaker Dagmar Schultz, Lorde said, “We must preserve the earth upon which we seek while formulating questions and looking for answers.”
The book’s title comes from a note scribbled in the draft of a Lorde essay that Gumbs once came across in an archive: “I love the word survival, it always sounds to me like a promise,” Lorde wrote. Gumbs wanted to make clear that Lorde’s appeals for survival went beyond the singular. The challenge, then, for Gumbs as a biographer, became how to lay out Lorde’s expansive and interrelated view of humanity and also bring her back to earth.
Gumbs’s biography starts with the idea that Lorde’s political awareness was shaped by the pressing issues of her time, which, in the 1940s, included the threat of nuclear war. In high school, she wrote science fiction, preoccupied with “the better world of tomorrow.” Even then, she understood that new worlds could be imagined, created. She started with herself. Born Audrey Geraldine Lorde, she elected to drop the y from her first name because it felt more aesthetically pleasing. Lorde’s life as a thinker began with her belief in the possibility of regeneration.
Lorde’s parents emigrated from Grenada to Harlem in 1924, hoping the postwar boom lifting the tides of the United States would raise their boat, too. Instead, they found discrimination, limited employment opportunities and debilitatingly high costs of living. Audre, their third daughter, was born in 1934. She was legally blind and could only see about two inches away from her face. As a child, before she wore glasses, she navigated by touch and scent, details that would later surface in her work, again and again (“my body writes into your flesh the poem you make of me,” she writes in “Recreation”). Lorde said that she didn’t speak until she was 4 or 5 and often had temper tantrums when she felt misunderstood. In the midst of one such outburst at the neighborhood library, a gentle librarian named Augusta Baker soothed her with nursery rhymes. Lorde was enchanted and later credited Baker for introducing her to poetry and eventually inspiring her to get a graduate degree in library science.
Her parents raised their girls in a strict household, shaped by West Indian values and fears about racial violence. Audre’s mother taught her to cook family dishes, but she also admonished Audre, who had the darkest complexion of her children, for having dirty hands, even when they were unsoiled. Audre rebelled in small ways, insisting on the privacy of her own space, which her parents fashioned out of the living room. Once, when her father caught young Audre stealing, he sat her down at the kitchen table and rested a loaded gun within her eye line. His unexpressed emotions were painful — but he was also the one who brought her books and encouraged her studies. She wrote that the only time she ever saw him cry was during the radio broadcast after the bombing of Hiroshima.
She started writing “because I had a need inside of me to create something that was not there,” she said. She left home young. During an intermission in her college education, Lorde worked at Keystone Electronics, sorting quartz crystals mined in Brazil that were turned into transducers for radios and radar equipment. She rinsed the rocks in toxins that studies would later find can result in liver cancer, which she ultimately died from, in 1992, at 58. For Lorde, unsustainability was not theoretical; it was a death sentence.
She paid her way through college with low-paying, strenuous jobs and later worked as a youth librarian. She began frequenting the downtown lesbian bar scene and experimented with gender presentation. She had male and female lovers and in 1962 married a man named Ed Rollins. Their union was controversial — partly because he was white — but they were close friends and knew about each other’s same-gender desires. They had two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan. Eventually Lorde realized she needed to leave her husband to live her life more authentically. She began raising her children with Frances Clayton, who remained her partner for many years. Their interracial lesbian family offered rich grounds for Lorde to hone her theories about the political realities of interconnected identities. She emphasized the need for political education, solidarity movements and cautioned against the weaponization of individual identities against each other. In her landmark 1980 essay, “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” she wrote: “We must recognize differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each others’ difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles.”
In 1974, Lorde’s poetry collection “From a Land Where Other People Live,” a raw and moving assemblage that touches on mothering and human rights, was nominated for a National Book Award, alongside Alice Walker and Adrienne Rich. “Sister Outsider” is an enduring collection of Lorde’s speeches and essays. “The Cancer Journals,” published in 1980, is a searing exploration of illness and navigating a racist medical system, in which she proclaimed, memorably, her plans to “write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes — everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a [expletive] meteor!”
In “Survival Is a Promise,” Gumbs sheds more light on the way Lorde’s activism infused every single part of her life, until its very end. A few days before her death, she urged her then partner, Gloria Joseph, to help her write a letter to Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany, expressing concern about escalating racial violence and the re-emergence of fascism. Not long after that, Lorde would succumb to her second bout of cancer. “I often think about that,” Gumbs told me when we met in July. “I’m humbled by the consistency of her life.” And Lorde, a staunch student of physics, did not believe that energy expended ever dissipated. “Lorde always said that ‘the power that you have that you don’t use will be used against you,’” Gumbs said. Lorde always wanted her students to ask themselves: “What is my power in this moment? What is our power in this moment?”
The first time Gumbs encountered Lorde, she was 14. As a teenager, she was part of a weekly writing group held at Charis, a feminist bookstore in Georgia, near where she grew up. During one meeting, she noticed a gleaming dark purple anthology of Lorde’s poetry. “I was like, ‘Who’s that?’” She pored over the poems, even though she didn’t yet understand the complexity of their meanings.
She wrote stanzas on packing tape and pasted them all over her bedroom. “They weren’t resonant because I knew what she was saying,” she told me, but “I was able to grow into them — and I’m still growing into them, actually.”
Lorde’s consciousness and politics — and queerness — nurtured Gumbs’s own growth as she matured and entered academia, writing her Ph.D. dissertation on the literary practices of the Black queer feminist thinkers Lorde, Alexis De Veaux, Barbara Smith and June Jordan. Gumbs continued her research on Lorde, and whatever she learned, she shared. She began hosting workshops in her living room called “School of our Lorde,” which eventually morphed and moved online. (They continue to this day; recently Gumbs hosted a writing workshop about Black women, government and power linking Kamala Harris’s bid for the presidency and the killing of a young woman, Sonya Massey, by the police in her own home.) Unprompted, people sent her Lorde paraphernalia for study and safekeeping: broadsides of her poems, the program from her funeral.
In 2019, Gumbs joined some friends to watch De Veaux, who by then had become her mentor and chosen family, on a podcast called “Who Yo People Is,” in which Sharon Bridgforth, the interlocutor, interviewed De Veaux about writing the first official biography of Lorde, which came out in 2004. Bridgforth wondered aloud why someone hadn’t written another biography. “And everyone turned and looked at me,” Gumbs recalled, laughing. “I was hiding behind my water glass.” At the time, Gumbs didn’t see biography as part of her multidiscplinary practices. But she had long admired De Veaux, and felt honored to be her spiritual successor. Then someone else reached out to her about writing a book soon after that. “At a certain point, to keep deflecting something is disrespectful,” she says.
Gumbs is the latest in a line of Lorde biographers. In 1995, the filmmakers Michelle Parkerson and Ada Gay Griffin preserved what Lorde looked and sounded like in their documentary “A Litany for Survival.” “Warrior Poet,” De Veaux’s book, which was published in 2004, is a sprawling and meticulously researched detailing of Lorde’s life and her indelible impact on the late-20th-century liberation movements. During the height of her living fame, her ideas — what those close to her called Lordeisms — were often oversimplified or compressed into a line or two. “Warrior Poet” was done at the request of Lorde’s estate, which tasked De Veaux with turning stone monument back into flesh and blood. Gumbs draws from much of the same material, along with newly digitized and archived interviews that surfaced in recent years. And she also seems to employ what the historian Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation,” dreaming into knowledge gaps of Lorde’s archive. This imaginative work is an effort to render Lorde as fully and humanely as possible. Gumbs identified Baker, the Harlem librarian, as a crucial shaper of Lorde’s creative life. She finds mirroring between the nursery rhymes Baker read to Lorde and poetic structures deployed by Lorde deep in her career. Gumbs draws links between Lorde’s interest in polyamory and the pollination and growth patterns of sunflowers. These details connect Lorde’s life with universal, even cosmic, concerns. As Gumbs started considering what she had come to know about Lorde over the years, she realized one of Lorde’s most powerful theories had not yet been popularized.
“There is no time that I can find in Audre Lorde’s life where she was not thinking about our relationship with this planet,” Gumbs told me. “I don’t hear people saying that Audre Lorde is an environmental advocate. But she was.” Once she started looking, she saw it everywhere. “Gender, sexuality, race and transnational feminism all flow from ecology. That’s the way she thought about it, and that’s the way she articulated it.” Lorde never uttered the phrase “climate change,” for example, but she published a scathing series of letters from her home on St. Croix after surviving Hurricane Hugo, a Category 5 storm, in 1989. She was critical of the government’s militarized response, its characterization of survivors as looters and cautioned against the conditions that led to the disaster in the first place. “If we do not learn the lessons of Hurricane Hugo, we are doomed to repeat them. Because Hugo will not be the last hurricane in this area,” she wrote.
Gumbs has absorbed all this thinking and brought it forward for 2024. These issues are still pertinent and accelerating. “That’s the challenge that we still face,” she told me. Lorde embroidered her poems with research. She read and thought endlessly about thermodynamics, seismic patterns, rock formations, the weather, how energy and power were transferred among people and systems and institutions. She infused her poems with the fruits of that curiosity. In “Coal,” Lorde writes, “I am black because I come from the earth’s inside.” In “A Woman Speaks,” she observes, “if you would know me/look into the entrails of Uranus.” In “For Each of You,” she cautions, “remember our sun is not the most noteworthy star, only the nearest.” They were more than pretty metaphors. Lorde understood the ways that environmental racism — though they didn’t call it that then — impacted her life. She was deeply concerned with the realities of oppression, and she spoke to them more directly, particularly toward the end of her life. In “The Cancer Journals,” she observed that “I may be a casualty in the cosmic war against radiation, animal fat, air pollution, McDonald’s hamburgers and Red Dye No. 2, but the fight is still going on, and I am still a part of it.”
Complicating a legacy as iconic as Lorde’s is a delicate dance: Gumbs wanted to give Lorde her due, but it also felt important to show her complex humanity. She felt strongly that Lorde would not want her life to be sanitized to the point of sainthood. “She really wanted us to learn from her mistakes,” Gumbs says. One of her most heartbreaking discoveries was the disintegration of Lorde’s friendship with the poet June Jordan. Their tight bond fractured during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when Jordan began writing publicly about her solidarity with the Lebanese and Palestinian people. Jordan was outraged that Adrienne Rich, a close peer of theirs, initially identified as a Zionist and wrote a letter publicly saying so. Lorde, slower to voice a pro-Palestinian stance and protective of Rich, was caught between the two of them. Jordan was furious. Lorde’s usually profuse journals are cryptically devoid of the matter — their silence, deafening. Yet Gumbs doesn’t leave it there — she imagines their mutual heartbreak and what may not be recorded.
As Lorde’s biographer, Gumbs joins a number of other Black thinkers and scholars who are stewarding the afterlives of their artistic and intellectual predecessors. One of the most notable early examples was Alice Walker’s locating the unmarked burial site of Zora Neale Hurston in 1973 and putting a gravestone on it. And it continues in the work to preserve Lucille Clifton’s house in Baltimore and Nina Simone’s childhood home in North Carolina; the activist, writer and filmmaker Tourmaline’s invocation and memorialization of Marsha P. Johnson; the scholar Maya Cade’s working to unearth Black cinema archives and rerelease them in national theaters; Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s new film on the French philosopher Suzanne Césaire. But whereas most of these artists are lifting Black women out of obscurity, Gumbs is working to expand our register of knowledge, which includes transforming her own life into the vision that Lorde set forth.
On a hot day in Durham, N.C., under a perfect blue sky, we drove to a parcel of land just outside of the city where Gumbs is part of a land collective called Earthseed — named for the spiritual community organized by a character in a dystopic Octavia Butler series — that was started in 2012. There was a treehouse, several small homes and an outdoor gathering space. Earthseed has a functioning farm called Tierra Negra, runs a community-supported agriculture program to distribute fresh, affordable produce to local residents and distributes surpluses to food pantries. Gumbs showed me newly sprouted rows of ginger, turmeric and ashwagandha that the team turns into tinctures. There were tomatoes, watermelons and blueberries, and the corn was just starting to come in. A trail map highlighted the oldest trees on the land, encouraging visits.
In one of Lorde’s last recorded conversations, she’s speaking to a longtime friend and collaborator, the South African writer Ellen Kuzwayo. Her voice is fried from radiation yet firm and strong. Lorde says that small groups of people changing their relationship to land and resources, and one another, is some of the most important work she has experienced in her life. In her later years, she moved from New York to St. Croix, eating fresh coconut and mangos for breakfast, harvesting honey as part of a beekeeping collective and swimming in the sea: living in reciprocity with the natural world and giving back as much as one takes. “We are exactly that,” Gumbs told me. “It’s not easy,” she added with a laugh. “But it is what she believed in and thought to practice, and that is what we are doing, too.”
Gumbs noted that it’s easy to agonize over perceived ineptitude or powerlessness, but Lorde was not one to tolerate that line of thinking. “She said, several times, in interviews and her classes, that the rumor that you can’t go up against city hall was started by city hall,” Gumbs told me. “Even if the power that we have feels way too small for what we want to change, we have to still use that power, whether that’s an action, a vote, proximity to a certain body of water, we still have to go through the process” — a process that Gumbs calls “Black feminist photosynthesis.” Lorde knew that “we do not survive as individuals,” something she wrote in her notes for the essay that became “I Am Your Sister.” She had a way of moving the moment beyond herself in a way few others can. As Gumbs told me: “How does a life become eternal? How did it disperse to everyone?”
In 1990, Lorde attended a conference in Boston that celebrated her body of work, her life and her legacy. It would be the last one of its kind that she could attend in physical form. As Lorde approached the lectern, she glowed as she raised her fist. The room vibrated and shook with voices and emotion. She asked everyone to feel the energy surging through them, to relish it, to remember it. It doesn’t belong to me, she told them. “It’s you. It’s yours. You are generating it, and you’re going to carry it out of this room. And you can do whatever you want with it.”
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