Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde was an American writer, professor, philosopher, intersectional feminist, poet, and civil rights activist. She was a self-described "Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet" who dedicated her life and talents to confronting all forms of injustice and oppression. She believed that there could be "no hierarchy of oppressions" among "those who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children".
As a poet, she is well known for technical mastery and emotional expression, as well as her poems that express anger and outrage at civil and social injustices she observed throughout her life. She was the recipient of national and international awards and the founding member of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. As a spoken word artist, her delivery has been called powerful, melodic, and intense by the Poetry Foundation. Her poems and prose largely deal with issues related to civil rights, feminism, lesbianism, illness, disability, and the exploration of Black female identity.
Early life
Audre Lorde was born on February 18, 1934, in New York City to Caribbean immigrants Frederick Byron Lorde and Linda Gertrude Belmar Lorde. Her father, Frederick Byron Lorde, was born on April 20, 1898, in Barbados. Her mother, Linda Gertrude Belmar Lorde, was born in 1902 on the island Carriacou in Grenada. Lorde's mother was a light-skinned Black woman but sometimes passed as Spanish, for employment opportunities. Lorde's father was darker than the Belmar family liked, and they only allowed the couple to marry because of Byron's charm, ambition, and persistence. After their immigration, the new family settled in Harlem, a diverse neighborhood in upper Manhattan, New York. Lorde was the youngest of three daughters. Lorde was nearsighted to the point of being legally blind. At the age of four she learned to read at the same time she learned to talk, with the help of Augusta Braxton Baker, then children's librarian at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. Her mother taught her to write at around the same time.Born Audrey Geraldine Lorde, she chose to drop the "y" from her first name while still a child, explaining in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name that she was more interested in the artistic symmetry of the "e"-endings in the two side-by-side names "Audre Lorde" than in spelling her name the way her parents had intended.
Lorde's relationship with her parents was difficult from a young age. She spent very little time with her father and mother, who were both busy maintaining their property management business in the tumultuous economy after the Great Depression. When she did see them, they were often cold or emotionally distant. In particular, Lorde's relationship with her mother, who was deeply suspicious of people with darker skin than hers and the outside world in general, was characterized by "tough love" and strict adherence to family rules. Lorde's difficult relationship with her mother figured prominently in her later poems, such as Coal's "Story Books on a Kitchen Table"
As a child, Lorde struggled with communication, and came to appreciate the power of poetry as a form of expression. She even described herself as thinking in poetry. She memorized a great deal of poetry, and would use it to communicate, to the extent that, "If asked how she was feeling, Audre would reply by reciting a poem." Around the age of twelve, she began writing her own poetry and connecting with others at her school who were considered "outcasts", as she felt she was.
Raised Catholic, Lorde attended parochial schools before moving on to Hunter College High School, a secondary school for intellectually gifted students. Poet Diane di Prima was a classmate and friend. While attending Hunter, Lorde published her first poem in Seventeen magazine after her school's literary journal rejected it for being inappropriate. Also in high school, Lorde participated in poetry workshops sponsored by the Harlem Writers Guild, but noted that she always felt like somewhat of an outcast from the Guild. She felt she was not accepted because she "was both crazy and queer but I would grow out of it all". Lorde graduated from Hunter College High School in 1951.
Zami places her father's death from a stroke around New Year's 1953.
Career
In 1954, she spent a pivotal year as a student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, a period she described as a time of affirmation and renewal. During this time, she confirmed her identity on personal and artistic levels as both a lesbian and a poet. On her return to New York, Lorde attended Hunter College, and graduated in the class of 1959. While there, she worked as a librarian, continued writing, and became an active participant in the gay culture of Greenwich Village. She furthered her education at the Columbia University School of Library Service, earning a master's degree in library science in 1961. During this period, she worked as a public librarian in nearby Mount Vernon, New York.In 1968 Lorde was writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi.
Lorde's time at Tougaloo College, like her year at the National University of Mexico, was a formative experience for her as an artist. She led workshops with her young, black undergraduate students, many of whom were eager to discuss the civil rights issues of that time. Through her interactions with her students, she reaffirmed her desire not only to live out her "crazy and queer" identity, but also to devote attention to the formal aspects of her craft as a poet. Her book of poems, Cables to Rage, came out of her time and experiences at Tougaloo.
From 1972 to 1987, Lorde resided on Staten Island. During that time, in addition to writing and teaching she co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.
In 1977, Lorde became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press. WIFP is an American nonprofit publishing organization. The organization works to increase communication between women and connect the public with forms of women-based media.
Lorde taught in the Education Department at Lehman College from 1969 to 1970, then as a professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice from 1970 to 1981. There, she fought for the creation of a black studies department. In 1981, she went on to teach at her alma mater, Hunter College, as the distinguished Thomas Hunter chair. As a queer Black woman, she was an outsider in a white male dominated field and her experiences in this environment deeply influenced her work. New fields such as African American studies and women's studies advanced the topics that scholars were addressing and garnered attention to groups that had previously been rarely discussed. With this newfound academic environment, Lorde was inspired to not only write poetry but also essays and articles about queer, feminist, and African American studies.
In 1980, together with Barbara Smith and Cherríe Moraga, she co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher for women of color.
In 1981, Lorde was among the founders of the Women's Coalition of St. Croix, an organization dedicated to assisting women who have survived sexual abuse and intimate partner violence. In the late 1980s, she also helped establish Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa to benefit black women who were affected by apartheid and other forms of injustice.
In 1985, Audre Lorde was a part of a delegation of black women writers who had been invited to Cuba. The trip was sponsored by The Black Scholar and the Union of Cuban Writers. She embraced the shared sisterhood as black women writers. They visited Cuban poets Nancy Morejon and Nicolas Guillen. They discussed whether the Cuban revolution had truly changed racism and the status of lesbians and gays there.
The Berlin years
In 1984, Lorde started a visiting professorship in West Berlin at the Free University of Berlin. She was invited by FU lecturer Dagmar Schultz who had met her at the UN "World Women's Conference" in Copenhagen in 1980. During her time in Germany, Lorde became an influential part of the then-nascent Afro-German movement. Together with a group of black women activists in Berlin, Audre Lorde coined the term "Afro-German" in 1984 and, consequently, gave rise to the Black movement in Germany. During her many trips to Germany, Lorde became a mentor to a number of women, including May Ayim, Ika Hügel-Marshall, and Helga Emde. Instead of fighting systemic issues through violence, Lorde thought that language was a powerful form of resistance and encouraged the women of Germany to speak up instead of fight back. Her impact on Germany reached more than just Afro-German women; Lorde helped increase awareness of intersectionality across racial and ethnic lines. Audre Lorde provided a safe space for these Black German women to process and handle their emotions in any way that they seemed fit. To be othered by mainstream German society, and to be defined through others' perceptions of one's apparent “faults” can destroy one's sense of self. In addition, many of these women weren't able to fully express all facets of their being and found being pigeonholed by society immensely restrictive. Audre Lorde was able to begin to bridge the gap between these women's perceived identity by the German public and their self-actualized being. Lorde created a space for which these women could discuss their experiences and grow a Black German epistemology. This is not to say that Lorde single-handedly started this identification of a pro-Black German identity but more so that she offered these German women a model for kinship, self-naming, and intellectual activism.In December 1989, the month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Lorde wrote her poem "East Berlin 1989" conveying her views of this historic event. In the poem, while Lorde voices her alarm about increased violent racism against Afro-Germans and other Black people in Berlin due to the new free movement of East Germans, she also more broadly and fundamentally decries the triumph of capitalist democratic freedoms and Western influences, demonstrating her deep skepticism about, and resistance to, the "Peaceful Revolution" that would lead to the transition of Communist East Germany to parliamentary liberal democracy, market capitalism, and ultimately German reunification.
Lorde's impact on the Afro-German movement was the focus of the 2012 documentary by Dagmar Schultz. Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984–1992 was accepted by the Berlin Film Festival, Berlinale, and had its World Premiere at the 62nd Annual Festival in 2012. The film has gone on to film festivals around the world, and continued to be viewed at festivals until 2018. The documentary has received seven awards, including Winner of the Best Documentary Audience Award 2014 at the 15th Reelout Queer Film + Video Festival, the Gold Award for Best Documentary at the International Film Festival for Women, Social Issues, and Zero Discrimination, and the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Barcelona International LGBT Film Festival. Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years revealed the previous lack of recognition that Lorde received for her contributions towards the theories of intersectionality.
Lorde was State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992.