1. smelling the wind
Signs of water wear creep at the edges. Dustings of mold find their own stability and shape. I touch them carefully, these copies of Audre Lorde’s books that survived the hurricanes, shipped from St. Croix into my hands. Audre’s own copies of the books she wrote. These are treasures. The guidebooks say I should wipe them with denatured alcohol, but first I breathe them in. I sit in a clinically clean temporary office in Minnesota, but my tongue remembers how salt air in the Caribbean rots the engines out of new cars. My skin remembers how the sun sometimes takes as much as it gives. I spread the books out across my office floor gingerly, so as not to disturb the microorganic skin cells and sand particles that made it through the shipping process. I long for a microscope to find the fingerprints, the pressure and release, the evidence of survival.
Instead, I choose a high-contrast filter and send Dr. Gloria Joseph a selfie of me lying on the floor with the books surrounding my head. I’m crowned for a moment by this slightly distressed rainbow: the threadbare maroon cloth of a once-soaked hardback Chosen Poems, Old and New; the bold red of the second edition of Zami, faded across the spine; the blood words of Our Dead Behind Us over the black-and-white image of three elder Amazon warriors; Coal, silver like the moon through soot; the washed-out yellow of the first German translation of A Burst of Light that must have been sitting in a window, and the blue clouds of the American edition of the same book; the black of H.U.G.O. (Hell Under God’s Orders), flecked with a light-show spiral of dashes; the beige of an uncorrected proof of Undersong that has known both floodwater and sun; the creased sky blue—or is that Caribbean sea blue?—of Sister Outsider; the gray scale of three copies of Cables to Rage, with Audre’s face on the cover, folded into staples now sienna with rust. From the best angle my wrist can manage, it looks like Audre is looking back at me, skeptical in triplicate through her black thick-framed glasses.
“How did you do it?” I whisper, reluctant to get up off the floor. “How did you survive?”
* * *
Inside the front cover of each book Dr. Gloria Joseph wrote
April 2018
To Alexis
In Memory of Audre
and signed her own name. And so that message becomes part of the matter of these particular copies of these particular books. A clue that I might have something to do with their renewal, their next life.
If not for the date in identical pen, I might have wondered if these books were once meant for a different Alexis—Alexis De Veaux, Gloria Joseph’s former student, my mentor, and Lorde’s first biographer. Who am I to help these books return to themselves? I thought. I sent the picture and a promise to steward these books along with other artifacts Doc Joseph mailed over the years so that future generations could hold the fragile and eternal life of Audre Lorde.
* * *
By the time Gloria Joseph sent me this package in 2018, the books had collectively been through more than one storm. In September 2011, when I arrived from the airport in St. Croix to live and work in the home where Audre wrote her last books and took her last breaths, Doc Joseph and Helga Emde rushed around barricading their windows for yet another hurricane. None of the storms between 1989 and 2011 were as powerful as Hugo, but like our bodies, books respond to changes in pressure, humid air. They swell, exhale, and dry again. Become more textured versions of themselves.
I don’t know what the house looked like seven years later when, in her process of moving out, Doc Joseph decided to mail me these books. I do know that others who have visited the house since say it is in disarray, with scattered items left behind. I consider it a miracle that at almost ninety years old, struggling with moving out of a house we all hoped would become a museum-shrine to our Lorde, Doc Joseph thought to post me these creased, folded, annotated books. And then, when they were returned to her due to some shipping error, she put the box inside another box and mailed it again.
Doc Joseph never corrected the people in the streets of St. Croix who assumed I was her granddaughter. She just stood her full six feet tall and laughed out loud. She didn’t correct the people in St. Croix who assumed that Audre was her sister and not her lover. When she got my selfie, Doc Joseph emailed back quickly. “Receiving your email this morning brought joy to my soul, body and psyche.” A few months later, Doc Joseph knocked on the door of death, and then miraculously recovered after we all said goodbye. A year later, she departed for good, at the age of ninety-one. During hurricane season.
2.the winds of the orisha
At her first funeral, Audre sat in the front row with tears in her eyes, while her daughter, Elizabeth, testified: “Audre Lorde has taught me that we don’t need to be afraid of our own power. And the other thing that she taught me is that we don’t need to be afraid of our love.” Audre pursed her lips and whispered the words “I shall be forever” when her close friend Yolanda Rios-Butts read them aloud from the poem “Solstice.”
Audre threw back her head and squealed when Blanche Wiesen Cook told jokes about when they first met at Hunter College.1 She nodded not quite humbly listening to the words about her life and legacy from colleagues and students, the letters from dignitaries who couldn’t attend, including the president of Hunter College and the president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who said, “She has touched us all—unsettling, probing, loving and real, and always to leave us thinking and more aware of our humanity and, sometimes, our inhumanity,” emphasizing that Lorde’s work “lives on—to survive her and me and all of you.” Everyone could feel her presence, hear her laughter. They could feel her touching them, not only with her words but with her hands. She squeezed her longtime partner Frances’s elbow, her sister Helen’s shoulder, her mentee asha’s face, the wrist of her future biographer Alexis De Veaux. She made her colleague Johnnetta Cole laugh out loud. Whispered in Gloria Joseph’s ear. Members of the press detected “currents of love.”2 Multiple witnesses glimpsed Audre shaking her shoulders to the solidarity rhythms of the Kuumba Women’s Drum Circle, which had gathered in her honor. It was a beautiful service. And Audre was there.
The Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother Audre Lorde was there, breathing, laughing, talking, and flirting. She even gave an impromptu speech. At this event, her first funeral, the dedication of the Audre Lorde Women’s Poetry Center at Hunter College, on December 13, 1985, Audre lived. Two days away from radical alternative cancer treatment in Switzerland, she graced a multigenerational gathering celebrating her legacy. It is fitting that the ceremony took place at Hunter College, where Audre had studied in high school and college and taught at that moment as an endowed professor. The Audre Lorde Women’s Poetry Center, named in her honor as the result of student and faculty organizing, would be housed in the same location as the reception: Roosevelt House on the Hunter College campus.3 Roosevelt House also happened to be the place where Audre had married Ed Rollins in 1962, under arguably somewhat funereal circumstances, if not for Audre and Ed then for some of their friends, family members, and lovers.
On the night the students activated their hub of feminist dreaming, each attendee pitched their spirit high. But they also knew Audre’s cancer was back. The event was one of a series created by a community that valued Audre’s work, dreaded her terminal illness, and saw the need for celebration and ceremony in her honor.4 As Gloria Steinem would say years later, “Because she was honest about her struggle with cancer … Each time we read new words and poems of hers, there was that added weight and poignancy of their limits.”5 This celebration at Hunter, as well as the book release of Our Dead Behind Us (also at Hunter) and almost every event Audre attended from the mideighties on, was about life, legacy, and afterlife. Black women around the world celebrated the choice to hang Audre’s name on the door as part of a collective victory. The poet Toi Derricotte, who would go on to cofound Cave Canem, the most enduring US initiative for Black poets, wrote a congratulatory card on the occasion: “What a happy proud thing this center is for all of us black women—women you have loved into being.”6 The poet Cheryl Clarke sent a letter to be read aloud at the event: “I can think of no teacher, writer, hardworking Black woman who deserves to have a poetry center named after her more, except for those nameless Black women workers who’ve gone before in whose name I know you accept this honor.”7 Clarke did not speak directly to Audre’s health, but she adds, “I wish the students dedicating this center to you many many more years of learning from you.” Clarke continues, “Thank you for everything you’ve given me and all Black lesbians.”8
Naming and claiming a room for women’s poetry affirmed poetry itself, and challenged the norms of the institution. Audre’s students and the student government members and literary organizations on campus came together to achieve what student leader Gina Rhodes said “was the first time in the history of Hunter College that the college paid student poets.”9 Audre’s students called her by her first name and read their own brave poems about child sexual abuse, Palestinian children who lost their hands to American-made bombs in Lebanon and who then had to come to the United States to get medical treatment, grandmothers on stoops, women who killed their rapists and raised the daughters born out of that rape. Precise and raw poetry, from the students who had learned from Audre that, in their own words: “Poetry is like a light beam” and “never to be silent” and “I don’t have to be afraid to share my feelings.”10
Blanche Wiesen Cook wore a tuxedo. She had the job of reading the letters from the president and vice president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and she added her own aside, “But I do want to say that being friends with Audre from those days to this has been a continuous learning experience. One cannot be friends with Audre without learning a great deal. A great deal about politics and power and words. A great deal about yourself and your own community. A great deal not only about survival but success and triumph in a world where we are not supposed to survive.”11
Colleague Louise DeSalvo cried as she recounted coming to a reading of Audre’s students on the day that her mother was placed in a mental institution. One of the students read a poem about a woman locked in an asylum and “in that moment I knew that I was exactly where I had to be. Because there was a woman who was a poet who taught another woman who was a poet to write a poem that healed me, and Audre, that’s what you’ve done for us and I love you.”12
Yolanda Rios-Butts, hoarse from teaching kindergarten, told the story of meeting Audre when she was twenty-one years old “with no consciousness of my value” and learning that she was, in Audre’s estimation, “very bright but poorly educated.”13 It was Audre who retaught her to read. “My primers for learning to read were Audre’s words. I am a full-fledged graduate of the Audre Lorde school of language.”14 Before reading six of her favorite poems aloud, she said, “Audre, you are my sister, you are my mother.”15
Audre witnessed the power of her poetry, even in the mouths of others, to touch people and move them to action. She saw evidence that her poetry and her approach to poetry could create and transform institutions. Gina Rhodes credited Audre with helping the students move the proposal for the Women’s Poetry Center from an idea in a file cabinet to a real physical place.
“We are able to meet her vision with our own vision, we are able to meet her courage with courage of our own, we are able to meet her love with our own love. And tonight that love takes the shape of a room on the fifth floor of the Roosevelt House on which we will place a sign with the new name of a Women’s Poetry Center. The Audre Lorde Women’s Poetry Center!” Rhodes crowed. The multitude cheered.
“Just think,” Rhodes said, “that this night is happening despite the fact that there is a world that doesn’t care to hear the voices of poets, of women, of blacks, and of lesbians within academia and outside. What else can this night be but a victory?”16
* * *
“I wish I could just stretch my arms around this room and hug all of you!” Audre shouted, holding the two plaques in her arms, one for the door of the center and one for her to take home. “That’s really having your name in print isn’t it?” she said, laughing. She played with the gleeful crowd: “This night brings together three of my favorite interests, which are beautiful women, beautiful words, and myself.”17
But Audre took the vision of a space dedicated to possible poems quite seriously. She saw it as an energetic meeting point for the young poet she had been in the halls of Hunter and for the current young poets enrolled in the college, and as a possible “nexus” for women’s poetry in general. She took the three words “women’s poetry center” literally. “Every time I look at them they give me chills.” She felt that the women’s poetry center was a transformer for the divine and renewable energy of poetry in women’s lives.
“It is a vision that we have siphoned through ourselves, giving it energy out of our bodies, out of our love and passing it on. And it needs each one of you. It needs women who are not even sitting here now whose mouths are stuffed with words but they have no place to lay them, they have no place to be heard. Well, that is what the Audre Lorde Women’s Poetry Center has got to be about. So I ask you to lend some of the energy that you have here tonight, lend it next week, next month, next year, remember that this is a jewel that we are building together. And we need to pour our own juices, our own substance so that it will flourish and in turn give us strength too. I am so happy that this is here. That this is starting.
“It is never separate from of course myself, from the women with whom I share, it’s never separate from the consciousness of me as a Black woman in a space and time, all of the women that I have been, all of the women I hope to be, I hope to become.”18
She ended her impromptu remarks with her poem “Call,” an invocation of the Rainbow Serpent goddess, Aido Wedo. She explained: “Aido Wedo is the personification of all the deities, all the divinities of the past, whose faces have been forgotten, whose names we no longer know who must therefore, of course, be worshiped in each other, in ourselves. And this is a prayer that I share with you.” Less than ten years later, on January 18, 1993, the same poem would close Audre’s real memorial service at St. John the Divine, the unfinished cathedral in Harlem.
* * *
Audre didn’t mention her mortality at the event, but later that night after crossing the river home with Frances, she wrote in her journal: “Whatever happens to me, there has been a coming together in time and space of some of my best efforts, hopes and desires.”19 As she had written after Elizabeth’s graduation earlier that year, “Whatever happens with my health now, and no matter how short my life may be, she is essentially on her way in the world.”20 Repeating the word “whatever” in her journal, Audre surrendered to her mortality and released what she could not control. But as her daughter prepared for medical school, Audre was taking control of her health in radical ways that the US cancer industrial complex did not want her to imagine. She took action to protect her quality of life in order to prioritize these types of legacy-affirming encounters with the communities she loved. She faced the reality that death was imminent but also continued to recruit more people into her legacy, her eternal life.
3.prologue
Last week I was dying. But now I’m not.
—AUDRE LORDE1
When Audre Lorde began her afterlife on November 17, 1992, a broad community of readers who credited her with saving their lives wondered what her death would mean and how or if her legacy would live on. In Gainesville, Florida, Linda Cue stayed up all night after she heard about Lorde’s death looking for some mention of it on CNN. There was none, though Cue noted there had been for James Baldwin. “Maybe someone will even write a biography,” she mused and then corrected herself: “No. Maybe they won’t I think…”2 But the loved ones, students, and strangers influenced by Audre Lorde have not left it up to an amorphous “they” to honor her legacy. Cue herself became a youth librarian in Gainesville, a job Audre once held in Mount Vernon, New York. Now Cue introduces Lorde’s work to teenagers in her community every week.
Like Linda Cue, I cannot leave this legacy to chance. I want Audre Lorde’s legacy to reach the waiting hands of generations. Because my life cannot be my life without honoring her life. Lorde’s writing, her impact on our movements, her fierce offering of love, are elemental in my life. The universe from which my every breath is made. And I am not the only one.
This biography, twenty years after the first official textual biography of Audre Lorde, multiple biographical films, and a bio-anthology, needs not wrestle with the fear that the world will not remember the name Audre Lorde. Her students and loved ones have been vigilant and they have prevailed. The question for us is whether we ourselves, the generations Audre made possible, will survive the multiple crises we face as a species largely detached from our only planet and ignorant about the universe that connects us. And this is why we need the depth of her life now as much as we ever have. We need her survival poetics beyond the iconic version of her that has become useful for diversity-center walls and grant applications. We need the center of her life, the poetry that society at large has mostly ignored, preferring to recycle the most quotable lines of her most quotable essays (necessary as those essays are!).
My task is to follow Audre, who studied the earth and the universe closely from childhood through the end of her life, and to honor the fact that the scale of the life of the poet is the scale of the universe. My understanding is that the way the earth shows up in Audre Lorde’s poems is not merely as a metaphor or a setting for her examination of human relations. Therefore, this biography will consider what Audre considered and what organized her life: weather patterns, supernovas, geological scales of transformation, radioactive dust. Audre referenced the natural world in her poems, not as a metaphor for human relations but as a map for how to understand our lives as part of every manifestation of Earth. As Audre wrote in an open letter to the Black lesbian feminist journal Aché: “The earth is telling us something about our conduct of living as well as our abuse of the covenant we live upon.”3 We live upon the covenant. The planet is the covenant. Earth is a relationship.
This understanding, crucial to our survival as interrelated living beings, is the only way we can understand Audre on her own terms, as a survivor of childhood disability injustice, a survivor of her best friend’s suicide, a high school theorist of what it meant to survive the atomic age, a college activist against nuclear irresponsibility, a mother who knew poetry could help teach her children to survive in a racist world, and ultimately a cancer survivor who understood the war going on within her cells as connected to every struggle against oppression on the planet.
Audre talks explicitly in interviews about how deeply the atomic age impacted her thinking.4 She was a young science-fiction reader who grew up in Harlem blocks away from the Columbia University tunnels where government-funded researchers invented the atom bomb. The question of survival on the scale of an entire species stayed with her throughout her life. The students of those atom-splitting researchers would invent particle physics and theorize a quantum reality where the relation between time and space becomes queerly multidirectional, nonlinear, and profoundly impacted by our noticing. For me, Audre has always been quantum, not only because she died before I met her, not only because she shows up in the lives and actions of countless devotees across space and time, but also because her theory of energy and the way she used her lifeforce exceed a normative understanding of life. So this is not a normative biography linearly dragging you from a cradle to a grave. This is a book shaped by what Audre Lorde did as a reader and a writer and a mentor to change what a book can be, what a book can do. This is a quantum biography where life in full emerges in the field of relations in each particle. This is a cosmic biography where the dynamic of the planet and the universe are never separate from the life of any being. This profound connection is true for all of us, and we get to study the queer life of a being who knew it. As a poet, even in her prose, Audre sought to recode language toward a more life-giving set of relations on Earth. Identifying less as an individual than as a possibility, Audre offered multiple versions of her life as a map. In this biography, I work as closely with Audre’s reading as I do with her writing, honoring her as a writer who held the work of other writers close, like I am doing now. I also read even the discrepancies between the historical Audre and the literary version of herself she offered the world as a cartography of longing, a rigorous commitment to bequeath future generations the possibilities we deserve. And following Audre’s lead I care more about offering well-researched wonder than I do about closing down possibilities through expertise. May this book, which centers Audre Lorde as a wonder of the world, increase your questioning active wonder. Read this book as a survival guide, a point of connection through Audre’s life to the most pressing questions about your own and our collective relationship to our shifting ecosystem. Read this book in any order you want, knowing it will reach you on a personal and a cosmic scale. Read these chapters like a collection of poems that speak in chorus in all directions. Understand each word as an opportunity for Audre’s fierce love, which is the same love that birthed the volcanoes and split the continents, to reach you. Wherever you are.
* * *
In early 1992, Audre gave instructions for her ashes to be divided into eight packets prepared for ceremonial distribution all over the planet. Over the following years her loved ones would deposit her ashes in underground caves near where the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea meet in St. Croix; in two different sacred volcanic sites in Hawaii; in Krumme Lanke, her favorite lake in Germany, among other places. And so the tiniest carbon remnants of Audre’s being rejoined the swirling churning engines of the molten, or salted, or cracked-open depths ready to remake life on a geological scale.
According to the director of the Thomas/Hyll Memorial Chapel in St. Croix, Audre’s cremated ashes would not even remain contained in their box. Doctor Joseph remembers the director telling her “in soft tones” that “although the container with the ashes was sealed with tape, it kept opening—three times she reclosed it and each time it popped open.”5
“I will never be gone,” Lorde warned us. “I am a scar, a report from the frontlines, a talisman, a resurrection.”6 Or as the writer Ayofemi Folayan imagined: “Long after all of us now alive are atoms in the universal void, some magnificent reminder of the greatness she represented will inspire awe in future generations.”7
Copyright © 2024 by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
