8 April 2021—The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

8 April 2021 Reading Blog—The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

Recently I was feeling like I had reached an impasse. My daily poems were starting to feel stagnant to me because I had arrived at a kind of formula. Time to grow. So I decided that for the month of April, I would alternate between two series of poems: one called metaphysics and the other called ethics. During the first of my classes on the literature of friendship, I started reading Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, which had me feeling authorized and encouraged to think about the idle, impractical, useless, and essential questions of metaphysics: why is there something rather than nothing? What does it mean to think about being, not from some imagined position outside of it, but as a part of the totality of being?

However, this final and ultimately unfinished work of Arendt’s must be considered in the context of the rest of her oeuvre, much of which is defined by a concern for politics and ethics: how ought we to treat one another? What are the meanings of work, labor, and action, and how are the distinctions between these concepts meaningful for our activities in the world? What conclusions can we draw from consideration of the historical record about systemic injustices like fascism and anti-Semitism?

It wasn’t just Arendt, though—she just helped give shape to something. I felt like my poems were too navel gaze-y, stuck in a narrowly defined conception of the self. In pushing myself to reach towards being as such, on the one hand, and interbeing, on the other, I felt like I could answer to the world I was in, rather than subsisting on myself as a microcosmos (although for the purposes of my line of thinking here, I’m overstating the hermetically enclosed nature of my previous way of writing poems).

And the world is ongoing and full of events. In the first ethics poem, I awkwardly dance my way in through my consumption of media. Given: “…that love is the labour / of liberating each other and, / given that “I is an other,” how / will you go about liberating / yourself today (to say / nothing of your other others)?” I ask, only in the next poem turning, if clunkily, to the affairs of the world that were passing through my awareness, like the anti-Black racism of the US tax code, the local manifestation of the police abolition movement, the unfolding situation between protests against the military coup in Myanmar and their brutal suppression. Alongside these things, I was trying to trace (again: clunkily), how I had become aware of them, pushing myself either to articulate my relationship to them, or to form a relationship with them in the space of the poem.

It is here, finally, that I get to Audre Lorde. It’s spring here in Massachusetts, and I played hooky the other day, meeting up with a couple of friends. It was one of their birthday’s and so we went looking for a book that the birthday-having friend wanted. You can’t really take me into a bookstore without walking out with something, so I left with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s new book and The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, edited and with an introduction by Roxane Gay.

Lorde has already been on my mind of late. With the cache of Kenning Editions books I received for the gig I’m doing for them was Audre Lorde: dream of Europe: Selected Seminars and Interviews 1984-1992. The part I started to read was the series of lectures Lorde gave at the Black Women’s Poetry Seminar at the Freie Universität Berlin from April to July of 1984 [I’m strangely tickled that she was conducting this seminar while I was busy being born half a world away in Austin, TX]. I’m planning my next class on the literature of friendship around Toni Morrison’s Sula, which I am wanting to put in conversation with Black feminist literature, and as I was working on the course description and syllabus, Audre Lorde: dream of Europe was a ready to hand text by a legendary Black lesbian feminist author, and I found myself quoting from it to articulate the aims of the class:

As Audre Lorde writes in the lecture notes for her “Black Women’s Poetry Seminar” at the Freie Universität Berlin April – July 1984, “Within each of ourselves there is that which is dark, which is female, which is hidden and has not been allowed. The cultures that we, and most certainly you, have been raised in underline what is white and male.” Lorde associates this hiddenness and forbiddenness with an educational culture of rote learning and passivity, going on to acknowledge that, “It is a hard process yet an absolutely necessary one, to begin to forge the new.” We will learn together, how Morrison forged the new and how we can begin to forge it in our work and our friendships.

Yesterday, I shifted my reading over to The Selected Works, want to read that first, to reengage with Lorde’s work as a whole, mindful of what Roxane Gay observes in her introduction, that when being introduced, “The black woman is spoken of in terms of anecdote rather than accomplishment,” and that, “all too often, people misappropriate the words and ideas of black women. They do so selectively, using the parts that serve their aims, and abandoning those parts that don’t,” and I feel eager to meaningfully engage with Lorde’s work, and the works of other Black feminists that I’m wanting to read in tandem with Morrison’s Sula.

My reading in this moment holds echoes of my first encounter with Lorde, in the form of Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Lorde’s “biomythography” which I’m sure I picked up at Book Woman or Monkey Wrench Books. I was younger, inchoate, called to the long path leading to my own goal (suppressed, forgotten, reviled) of living openly as a woman. I traveled this path in the vehicles I knew, books, and my reading had a lot to teach me about the vast extent and heterogeneity (the difference on which Lorde so urgently insists) within that gender category. I was reading Zami around the time I first read Diane di Prima’s Recollections of My Life as a Woman around the time I first read Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera around the time I first read Leslie Feinberg and Kate Bornstein, which is to say that my reading was inculcating in me, even if I may not have been fully conscious of it then, a sense of not only the inextricability of race, class, and gender, but also of subject position and political responsibility, and of politics with feelings and embodiment.

I wasn’t just a baby trans woman—an egg—but a baby lesbian, which I vaguely understood as not just a sexual and romantic orientation, but a set of life practices, a culture, a politics, and a history. I wanted models and one of the ones I reached for was Zami, which I read so long ago that it remains mainly as an echo calling out to be reread, an echo at the periphery of my consciousness as I jump into Lorde’s selected works, and as a text that I’m holding in abeyance to read after The Selected Works and Audre Lorde: dreams of Europe.

The first piece Gay has chosen is “Poetry Is Not A Luxury” in which Lorde identifies poetry prefigurative of change in our lives and the world; poetry as a kind of stage on which to rehearse those changes. She says it best (and I’m going to quote the entire first paragraph because it’s beautiful):

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are—until the poem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.

Lorde locates within “each of us as women…a dark place within,” arguing that from the strength of these dark inner places of potentiality derives from the fact that, “they have survived and grown strong…” For these places, Lorde uses the words, “ancient,” “hidden,” “dark,” “deep,” and, later, “nameless.”

This notion resonates so powerfully within me, because it speaks to something I had perhaps mistakenly thought of as a particularly trans aspect of my experience, namely, the feeling of carrying something precious hidden inside you (I’d always thought of it as a seed) until which time it is safe to plant. There is nonetheless something in the above that a contemporary reader might find essentialist. That is: what does it mean to assert that this dark, deep, hidden, nameless place exists within each of us as women (and presumably all women, and only women)? What does it mean that this potentially fallacious mystical gender essentialism nonetheless has held and holds an appeal for me, such that while I can’t fully embrace it, neither can I fully discard it? [This question, and this essay, will reappear in an upcoming class tentatively entitled “Écriture Transféminine” (with apologies to Hélène Cixous and Juliet Jacques).]

Lorde strikes out against the strictures of european consciousness, which includes logocentrism and an unhealthy attachment to novelty, advocating instead for feelings as a source of knowledge and power, and “…poetry as revelatory distillation of experiences, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean.”

Regard Lorde’s images for the way that, “The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems…” She calls these spaces, which are simultaneously processes, “sanctuaries and spawning grounds” as well as “safe-house,” “the skeleton architecture of our lives,” and “a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.” Poetry is, or rather, ought to be, a dwelling place, a place for rest, becoming, respite. Or as my phenomenological boyfriend Gaston Bachelard puts it, “the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” The house of, as Lorde understands it, is never meant to be a definitive endpoint but rather a site for what she elaborates in a later essay, whose telling title is “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Actio.”

I admire the commitment to dreams and feelings Lorde articulates in “Poetry is not a Luxury.” Permit me another long quote:

For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to though as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare.

The circuit that Lorde describes: of smuggling feelings into dreams to safeguard them from dehumanization, and of dreams leading to poetry leading to action resonates because in my own way (with full acknowledgement of the privileges attendant to being a white woman within a violently enforced regime of race and the differences that follow from them) I have lived it, passing through its itinerary like the points along a pilgrimage, arriving at poetry as to a holy site, cognizant that for the pilgrim even the most holy site is not a destination but a space of reorientation, towards the divine but also looping backward towards the conditions of their own life, but now ideally imbued with an articulated vision of possible transformation.