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Lorde, Audre

Audre Lorde was, as she described, “a black woman warrior poet” who was born in Harlem and lived from 1934 until her death in 1992, after a 14-year struggle with breast cancer. Lorde was, in many ways, a survivor who worked to end the many silences in black women's history. As a mother, lesbian, feminist, African American, and a cancer survivor, Lorde reflects the multiplicity of black women's existence.

Breaking the Silence

It is the connection between the silence about black women's history and black women's continued oppression that Lorde's work examines. Dating from slavery, black women's sexuality was owned and used by white slave owners in two main ways: for the reproduction of wealth and labor through enforced pregnancies, and as an outlet for white men's desire in a system where white women were seen as chaste. Thus, enforced mating, pregnancy, childbearing, and rape were routine experiences for black women under slavery. Furthermore, marriages between black men and women were outlawed under slavery, making it impossible for black women to be “respectable.”

Even after slavery ended, the systematic lynching of black men, women, and children as well as Reconstruction prohibition of relations between whites and blacks contributed to the continuation of a daily pattern of social dominance. The enforced use of black women's sexuality under slavery, compounded by generations of sexual violence, together meant that black women must not only struggle against multiple oppressions from the exterior, but they must also contend with a legacy of silence from within. Lorde's writing shows a collective, institutionally enforced silence for black women that is accompanied by an individual, psychically enforced silence within black women themselves.

Audre Lorde's autobiographical narrative, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, tells the story of a black lesbian woman coming to consciousness through a history of traumatic violence toward black women. There are several instances of abuse in her narrative: from the white monsignor at her Catholic school, against her friend, Gennie; from her father; and from a man in a neighboring apartment when she is a young woman. The results of these incidents manifest themselves in the inability to feel or speak about them, or feel grief at her father's death. In telling her story, Lorde is also telling the collective history of African women under colonization and slavery, as well as the collective history of all women and girls, like Gennie, who suffer from sexual abuse. In speaking out about her silence, she intends to provide a model for collective and individual healing.

Dreams of the Past and Future

Lorde's entire life's work can be read as an attempt to learn and teach how to dream, learning how to remember the pasts that one would rather forget, and to speak of the dreams that scare one to silence. In poems such as “Suffer the Children,” “Rites of Passage (to MLK jr.),” “For Each of You,” and “Equinox,” Lorde teaches that learning to dream the future is only possible by learning to speak through the silence of the past.

Lorde's concern with silence shows that paradoxically, it is only through the very act of speech that there is any hope for the survivor. First, silence can only be overcome by speaking, and furthermore, such speech must come even in the face of fear. Second, there is the silence that results from a history of collective, institutionalized sexual violence enforced upon black women, as well as individual and traumatic sexual violence. As Lorde writes in Black Mother Woman, “I learned from you/to define myself/through your denials.” These silences are both external and internal, both collective and individual, and the speech that overcomes it must occur at both levels.

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