Just out., December 01, 1992, Page 13, Image 13

1, 1092 T 13
the broad context of community, Audre
Lorde has functioned as a role model and an
inspiration. She presented her words and the very
living of her life with such integrity and craft that
all she has created has become worthy of emula­
tion. In trying to relate the significance of Audre’s
life, several words come to mind: power, courage,
integrity, presence, craft and love.
“Audre seemed to me to be power incarnate.
There was terrific power in her physical presence
and a resonance in her voice that carried the
weight of her words. At Oberlin College in 1985,
she told her audience, ‘Each one of us has some
power that can be used, but power is relative;
unless we claim it and use it, it will be used against
us. ’ Lorde went on to question the students, ‘Now
are you using all of who you are in the service of
your beliefs?’
“Audre Lorde identified herself as ‘Black,
Woman, Mother, Lesbian, Warrior, Poet.’ She
applied all of who she was to the examination of
many important themes of our time. She brought
her own truths and clarity to such issues as hori­
zontal hostility among feminists, lesbian S/M,
black male violence against black women, inter­
racial relationships, racism, incest, U.S. imperial­
ism, the politics of cancer and more.
“The ways in which she approached these
themes was always insightful and never dull. Her
poetry is especially full with well-chosen, evoca­
tive phrases.
“Lorde remarked to the students at Oberlin
that ‘ all poems are in some way love poems. ’ This
is perhaps because the poet must open herself up
to her theme, and then share what she finds with
her readers. Surely Audre Lorde has given greatly
of herself and loved her readers well.
“A future without new insights from Audre
Lorde is a prospect over which we must grieve.
Mixed in with those tears of grief, however, are
also those of gratitude and joy-gratitude over the
existence and visibility of an honored foremother,
and joy that one woman’s well-articulated truth
could touch the hearts of so many. As Lorde
herself wrote, ‘I am a Black woman stripped
down and praying; my whole life has been an
altar worth its ending.’”
Diana A. Cohen
local lesbian feminist poet
“W e must recognize
and nurture the
creative parts of each
other without always
understanding what
will be created.”
Audre Lorde, “Eye to Eye: Black
Women, Hatred and Anger,”
Sister Outsider,
The Crossing Press, 1984.
Conclusion
Passing men in the street who are dead
becomes a common occurrence
but loving one of them
is no solution.
I believe in love as I believe in our children
but I was bom Black and without illusions
and my vision
which differs from yours
is clear
although sometimes restricted.
I have watched you at midnight
moving through casual sleep
wishing I could afford the non-desperate dreams
that stir you
to wither and fade into partial solutions.
Your nights are wintery long and very young
full of symbols of purity and forgiveness
and a meek jesus that rides through your cities
on a barren ass whose braying
does not include a future tense.
But I wear my nights as I wear my life
and my dying
absolute and unforgiven
nuggets of compromise and decision
fossilized by fierce midsummer sun
and when I dream
I move through a Black land
where the future
glows eternal and green
but where the symbols for now
are bloody and unrelenting
rooms
where confused children
with wooden stumps for fingers
play at war
who cannot pick up their marbles
and run away home
whenever nightmare threatens.
Audre Lorde
From a Land Where Other People Live,
Broadside Press, 1973.
UI wish to raise a Black man who will
not be destroyed by, nor settle for,
those corruptions called power by the
white fathers who mean his destruction
as surely as they mean mine. I wish to
raise a Black man who will recognize
that the legitimate objects of his hostil­
ity are not women, but the particulars
of a structure that programs him to fear
and despise women as well as his own
Black self.
MFor me, this task begins with teach­
ing my son that I do not exist to do his
feeling for him.”
Audre Lorde,“ilfon Child: A Black Lesbian
Feminist’s Response,” Siater Outsider,
The Crossing Press, 1984.
“S h e brought out the experience of feeling
for me by showing that we needed to feel every­
thing to truly experience being a woman, being a
Black woman. We need to feel every aspect of our
lives. It is through her teaching that I understand
that she is not dead to me-she is an ancestor now.”
“T h e r e is no question that Audre Lorde was
putting the issue of cancer, especially breast can­
cer, squarely in the political arena, where it be­
longs, long before anyone else. We’ve lost some­
body really important with her passing, because
she was so clear about what she was.”
A student
Judy Brady
of Audre Lorde's at Hunter College, N.Y.
cancer survivor and cancer activist,
editor o f l in 3: Women With
Cancer Confront An Epidemic
“.A u d re worked with so much integrity, that
had to be her greatest contribution. Most people
don’t realize what a high price that level of integ­
rity exacts.
“One thing that the lesbian and gay commu­
nity often doesn’t realize about Audre is the high
skill-level she had as a writer. People embrace her
because of the message in her words, and it’s
important that people know how technically skilled
and developed she was as a writer.
“She would have received a lot more recogni­
tion as a writer if she hadn’t been out as a lesbian.
“The integrity with which she worked was a
great act of courage. She didn’t stop at having a
brilliant writing career...she politicized it. In her
work, in her life, she wasn’t willing to let people
get away with oppression, racism. If you look at
her poems, she’s very political. She was never
silent about oppression.”
Barbara Smith
co-founder o f Kitchen Table:
Women o f Color Press
“^Vhenweturn from anger we turn
from insight, saying we will accept
only the designs already known; deadly
and safely familiar.”
Audre Lorde, ”The Uses o f Anger:
Women Responding to Racism,”
Sister Outsider,
The Crossing Press, 1984.
“ A lu dre affected my life by being what I call
a bright light. There are people in your life who
help you push the edges of yourself to discover
new things about yourself. Audre was one of
those people to me. I always enjoyed any time I
had with her. We ate each other’s brains up. She
always made me think about what I was doing,
what I said and my responsibility for things, just
by our dialogue. We hadn’t talked a lot in the last
few years, but she was a support for me in her
writing and I admired her. She was courageous
and gifted. I will miss her. I will miss knowing that
she is in the world, butl do believe that bright light
still shines and that she handed it to lots of people
in little sparks, and it is up to us to make them glow
and grow.”
Kathleen Saadat
longtime women’s- and civil-rights activist
“ A n g e r is useful to
help clarify our
differences, but in the
long run, strength that
is bred by anger alone is
a blind force which
cannot create the
future. It can only
demolish the past.”
Audre Lorde, “Eye to Eye:
Black Women, Hatred and Anger,”
Sister Outsider,
The Crossing Press, 1984.
“A tudre Lorde is a voice of eloquent cour­
age and unflinching honesty. She grew up speak­
ing with the voice of a poet-passionate, always,
about telling her truth and sharing her triumphs
and pain with her loved ones, her community and
the world.
“She has never outgrown the passion as she
has sung her songs of joy and anger, of desire and
loss. She writes about love and suffering in
vividly honest and penetrating language but with
artful dramatic dexterity.
“There is no cant, no idle conjuring in Audre
Lorde’s work. She allows herself to be known
fully. Her imagination is charged by a sharp sense
of racial injustice and cruelty, of sexual prejudice.
She cries out against it as the voice of indignant
humanity.
“She is candid, even bold about the hard truth
as she has witnessed and lived it. But she has not
missed the sweetness either. She sings, too, of the
love and sisterhood among women and of the
tenderness that accompanies the tensions between
parents and children and mothers and daughters.
“It has been said of Audre Lorde that she is like
the black unicorn of which she writes: a magical
and mysterious bearer of fantasy draped in truth
and beauty.
“Audre Lorde is a poet of courage and p>ride, of
hard-edged anger and of indomitable hope, for
light and change.”
Gov. Mario Cuomo
His statement when Audre Lorde was
named New York State Poet on Nov. 12,1991.
“Som etim es we are blessed with being able to choose the time
and the arena and the manner of our revolution, but more
usually we must do battle wherever we are standing. It does not
matter too much if it is in the radiation lab or a doctor's office
or the telephone company, the streets, the welfare department
or the classroom. The real blessing is to be able to use whoever
I am wherever I am, in concert with as many others as possible,
or alone if needs be.”
Audre Lorde, “A Burst o f Light: Living With Cancer , ”
Firebrand Books, 1988.
\