Cities (1968), Cables to Rage (1970), From the Land
Where Other People Live (1973); nominated for the
1974 National Book Award; The New York Head
Shop and Museum (1974); Between Our Selves
(1976), Our Dead behind Us (1986), and a posthu-
mous volume, The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde,
(1997). Lorde was also a brilliant essayist. New
York State’s poet laureate in 1991, Lorde received,
among her many awards, honorary doctorates
from Haverford College (1989), Oberlin College
(1990), and Hunter College (1991).
Fiercely and incisively exposing racism, to-
kenism, exclusion, invisibility, silencing, and the
erasure of difference, Lorde’s feminist vision is
more than subversive; it is incendiary. In poetry
and prose that is as compelling for its ethical vi-
sion as for its language, Lorde dares to imagine a
changed world, insisting, “for women... poetry is
not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.
It forms the quality of light within which we predi-
cate our hopes and dreams towards survival and
change, first made into language, then into idea,
then into more tangible action” (Lorde, 37–38).
Reversing the racist stereotypes equating darkness
with fear, hatred, and death, her poems associate
darkness with strength, integrity, beauty, vision,
and magic.
The title poem from Coal (1976) invokes a
powerful and joyous recognition of self, and of the
beauty of blackness: “I am Black because I come
from the earth’s inside / now take my word for
jewel in the open light.” The love poems from The
Black Unicorn (1978) are sensuous, tender, fiercely
passionate. Dreaming in “Woman” of a time when
“the commonest rock / is moonstone and ebony
opal,” Lorde envisions racial healing between white
and black women. In “Fog Report,” the poet de-
scribes the powerful force of sexuality, its potential
to throw a person off balance, as well as its ability
to be centering and empowering—a place to “solve
[one’s] own equations.” In “Meet,” Lorde borrows
from the legend of Mawulisa as a prophecy, vowing
to resist the lies uttered against loving and the cen-
sure and denial of lesbian relationships. “Coniagui
Women” premises itself on the necessity for black
women to teach black men to care for themselves.
The woman who feeds her sons “yam soup / and
silence” refuses the persistent, seductive entreat-
ies of her young. In “Power,” she warns that real
power is not the simple possession of the means of
violence but a means to individual transformation,
insisting that the appropriate use of this power will
engender the muscular, cohesive vision that makes
social revolution possible. Poems such as “Power”
or the later “Need: A Choral of Black Women’s
Voices” and “Afterimages” (a brilliant choral echo
of GWENDOLYN BROOKS’s poem about the murder
of EMMETT TILL)—both from Chosen Poems Old
and New (1982)—are as visceral and devastating as
the actual events they describe, avoiding any sem-
blance of conventional poetic diction or syntax.
Our Dead behind Us (1986) opens with the poem
“Sisters in Arms,” the tragedy of “six-year-olds
imprisoned for threatening the state.” The stench
of death, of apartheid, of “the seeping Transvaal
cold”—metaphoric and actual—remains in the
lovers’ bed. In Germany for cancer treatment dur-
ing the period she was writing this volume, Lorde
wrote of Ravensbruck and other Nazi atrocities.
The poems here and in The Marvelous Arithmet-
ics of Distance (1993), nominated for the National
Book Critics Circle Award, speak of Sharpeville,
Soweto, Shatila, and lowercase alabama—sites of
anguish and resistance. The final poem of Lorde’s
last individual volume evokes quiet despair, a more
personal confrontation with death, of “How hard
it is to sleep / in the middle of life.”
In their unflinching gaze into much that is
nightmare in American culture, many of these are
not comforting poems. But because Lorde’s work
imagines what poet Adrienne Rich has called “the
possibilities of truth between us,” they are poems
that chart a new, essential geography, one whose
terrain we ignore only at our own peril.
Lorde’s speeches and essays share a common
cause with her poetry. Her best-known speech,
“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the
Master’s House” (Sister Outsider, 1984), delivered
in 1979 at the Second Sex Conference, condemns
predominantly white, middle-class, and hetero-
sexual feminists, who, while speaking against their
own oppression, fail to listen to, support, and in-
clude as equals speakers representing communities
disadvantaged by color, class, and sexual identity.318 Lorde, Audre Geraldine