In “Feminism and Black Liberation: The Great
American Disease,” Lorde writes of the danger of
black women’s sacrificial love: “If society ascribes
roles to black men which they are not allowed to
fulfill, is it black women who must bend and alter
our lives to compensate, or is it society that needs
changing?” And in “The Erotic as Power,” Lorde
explores how “our erotic knowledge empowers
us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize
all aspects of our existence... [providing] a grave
responsibility.. , not to settle for the convenient,
the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the
merely safe.” Audre Lorde’s courageous struggle
with cancer, described in both The Cancer Journals
(1980) and Burst of Light (1988), she regarded as
“only another face of that continuing battle for
self-determination and survival that black women
fight daily, often in triumph.” The Cancer Journals,
which received the Critics’ Choice Award, 1995–
1996, while deeply personal, focused attention on
the politics of women’s health care and the mis-
treatment of women by the medical establishment.
One passage describes the political consciousness
behind Lorde’s refusal to wear a prosthesis: “Pros-
thesis offers the empty comfort of ‘Nobody will
know the difference.’ But it is that very difference
which I wish to affirm, because I have lived it and
survived it, and wish to share that strength with
other women.” Another passage celebrates com-
munity in the same breath as it acknowledges
difference: “I am defined as other in every group
I’m a part of.... Yet without community there is
certainly no liberation, no future, only the most
vulnerable and temporary armistice between me
and my oppression.”
Gloria T. Hull has described the complex and
profoundly ethical positionality Lorde represents
in her life and her work by noting that “[w]hen
Lorde names herself ‘sister outsider,’ she is claim-
ing the extremes of a difficult identity.... Lorde
has placed herself on that line between the either/
or and both/and of ‘sister outsider’—and then
erased her chance for rest or mediation.”
Other collections of Lorde’s essays include:
Apartheid U.S.A. and Our Common Enemy, Our
Common Cause: Freedom Organizing in the Eight-
ies (with Merle Woo; 1986), and I Am Your Sister:
Black Women Organizing across Sexualities (1986).
Among her many activist endeavors, Lorde co-
founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press
(1981), helped establish Sisterhood in Support of
Sisters in South Africa (SISA) (1985), and, in 1989,
was instrumental in raising U.S contributions to-
ward relief efforts for the island of Saint Croix after
the devastation caused by Hurricane Hugo.
Audre Lorde received a B.A. from Hunter Col-
lege (1959) and an M.A. in library science from
Columbia University in 1961. A librarian until
1968, when she published her first book of poems
and became poet-in-residence at Tougaloo Col-
lege (Mississippi), she later became professor of
English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice,
teaching poetry, race relations, and urban studies,
and held the Thomas Hunter chair in the English
department at Hunter College.
Married in 1962 to attorney Edwin Ashley Rol-
lins, from whom she was subsequently divorced,
Lorde had two children, Jonathan and Elizabeth,
whom she raised with Frances Clayton, her partner
of 17 years. The final years of her life were spent
with her partner Gloria Joseph on the island of St.
Croix, where, after a 14-year battle with cancer, she
died on November 17, 1992.
In a ceremony not long before her death, Audre
Lorde was given the African name Gamba Adisa,
meaning “Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning
Clear.” Like the shimmering robe she was given
at the 1990 “I Am Your Sister” conference held in
Boston to celebrate her work and the values it re-
flects and encourages, Lorde’s African name was
a singularly fitting honor—for words drenched in
clarifying truth are Audre Lorde’s greatest legacy.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexander, Elizabeth. “ ‘Coming out Blackened and
Whole’: Fragmentation and Reintegration in
Audre Lorde’s Zami and The Cancer Journals.”
American Literary History 6, no. 4 (1994): 695–
715.
Avi-Ram, Amitai F. “Apo Koinou in Audre Lorde and
the Moderns: Defining the Differences.” Callaloo
9, no. 1 (1986): 193–208.
Hall, Lynda. “Lorde and Gomez Queer(y)ing bound-
aries and Acting in Passion(ate) Plays ‘WhereverLorde, Audre Geraldine 319