SOURCE: "Living on the Line: Audre Lorde and Our Dead Behind Us," in Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, edited by Cheryl A. Wall, Rutgers University Press, 1989, pp. 150-72.

[In the essay below, Hull conducts a broad appraisal of the themes and issues Lorde addresses in her poetry.]

In Audre Lorde's poem "A Meeting of Minds," a woman who "stands / in a crystal" is not permitted to dream ("the agent of control is / a zoning bee") or to speak ("her lips are wired to explode / at the slightest conversationsation"), although around her, "other women are chatting."

the walls are written in honey
in the dream
she is not allowed
to kiss her own mother
the agent of control
is a white pencil
that writes
alone.

Denied access to her sleeping consciousness, this heroine cannot see her past or future, nor can she fully know and constitute herself. Prohibited conversation, she cannot connect with other women except in what feels like oneway visual separation, rendered even more cruel by her observing of their verbal sharing with each other around the honeyed walls. Crystal, a gem used by women for vision, protection, and the transmission of healing energy, becomes here cold, imprisoning stone whose properties only enhance her torment and isolation. Kissing her mother, her own and not a stepmother, would reinstate the first and most basic contact in a touch that embraces and validates the self. But even this simple bloodright/rite is not allowed.

As bad as the zoning bee and explosives undoubtedly are, Lorde's climactic and pointed placement of the "white pencil / that writes / alone" (note the spatial pause between "is" and "a white pencil") signals its overall importance. This pencil which signs the woman's ultimate alienation is, first of all, white and, second, self-contained and -propelled. Its color is the blank neutrality of the dominant world, and there is no visible agent-author to own its powerful interdictions. It has the deterministic force of Khayyam-FitzGerald's "moving finger" (which having writ, moves on), plus a disembodied horror impossible to efface.

Lorde has spent her entire career as a black lesbian feminist poet writing against this white, Western, phallocentric pencil. She has placed a colored pen within the woman's grasp and authorized her to inscribe her own law—an order that valorizes dreaming, speaking, and kissing the mother and, above all, does not seek to hide its hand in a transparently cloaked objectivity. Honesty and responsibility—even in the midst of difficult saying—are premier goals and motivations. Lorde's poem "Learning to Write" begins with a question:

Is the alphabet responsible
for the book
in which it is written
that makes me peevish and nasty
and wish I were dumb again?

This present-tense outburst against someone's vexing use of language triggers a childhood memory of practicing the drawing of letters, and then concludes with a resolution obviously generated in response to what has irritated her:

I am a bleak heroism of words
that refuse
to be buried alive
with the liars.

Time and again she asserts her position, comparing her honesty (in "A Question of Climate") to her "powerful breast stroke" / "a declaration of war" which she developed by being "dropped into the inevitable."

Identity is no meaningless accident. Thus, writing honestly requires acknowledging the particulars that construct the self. This seems to be the message of "To the Poet Who Happens to Be Black/and the Black Poet Who/Happens to Be a Woman," a title that places sarcastic weight on the word happens and a heavy disapproval on those poets who discount their race and gender. Part one of the poem records her first birth "in the gut of Blackness / from between my mother's particular thighs." The second stanza recounts the first sister touch, a joyous woman birth which wrote into her body a "welcome home." Black and woman born, she survives all the attempts in part three of the poem to cancel her out "like an unpleasant appointment / postage due." The movement ends:

I cannot recall the words of my first poem
but I remember a promise
I made my pen
never to leave it
lying
in somebody else's blood.

There is always the pitfall of lying, which is accentuated in these lines by the obvious pun. Writing with the ink of her own precisely claimed blood keeps Lorde from using her pen—like a ghostly white pencil—to spill the blood of others.

Of course, saying honestly is not especially easy. Having worked through inner pressures and prohibitions, the poet still must face the unspeakable in experience and language. When "cadences of dead flesh / obscure the vowels," there can be "no honest poems about dead women." Likewise, in "This Urn Contains Earth from/German Concentration Camps," Lorde contemplates the well-trimmed order of a West Berlin memorial, its

Neatness
wiping memories payment
from the air.

She contrasts this scene with a summer picnic, where "rough precisions of earth" marked her "rump" and a smashed water bug oozed eggs into a bowl of corn. It is this latter which is

Earth
not the unremarkable ash
of fussy thin-boned infants
and adolescent Jewish girls
liming the Ravensbruck potatoes

This realization forces the sobering knowledge that

careful and monsterless
this urn makes nothing
easy to say.

Here, by juxtaposing the abstract "mythization" of the Holocaust horror with concrete corporeality, Lorde makes her project clear. She is rescuing meaning from immateriality, from the sanitized wipeout of traditional history's magic pencil. Unburying the bones and rotting flesh of what has been covered up may not be pretty, but, for her, the unthinkable alternative is muteness, a condition she ascribes to bottles and wood and interdicted women encased in stone.

Lorde began her published work in 1968—twenty years ago—with The First Cities. When she arrived via five volumes of verse and a growing reputation at Between Our Selves (1976) and The Black Unicorn (1978), she had gone from merely writing poetry to casting wise and incantatory magic. A Choice reviewer put it quite sensitively when s/he wrote:

Audre Lorde has always been a good poet…. But now, with the arrival of The Black Unicorn, these previous books [of hers] have an added value; for they show, in a unique way, how a black poet has changed over a decade, in response to the poetic styles and to her own deepening sensibilities…. As a woman, mother, teacher, lover, she has been a strong lyrical figure in Afro-American Life. Now she has added another self—the spirit that has gone to Africa…. Here is poetry that is rich, startling in its speed and fervor. The personal experience still startles her, as in her previous work, but the stark, ironic, almost taunting poems of her earlier years have given place to words of acceptance and transcendence.

The Black Unicorn is a majestic voicing of statements and propositions whose applications are further worked out in her later book, Our Dead Behind Us (1986). Much of the struggle of defining and instating herself was done in the earlier volume, so that now she can simply put herself in motion, acting and being who she is. And because we know—and she knows that we know—where she is coming from, there is no need for her to repeat herself. At this hard-earned point, we can read Audre Lorde in her own light.

When Lorde names herself "sister outsider," she is claiming the extremes of a difficult identity. I think we tend to read the two terms with a diacritical slash between them—in an attempt to make some separate, though conjoining, space. But 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. However, the charged field between the two energies remains strong, constantly suggested by the frequency with which edges, lines, borders, margins, boundaries, and the like appear as significant figures in her work. One of the more striking uses begins her famous poem "A Litany for Survival":

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone

Those for whom she chants this survival song are outsiders who exist between their versions of life and the conflicting hegemonic scheme, who occupy the moment between a precarious present and a better future, "looking inward and outward / at once before and after." This margin, their place—if a space this untenable can be so concretely designated—is for marginal, that is, expendable beings. Lorde celebrates their "instant" and their "triumph," stating: "We were never meant to survive."

Two contiguous poems in Our Dead Behind Us further explore limits. After venturing past the easy spots where men catch proven trout in calm, knee-deep water, the speaker in "Fishing the White Water" confesses that she "never intended to press beyond / the sharp lines set as boundary." Yet she finds herself laboring in rapids back to back with her lover, choosing her partner's "dear face" over "the prism light makes / along my line." "On the Edge" contemplates relationship possibilities in terms of slicing blades and dangerous knives, leaving the speaker dreaming "I am precious rock / touching the edge of you."

Yet, it is not simply lines which attract Lorde. She is almost equally fascinated by what happens as they cross and recross, touch, and intersect with one another. Hence the "grids" and "crostics" of her poems (and also the bridges, which I do not discuss here). Her lover's face is "distorted into grids / of magnified complaint." Life in New York City forms "the complex / double-crostic of this moment's culture." A couple's two names become "a crostic for touch." These puzzling, intersecting lines that posit communication also attempt to pattern a map that can both locate and guide one through difficult geographies. Place is central in Lorde's work. Ethiopia, Berlin, Florida, Soho, and Vermont appear in her titles as a sampling of all the hot and troubled spots which engage her—Amsterdam Avenue, Mississippi, Grenville, Grenada, 830 Broadway, Santiago de Chile, Bleecker Street, Vieques, St. Georges, Johannesburg, White River Junction, Southampton, Maiden Lane, Pretoria, Alabama, Eau Claire, Tashkent, Gugeleto, and on and on—all place-names marking the wide area of her political and personal concerns. Lorde's vision encompasses the world, although she often approaches it from inside the woods, a garden, the next room, on a trail or a path to the deeper and broader meanings which glue the grid together. The bottom line is drawn clearly in the conclusion to "Outlines":

We have chosen each other
and the edge of each other's battles
the war is the same
if we lose
someday women's blood will
congeal
upon a dead planet
if we win
there is no telling.

Lorde's seemingly essentialist definitions of herself as black/lesbian/mother/woman are not simple, fixed terms. Rather, they represent her ceaseless negotiations of a positionality from which she can speak. Almost as soon as she achieves a place of connection, she becomes uneasy at the comfortableness (which is, to her, a signal that something critical is being glossed over) and proceeds to rub athwart the smooth grain to find the roughness and the slant she needs to maintain her difference-defined, complexly constructed self. Our Dead Behind Us is constant motion, with poem after poem enacting a series of displacements. The geographical shifts are paralleled by temporal shifting in a "time-tension" which Mary J. Carruthers sees as characteristic of lesbian poetry: "the unspoken Lesbian past and the ineffable Lesbian future bearing continuously upon the present." The ubiquitous leave-takings are not surprising—"Out to the Hard Road" ("I never told you how much it hurt leaving"), "Every Traveler Has One Vermont Poem" ("Spikes of lavender aster under Route 91 / … I am a stranger / making a living choice"), "Diaspora" ("grenades held dry in a calabash / leaving"). Yet even more telling is the way Lorde brackets "home."

A poem with that title begins:

We arrived at my mother's island
to find your mother's name in the stone
we did not need to go to the graveyard
for affirmation
our own genealogies
the language of childhood wars.
["Home"]

Ostensibly, these lines confirm a beautiful sisterhood between the two travelers which goes beyond the need for external documentation. And well it does—for none of the conventional "proof of origin and kinship is forthcoming. At the outset, another mother's name occupies the space where the speaker expected to find her own matrilineage. Nor does proof come from "two old dark women" in the second stanza who blessed them, greeting

Eh Dou-Dou you look too familiar
to you to me
it no longer mattered.

Has this woman arrived at home, the place where her particular face is recognized?

"On My Way Out I Passed over You / and the Verrazano Bridge" is a mediated suspension between leavetaking and home. In fact, the poet is literally hanging in the midair of an airplane flight, "leaving leaving." Beneath is water, sand, "silhouette houses sliding off the horizon," her and her lover's house, too, which "slips under these wings / shuttle between nightmare and the possible." The home which "drew us" because of space for a growing green garden now holds "anger" in a "landscape of trials," comparable to the way sulfur fuels burned in New Jersey have turned the Staten Island earth bright yellow. So what is to be done?

we live on the edge
of manufacturing
tommorrow or the unthinkable
made common as plantain-weed
by our act of not thinking
of taking
only what is given.

Their domestic conflict is encompassed by global pain and injustice which render home/place tenuous and terrifying for people all over the world—from Poland to Soweto, the Bay Street Women's Shelter, and the altars of El Salvador. Winnie Mandela's steps and her blood are slowing "in a banned and waterless living." Thus, when Lorde says

I am writing these words as a route map
an artifact for survival
a chronicle of buried treasure
a mourning
for this place we are about to be leaving

all of this madness is what she wants to put behind.

The penultimate movement of the poem telescopes ordinary, heroic women at war, some of them "burning their houses behind them" or being "driven out of Crossroads / perched on the corrugated walls of her uprooted life." This unkind history necessitates

So permitted, the poet—returning to her immediate conversation with her lover—can

Despite its long and torturous charting of this farewell gesture, the poem ends as it began, suspended in moving uncertainty. Home is continually deferred in a world which, as Matthew Arnold put it, "hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." Lorde herself had told us earlier, in The Black Unicorn, that

for the embattled
there is no place
that cannot be
home
nor is.

Lorde's inability to rest—in place, time, or consciousness—is reflected in a technique she frequently uses of playing meaning along lines that shift both backward and forward. In the first excerpt from "Home" quoted above, the clause "we did not need" stands as its own declarative, but it also modifies "stone" in a completion of "the stone we did not need," as well as begins the new sentence of "we did not need to go to the graveyard." The next phrase, "for affirmation," is likewise shared, as prepositional closure for the "graveyard" behind it and as introduction for the forwarding statement of "for affirmation, [we had] our own genealogies." The "to you to me" of the second quote is also doubly constructed. In the first "On My Way Out" passage, the reader pauses after "of manufacturing"—only to have to pick up the burden of the line to make an object of "tomorrow or the unthinkable," which then becomes the subject of "made common"—if one has not already read "we" as that phrase's nominative designation.

The poet is not (only) playing games; she is also writing political poetry. We need to think about the industrial pollution that neighbors us and the way we determine our future tomorrows. We need to realize that willfully not thinking makes both ourselves and the worst world we can imagine "common" (also meaning vulgar) and acceptable. Amitai F. Avi-ram has published a study of Lorde's use of this technique which in rhetoric is termed apo koinou, a Greek phrase meaning "in common." She has this to say about its thematic and formal functions in Lorde's poetry:

apo koinou seems to be a controlling method in Audre Lorde's art. It enables her to suspend the ordinary pressures of sentence-closure, to reveal the suspect "nature" of such closure and its ideological consequences, and to reveal the hidden possibilities of meaning in words, especially, in their ideological dimensions. It also enables her to form a new language that both criticizes reality and pursues the articulation of feeling as the satisfaction of a kind of erotic demand. In so doing, finally, apo koinou affords Lorde a technique for an alternative constitution of the subject in poetry as one that makes contact and has intense feelings in common with others, but preserves its ability to experience and to mean by observing its own differences in a world fraught with difference.

[Callaloo 9, No. 1, Winter 1986]

Employing this stratagem, she is pressing further

the sharpened edge
where day and night shall meet
and not be
one.

Lorde's tricky positionality—as exemplified by her relationship to home and poetic lines—also extends to community, which she likewise desires, but problematizes and finds problematic. An early poem, "And What About the Children," alludes to the "dire predictions" and "grim speculations" that accompanied her interracial marriage and mixed-race offspring. She takes defiant comfort in the fact that if her son's head "is on straight,"

he won't care
about his
hair
nor give a damn
whose wife
I am.

"Between Ourselves" recalls her former habit of walking into a room seeking the "one or two black faces" which would reassure her that she was not alone; but

now walking into rooms full of black faces
that would destroy me for any difference
where shall my eyes look?
Once it was easy to know
who were my people.

Caught during a women's rally between a racially deferent black counterman at Nedick's restaurant and a group of white companions discussing their problems with their maids, Lorde learns afresh that

In "Scar," having "no sister no mother no children" is juxtaposed with what is "left": "only a tideless ocean of moonlit women / in all shades of loving."

These communal displacements are not so critically prominent in Our Dead Behind Us—perhaps because, by now, they are so familiar. Instead, we find glyphs of female connection—the "large solid women" who "walk the parapets beside me"; the "corn woman bird girl sister" who "calls from the edge of a desert" telling her story of survival; the "Judith" and "Blanche" with whom she hangs out; the "warm pool / of dark women's faces" at a Gainesville, Florida, lecture. At this point, Lorde has achieved spiritual bonding with an ancestral and mythic past. The Amazons and warrior queens of Dahomey and the orisha of the Yoruba religious pantheon have given her a family that cannot fail:

It was in Abomey that I felt
the full blood of my fathers' wars
and where I found my mother
Seboulisa

Even on 125th Street in New York City,

Head bent, walking through snow
I see you Seboulisa
printed inside the back of my head
like marks of the newly wrapped akai [braids]
that kept my sleep fruitful in Dahomey

The cover of Our Dead Behind Us consists of "a snapshot of the last Dahomean Amazons," "three old Black women in draped cloths," superimposed upon a sea of dark and passionate South Africans at a protest demonstration. This image projects Lorde's membership in a community of struggle which stretches from ancient to modern times. In "Call" she invokes "Oya Seboulisa Mawu Afrekete," "Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer / Assata Shakur and Yaa Asantewa / my mother and Winnie Mandela," speaking into exclusionary spaces a transcendent black woman power "released / from the prism of dreaming."

However uneasy her identity may be, it is imperative for Lorde that she read the world as a meaningful text and not as a series of interesting and elusive propositions. For her, to "read" is (1) to decipher—like the musician Prince—the signs of the times, (2) to decode—as the lesbian/gay community does—the submerged signification of the visible signs, and (3) to sound out clearly and "to your face" uncompromising truth as she sees it, in that foot-up, handson-hip loudness that is self-authorized black female jeremiad, sermon, and song. From the beginning, her vatic voice has defined her moral and didactic arena—in the same way that her presence claims its territory on the stage or in a photographic frame. She and Adrienne Rich, especially, have been criticized for their heavy seriousness. However, with so many dead behind her, Lorde is too busy pulling the bodies from bars and doorways, jungle tracks and trenches to find time for unrestricted poetic laughter. Her task is to foreground the carnage in a valiant effort to make such senseless dying truly a thing of the past.

From the first poem in her first book, "Memorial II," Lorde has decried society's chewing up of young girl-women like "Martha" (in Cables to Rage) and "Genevieve." She begs, "Genevieve tell me where dead girls / Wander after their summer," and asks, in "Suffer the Children," "But who shall dis-inter these girls / To love the women they were to become / Or read the legends written beneath their skin?" Their spirits still shadow her lines—as she yearns each springs "to braid the hair of a girl long dead" ("Beams"), or as they reincarnate as the liminal "dark girls" of her haunted lyrics (for example, in "Diaspora").

These readings are gentle, compared to the devastating fury that drives poems such as "Equal Opportunity" and "For the Record." In the latter, it is the poet herself who "counts" the big fleshy women like black grandmother Eleanor Bumpers who was brutally murdered by police while defending her home and then ignominiously carried out "dress torn up around her waist / uncovered." The next day Indira Gandhi, another sixty-seven-year-old "colored girl," is shot down in her garden, and the two women—who are now perhaps talking to each other—"weren't even sisters." The first poem is scathing satire of the black female "american deputy assistant secretary of defense / for Equal Opportunity" who preens in her crisp uniform and defends the department's "record / of equal opportunity for our women"—while United States troops invade Grenada, terrorizing "Imelda young Black in a tattered headcloth" whose empty cooking pots are overturned and garden trampled, whose husband was "buried without his legs," and who stands carefully before these trigger-nervous men asking for water for herself and her child. In "Soho Cinema," she takes to task a well-off white woman for her complacently liberal nonresponse to the world's problems.

Irony blasts in these poems as explosively as it does, laughter-tinged, in "A Question of Essence," where Lorde repeats that magazine's query, "Is Your Hair Still Political?" and quips "tell me / when it starts to burn." This is her kind of humor—piercing wit in the service of a serious cause. "The Art of Response" reads:

The first answer was incorrect
the second was
sorry the third trimmed its toenails
on the Vatican steps
…………
the sixth wrote a book about it
the seventh
argued a case before the Supreme Court
against taxation on Girl Scout Cookies
the eighth held a new conference
while four Black babies
and one other picketed New York City
for a hospital bed to die in
…………..
the thirteenth
refused
the fourteenth sold cocaine and
shamrocks
near a toilet in the Big Apple circus
the fifteenth
changed the question.

The cataloged responses are wildly comic, but the point is that the problem of how to live in this mad world—the unstated "question"—is usually posed in terms that make meaningful, efficacious response impossible; thus the only valid move is for one to change the "question." Similarly, the "some women" in "Stations" who love to wait at various spots "for life for a ring / in the June light for a touch / of the sun to heal them," for "their right / train in the wrong station," for love "to rise up," for visions, "that do not return / where they were not welcome," for themselves "around the next corner," are contrasted with the women in the final stanza who wait for something

to change and nothing
does change
so they change
themselves.

Both "Stations" and "The Art of Response" carry a lilt and tone different from most of Lorde's work.

Her way is to paint social and political injustice in intimate and familiar forms. She "outlines" the difficulties faced by an interracial lesbian couple in a racist-sexisthomophobic culture "with not only our enemies' hands / raised against us": dog shit dumped on the front porch, brass wind chimes stolen, a burning cross ten blocks away, and the "despair offerings of the 8 A.M. News" reminding them that they are "still at war / and not with each other." This union is as charged with significance as the play of language and power which structures an exchange between the poet and an almost extinct Russian Chukwu woman in "Political Relations." Their warm words to each other must be spoken across the thin lips of dominance, white Moscow girls who translated for them "smirking at each other."

"Sisters in Arms," the brilliant poem that begins Our Dead Behind Us, starts with:

The edge of our bed was a wide grid
where your fifteen-year-old daughter was hanging
gut-sprung on police wheels

Instantly, the poet and the black South African woman in bed beside her are catapulted through space and time into the embattled Western Reserve where the girl's body needs burying:

so I bought you a ticket to Durban
on my American Express
and we lay together
in the first light of a new season.

The "now" of the poem is the speaker clearing roughage from her autumn garden and reaching for "the taste of today" in embittering New York Times news stories that obscure the massacre of black children. Another shift occurs with "we were two Black women touching our flame / and we left our dead behind us / I hovered you rose the last ritual of healing." These lines show traces of the deep, joyous, authenticating eroticism Lorde describes in another of her poems as "the greed of a poet / or an empty woman / trying to touch / what matters."

These two women's loving is flecked with the cold and salt rage of death, the necessity of war: "Someday you will come to my country / and we will fight side by side?" When keys jingle, threatening, in "the door ajar," the poet's desperate reaching for "sweetness" "explodes like a pregnant belly," like the nine-year-old Joyce mentioned earlier who tried to crawl to her bleeding brother after being shot during a raid, "shitting through her [own] navel." The closing section of the poem looks backward on the grid to the only comfort in sight—a vision of warrior queen Mmanthatisi nursing her baby, then mapping the next day's battle as she

dreams of Durban sometimes
visions the deep wry song of beach pebbles
running after the sea

—in final lines whose rich referentiality links all the "Sisters" together in an enduring tradition of nurturance and hopeful struggle.

The oracular voice that powers—at different frequencies—Lorde's work can best be heard full force in the majestic orality of "Call," a spiritual offering of praise and supplication that is chilling, especially when she reads it. Aido Hwedo is, a note tells us, "The Rainbow Serpent; also a representation of all ancient divinities who must be worshipped but whose names and faces have been lost in time." Stanza one summons this

Holy ghost woman
Stolen out of your name
Rainbow Serpent
whose faces have been forgotten
Mother—loosen my tongue or adorn me
with a lighter burden
Aido Hwedo is coming.

She invokes this deity in the name of herself and her sisters who, "on worn kitchen stools and tables," are piecing their "weapons together / scraps of different histories":

Rainbow Serpent who must not go
unspoken
I have offered up the safety of separations
sung the spirals of power
and what fills the spaces
before power unfolds or flounders
in desirable nonessentials
I am a Black woman stripped down
and praying
my whole life has been an altar
worth its ending
and I say Aido Hwedo is coming.

She brings her best while asking for continuing power to do her work as a woman/poet. And she is blessed to become not only the collective voice of her sisters, but Aido Hwedo's fiery tongue, "the holy ghosts' linguist."

Critic Robert Stepto pronounced The Black Unicorn "an event in contemporary letters" because of its author's "voice or an idea of a voice that is essentially African in that it is communal, historiographical, archival, and prophetic as well as personal in ways that we commonly associate with the African griot, dyēli, and tellers of nganos and other oral tales." This voice holds in her later volume, which continues to "explore the modulations within that voice between feminine and feminist timbres" and also to chart "history and geography as well as voice" [Parnassus, 8, No. 1, 1979].

Lorde's moral and political vision combined with her demanding style make her difficult for many readers. Her aggressive exploration of her own alterity (she is a repository of "others" personified) is strategic defiance. Reviewing Our Dead Behind Us in the Los Angeles Times [December 1986], Ted C. Simmons even uses that word: "What further animates Lorde's work beyond this ore vein of contrapuntal interplay is her defiance. She seems to live defiance, thrive on it, delight in it. She is up-front, a feminist and militant, an activist juju-word woman."

Her stance impels commentators to approach her writings in terms of sympathy/guilt and the likeness/unlikeness of potential readers to the poet herself. A particularly exaggerated version of this tack occurs in the Village Voice, [in Kate Walker's September 4, 1984 review of Lorde's] essay collection Sister Outsider: "the more you resemble her target of white, -male, -thin, -young, -heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure, the more you'll squirm under her verbal guns…. If you're black, gay, or left-wing, it's easier to identify with Lorde because we can never join the patriarchy, even if we're tempted." The same theme sounds in remarks such as the following about her poetry: "[Chosen Poems—Old and New] has an enormous appeal for those who share the author's feelings and would like to see their own feelings and experiences confirmed in print." "The content [of Our Dead Behind Us] is laudable; at least if you agree with her. But … there's more than a little of the disingenuous about her approach, which seems bent on instilling guilt in the reader as much as offering enlightenment." Those who squirm the most seem to be those who are most uncomfortable with their own privileged identities, and a great deal of the "guilt" is unacknowledged responsibility inappropriately reversed.

The wide divergence of opinion regarding the worth of Audre Lorde's poetry is striking. At one extreme rests the critic [Michael T. Siconolfi] who believes that, in The Black Unicorn, "ugliness predominates" and that "most of the poems are simply bad; they don't work as organic wholes and leave the reader surprised that a piece continues on the next page" [Best Sellers, January 1987]. The renowned Hayden Carruth begins his assessment of the book [The Nation, December 23, 1978] with negative judgment and ends in a confusion of praise: "The truth is, I don't care much for her writing, which seems far too close to the commonplace…. Yet few poets are better equipped than Lorde to drive their passion through the gauzy softness of commonplace diction and prosody. One can't help being absorbed in it. Her best poems move me deeply."

Many critics pinpoint what they perceive to be her weaknesses, and credit their discoveries of beauty and strength: "If I have a complaint, it is that lines sometimes tend to be prosaic … yet the musicality and the self-assurance make it work as poetry" [Joan Larkin in Ms., September 1974]. "Audre Lorde is a brilliant and honest poet, and while no poem in this volume touches me as the earlier Lorde poems do, The Black Unicorn should be read for its own wit, wisdom, and incandescence" [Andrea Benton Rushing in Ms., January 1979]. Others are even more unstinting in their admiration. The Library Journal's reviewer consistently describes Lorde as "an excellent craftsman: her voice is lyrical and her eye is sharp" and pronounces her poems "hard-edged, compelling, and vital." Stepto concluded his discussion of Lorde with "The Black Unicorn offers contemporary poetry of a high order, and in doing so may be a smoldering renaissance and revolution unto itself." Paula Giddings begins her review of Our Dead Behind Us: "Each new volume published by Audre Lorde confirms the fact that she is one of America's finest poets" [Essence, September 1986]. On the dust jacket of The Black Unicorn, Adrienne Rich elevates Lorde's "poems of elemental wildness and healing, nightmare and lucidity" which "blaze and pulse on the page, beneath the reader's eye."

Readers who—by whatever means of experience, empathy, imagination, or intelligence—are best able to approximate Lorde's own positionality most appreciate her work. For instance, it is clearly Siconolfi's ethnocentric ignorance of African traditions and their importance to Afro-Americans which leads him to arrogantly dismiss Lorde's "surprising" ("for a resident of Staten Island") "dragging in" of "a plethora of African mythology (a handy glossary is mercifully provided)" as a "purple Dashiki patch"—while black American critics Stepto and Andrea Rushing see this same material as a creative use of important African sources. Yet readers who also have "radically-situated subjectivities" still find themselves challenged by Lorde's poetry. Sandra Squire Fluck, a self-described "educator, poet/writer, and peace and social justice activist," writes the following in her review of Our Dead Behind Us: "As uncomfortable as Lorde makes me feel here about the world situation, I do not have to relive my own righteous anger, brimming with angst and isolation, as it used to [be]. But I do have to accept Lorde on her terms, because she challenges me to see history her way as a Black lesbian woman." Only Lorde's recognition of "the limits of righteous anger" allows Fluck to "say yes" to her "without being threatened or overwhelmed" [New Directions for Women, January-February 1987]. As I write this, I recall that my own "Poem for Audre" of a few years ago begins with the words

What you said
keeps bothering me
keeps needling, grinding
like toothache
or a bad conscience

Clearly, Lorde keeps her reader—as she does herself—unsettled.

Viewed stylistically, Lorde's poetry is not transparent. Understanding her texts requires attention, effort, energy, hard work. Even a sympathetic reviewer like Fahamisha Shariat admits that Lorde "may not be totally clear on a first, or even a second reading—sometimes her language approaches the surreal," but that "her poems are rich enough to send us back for new discoveries with each reading." Our Dead Behind Us is simpler in language and reference than Coal or The Black Unicorn, the poems less coded and more straightforward. Nevertheless, today's literary marketplace seems to be filled with customers looking for an easy "read" (usually fiction) and setting aside most of what cannot be conveniently discussed as narrative/narrativity.

Taking up Lorde reminds us of the still-unique nature of poetic discourse, the essence of which is a submerged textuality that, like Neitzsche's truth, remains an army of metaphors. Lorde's own poetry is basically a traditional kind of modernist free verse—laced with equivocation and, to use an old-fashioned concept, allegory. Only in her black Broadside Press-published books does she employ to any significant extent a recognizable ethnic idiom. Thus, who we hear with her foot up, specifying, does not sound to our ears like Zora, or Bessie, or, among the contemporaries, Sonia or Nikki, Pat or June.

Trying to read Lorde's more veiled texts can leave one foundering in her wake. These poems, I think, derive from a more vulnerable, unprocessed self, or from the poet's desire to keep some secrets partially hidden. "Berlin Is Hard on Colored Girls" comes across as a private joke about personal deprivation in a strange city and some kind of (dream?) encounter. Even read in the light of its two predecessors, "Generation III" remains densely impenetrable, except to suggest something emotionally strenuous related to mother-family and child-children. A handful of these private poems touches haltingly on Lorde's protracted fight with cancer and the idea of impending death—"Mawu" (which ends with the line "insisting / death is not a disease"), "From the Cave" perhaps, and "Never to Dream of Spiders" (with its glimpses of hospital surgery, recovery, a fiftieth birthday in 1984, and its concluding phrase, "a burst of light," which became the title for her second book about her health and illness).

Finally, Lorde's stylistic challenges are probably related to the manner in which she came into language/poetry. An inarticulate, left-handed child who had been forced to use her right hand, Lorde did not talk until she was five years old. Screaming in a four-year-old tantrum on the floor of the Harlem library (caused, I am sure, by the frustration of not being able to otherwise communicate), she was taken up by an impressive librarian who sat down and read her some stories. Audre knew instantly that that was "something I was going to do," and went on from there to read, then talk, then write—in that unusual order.

Words became for her "live entities." As a child she would take them "apart and fragment them like colors." She possessed a vocabulary which she had never heard spoken and did not know how to pronounce. These words such as legend, frigate, and monster "had an energy and power and I came to respect that power early. Pronouns, nouns, and verbs were citizens of different countries, who really got together to make a new world." During this period, she charmed away nightmares by choosing words which most terrified her and then "stripped them of anything but the sound—and put myself to sleep with the rhythms of them." This sense of words as sound full of both malevolent and joyful possibility is captured in her early poem "Coal" (which contains the lines, "how sound comes into a word, coloured / by who pays what for speaking").

Lorde's first language was, literally, poetry. When someone asked her "How do you feel?" "What do you think?" or any other direct question, she "would recite a poem, and somewhere in that poem would be the feeling, the vital piece of information. It might be a line. It might be an image. The poem was my response." Since she was hit if she stuttered, "writing was the next best thing." At this point, Audre was well on her way to becoming schizophrenic, living in "a totally separate world of words." She got "stoned on," retreated into poetry when life became too difficult. As miscellaneous poems no longer served to answer questions from herself and others, she began to write her own. These she did not commit to paper, but memorized and kept as a "long fund" in her head. Poems were "a secret way" of expressing feelings she was "still too afraid to deal with." She would know that she "finally had it" when she spoke her work aloud and it struck alive, became real.

Audre's bizarre mode of communication must surely have meant frequently tangential conversations, and certainly placed on her listeners the burden of having to "read" her words in order to connect her second-level discourse with the direct matter at hand. At any rate, her answer to "How do you feel?" or "Do you want to go to the store with me?" could rarely be a simple "fine" or a univocal yes or no.

In high school, she tried not to "think in poems." She saw in amazement how other people thought, "step by step," and "not in bubbles up from chaos that you had to anchor with words"—a kind of "nonverbal communication, beneath language" the value of which she had learned intuitively from her mother. After an early, pseudonymously published story, Lorde did not write another piece of prose until her 1977 essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury." Even though she had begun to speak in full sentences when she was nineteen and had also acquired compositional skills, "communicating deep feeling in linear, solid blocks of print felt arcane, a method beyond me." She "could not focus on a thought long enough to have it from start to finish," but she could "ponder a poem for days." Lorde possessed an admirable, innate resistance to the phallogocentric "white pencil," to being, as she put it, "locked into the mouth of the dragon." She had seen the many errors committed in the name of "thought / thinking," and, furthermore, had formed some precious convictions about her own life that "defied thought." She seems always to have been seeking what she calls, in Our Dead Behind Us, "an emotional language / in which to abbreviate time."

Lorde had not connected words with a reality outside her individual head until she stood on a hill in Mexico one breathtaking morning, also when she was nineteen, and realized that she could "infuse words directly with what I was feeling," that "I didn't have to create the world I wrote about," that "words could tell." She found that the "trees" and "forest" she used to dream and fantasize about could indeed "be a reality" that words can "match" and "re-create." With this, Lorde had taken the final step of a journey that had begun when, extremely nearsighted and legally blind, she had put on her first pair of spectacles at four and saw that trees were not "green clouds."

This remarkable story inescapably suggests what the French poststructuralist critic Julia Kristeva posits about language and subjectivity—her locating of meaning in the unconscious, chaotic, preverbal, infant chora, in the rhythmic pulsing of semiotic sound, the drives and tides of a maternal body. According to Kristeva, this locus (which appears most strongly in poetry and which Kristeva even calls at one point poetic language) dynamically charges and interacts subversively with the symbolic, thetic world where rational, conceptual language and communication are situated. Lorde's is a living experience of that about which Kristeva theorizes.

Viewing Lorde's poetry in the light of Kristeva's theory reminds us that finding new, more provocative ways to discuss black women's poetry is a project that could claim more attention than is currently focused in that direction and, further, that these ways might well evolve from sensitive digging in the soil of diverse traditions.