SOURCE: "Word Warrior," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 256, No. 4, February 1, 1993, pp. 130-33.

[In the following review, Clausen uses the coinciding occasions of Lorde's death and the publication of Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New (Revised) to conduct a broad survey of Lorde's life and poetry.]

Audre Lorde, poet, died on November 17 at the age of 58, following a fourteen-year war of attrition with cancer, in the midst of which she wrote much of her most important work. Born during the Depression to West Indian immigrant parents, Lorde grew up in Harlem. As a young adult she took part in the "gay-girl" Village scene described in her autobiographical prose narrative Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. She would live mostly in New York City, teaching for many years in the CUNY system, raising a daughter and son in an interracial lesbian relationship and combining writing and political organizing in a range of settings at once astonishingly broad and flatly necessary, given who she was. In the words of her poem "Who Said It Was Simple," she must often have wondered "which me will survive / all these liberations."

In the 1970s Lorde did groundbreaking organizing with other Black feminists and lesbians on the East Coast, and in the early 1980s helped start Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, a multicultural effort publishing Asian-American and Latina as well as African-American women writers. With the companion of her last years, the writer and Black feminist scholar Gloria I. Joseph, she made a home on St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. Before her death she completed her tenth book of poems, The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance, forthcoming from Norton.

Her official designation as New York State Poet for 1991 — 93 notwithstanding, Lorde is best known for her prose works (including, besides Zami, The Cancer Journals and the essay collections Sister Outsider and A Burst of Light); for her activism on behalf of women of color; and—among feminists—for her eloquent advocacy of a flexible, nonessentialist identity politics: the "house of difference," she called it. Poetry was the core of her political thinking, as she noted in the essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury":

In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only our poetry to hint at possibility made real. Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real … our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors.

Lorde must be counted among a handful of necessary poets of her generation, yet her work has received shockingly little critical attention from any quarter: feminist writers of all colors, African-American critics or the still largely white and male American poetry establishment. The last category of indifference is easily understood, given not only Lorde's outsider identities but her blunt refusal to distinguish between poetry and life. Had she refused from the comfortable distance of Eastern Europe or even South Africa, she might be championed by those of the mildly leftish literati who love to castigate American poetry for insufficient social conscience, but the case is otherwise.

In a recent issue of Feminist Studies, critic Sagri Dhairyam points out the reductiveness of the narrowly nationalist reading given Lorde's poem "Coal" by the (mostly male, heterosexual) proponents of the 1960s Black Aesthetic movement—suggesting one reason why Lorde's poetic oeuvre has not exactly been swept into the African-Amer ican canon. The dearth of feminist criticism remains a more complicated issue, doubtless due in some cases to racism and homophobia, but also stemming, I believe, from a typically American mistrust of the genre. For poetry brings not peace but a sword: "may I never lose / that terror / that keeps me brave," Lorde wrote in "Solstice." She liked poetry's dangers—but not everybody does.

Of course her poetry has had a genuine live audience, and when meaning is absorbed through ear as well as eye, the impact often transcends formal articulation. Nevertheless, close critical attention—beyond the reach of blurbists and reviewers—is indispensable to full reception of any significant body of work. Lorde's death, coinciding with the publication of Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New (Revised), now offers the occasion for a critical project that should have gotten much further in her lifetime.

This volume, a subtle revision of Chosen Poems—Old and New (1982), spans three decades of production and includes work from Lorde's first five published collections. It is not a "selected poems" in the usual meaning of the term, because it contains no work from her centrally important The Black Unicorn (1978), which she considered too complex and too much of a unit to be dismembered by excerpting. Our Dead Behind Us (1986) is also unrepresented. Thus a large chunk of her strongest work is missing—including most of the poems in which she conjured and confronted "the worlds of Africa."

The omissions will disappoint those wanting a volume of "greatest hits"; more important, the reader gets a nagging sense of incompletion from the developmental gap between the early 1970s material out of New York Head Shop and Museum, with its vernacular, often anecdotal tone, and the prophetic reach of poems composed at the turn of the following decade. Yet Undersong is remarkable both for the power of many individual pieces and for what it reveals of Lorde's poetic journey.

"Am I to be cursed forever with becoming / somebody else on the way to myself?" Lorde writes in "Change of Season." Despite her imposing public presence and her auto-mythologizing, she did not believe in wiping out the traces of less assured earlier selves. As she states in an introduction, her revisions of Chosen Poems were undertaken to clarify but not to recast the work—necessitating that she "propel [herself] back into the original poem-creating process and the poet who wrote it." In fact, revision seems to have consisted largely of excising a handful of early poems, substituting others previously unpublished and reworking line breaks and punctuation to give more space and deliberate stress to each stanza and image. This welcome openness is enhanced by the book's respectful layout, allowing one poem per page; the Chosen Poems were crowded end to end as though in fear of wasting paper.

The notion of changeable selves—the broken journey toward self—is a recurrent motif in Undersong, juxtaposing the longing for completion with the awareness of change as a paradoxical condition of identity. In "October," Lorde appeals to the goddess Seboulisa, elsewhere described as the "Mother of us all":

Carry my heart to some shore
my feet will not shatter
do not let me pass away
before I have a name
for this tree
under which I am lying

Do not let me die still
needing to be stranger.

As the final couplet hints, the counterpoint to the search for self is the search for connection, and to a striking degree Lorde uses dialogue as a structuring device, creating a sense of companionship won in the face of an indelible and proudly borne singularity.

Lorde rarely employs poetic personae, but her "you's" are legion—from the friend she mourns in the early "Memorial" poems to the murderers of "Need: A Chorale for Black Woman Voices." In between we find direct address to lovers; to a friend, Martha, brain damaged in a terrible accident; to a dead male poet friend; to "Each of You"; "To My Daughter the Junkie on a Train"; to Winnie Mandela; to "the child of wind and ravens I created / always my daughter"; to those who fear "The Brown Menace"; "To the Girl Who Lives in a Tree"; to a "Black Mother Woman." Beyond the import of any single poem, the extraordinary flexibility and range of this running conversation carry the burden of meaning. Lorde does not confine herself to any narrow audience, any more than she narrows her definitions of self. Even when she is at her angriest, the separation between "I" and "you" is rarely absolute.

If one axis of the book (and Lorde's work as a whole) is the poet's self-location in the complex space of identity and relationship, then the second is surely her consuming involvement with issues of survival—issues that for her nearly always transcend the personal and private. Images of destruction abound: the dead friend Genevieve; the father who "died in silence"; the "lovers processed / through the corridors of Bellevue Mattewan / Brooklyn State the Women's House of D. / St. Vincent's and the Tombs"; "a black boy [Emmett Till] hacked into a murderous lesson"; the "long-legged girl with a horse in her brain / … nightmare / of all sleeping mothers"; the lost sisters and daughters of Africa and its diaspora, whose "bones whiten / in secret."

The word "nightmare" cycles endlessly throughout Lorde's work, her word for history as glimpsed in surreal previsions and "Afterimages" (the title of a poem linking her memories of Emmett Till's lynching to television pictures of a Mississippi flood). One looks in vain for a "positive" counterweight, before realizing that the nightmare, for Lorde, is not simply a token of negativity but rather represents the denied and feared aspects of experience that must be accepted for change to occur:

call me
roach and presumptuous
nightmare upon your white pillow
your itch to destroy
the indestructible
part of yourself.
("The Brown Menace, or Poem to the Survival of Roaches")

Lorde often begins or ends a poem with an oracular utterance that the rest of the text serves to gloss. "The Winds of Orisha," for example, begins, "This land will not always be foreign." There follows what seems at first a mystifying storm of imagery—an evocation of women who

… ache to bear their stories
robust and screaming like the earth erupting grain
or thrash in padded chains mute as bottles
hands fluttering traces of resistance
on the backs of once lovers
half the truth
knocking in the brain like an angry steampipe

The effect of layered montage—narrative like birth, women like earth, parturition like a vomiting of grain, chains mute as bottles (or is it the women who are mute?)—is anti-aesthetic, almost hideous with the overstuffed chaos of certain bad dreams. Yet in many poems Lorde insists upon these violently compressed metaphors, suggesting a reason in "Afterimages," where she speaks of "the fused images beneath my pain." It is the pressure of history itself, Lorde seems to argue, that has fused these images—the poet's job is merely to articulate connections.

At the same time, Lorde is capable of an almost imagist restraint, a sensuous discipline, as in the early "Echo":

Quiet love hangs
in the door of my house
a sheet of brick-caught silk
rent in the sun.

Or of renouncing imagery altogether, as in the late "Za Ki Tan Ke Parlay Lot," which relies on the haunting repetition of its Carriacou patois refrain, meaning "you who hear tell the others," to underscore the warning that "there is no metaphor for blood / flowing from children."

Even in less successful poems we can see Lorde at work with material that would later grow into startlingly powerful fusions of image, feeling and statement. One such precursor is "Vietnam Addenda." Dedicated "for Clifford," and also concerned with the blood of children, the poem makes a familiar connection between bombing overseas and the local "genocide" of children

rubbed out at dawn
on the streets of Jamaica
or left all the time in the world
for the nightmare of idleness
to turn their hands against us.

"Clifford" is Clifford Glover, the African-American 10-year-old gunned down by a Queens policeman—white, of course—who was subsequently acquitted. Lorde wrote of this episode many times, most wrenchingly in her terrifying "Power" (from The Black Unicorn), which succeeds largely because of its vivid, merciless imagery—the abstract notion of hands turned "against us" becoming the vision of a "teenaged plug" connected to "the nearest socket / raping an 85-year-old white woman / who is somebody's mother." It also succeeds because the first poem's routine accusation turns into anguished, stark self-scrutiny in the face of oppression's intolerable choices:

The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being
ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.

In The Black Unicorn and Our Dead Behind Us, Lorde often moved away from the dailiness of her New York City-centered poems to visions of Africa and pan-African solidarity. In reinterpreting West African cosmology from a woman-identified perspective, she located a language in which to express a mythic dimension of the quest for Black survival. Compare the raw scatology of Undersong's "Cables to Rage or I've Been Talking on This Street Corner a Hell of a Long Time":

SHIT! said the king and the whole court strained
passing me
out as an ill-tempered wind
lashing around the corner
of 125th Street and Lenox….

with the tenderly shaped longing of "125th Street and Abomey," from The Black Unicorn:

Head bent, walking through snow
I see you Seboulisa
printed inside the back of my head
like marks of the newly wrapped akai

that kept my sleep fruitful in Dahomey….

Yet Lorde never forgot that Dahomey, like Black, was a metaphor, and as fraught with contradictions as the sidewalks of New York:

if we do not stop killing
the other
in ourselves
the self that we hate
in others
soon we shall all lie
in the same direction
and Eshidale's priests will be very busy
they who alone can bury
all those who seek their own death
by jumping up from the ground
and landing upon their heads.
("Between Ourselves")

Lorde's historically determined passion for survival—expressed here as a warning against ideological rigidity—certainly extended to her brothers. But the heat and heart of it rest in the great variety of poems that reach toward her sisters of the African diaspora. In Undersong, one of the most notable of these is the long closing poem, "Need: A Chorale for Black Woman Voices." Here, the poet's singular voice merges into a "we" with the voices of female victims of Black male "vengeance / dressed in the easiest blood."

Lorde speaks openly about the complexities of a female bond haunted not only by external hardship but by the pain of self-hatred that dark daughters learn under the guise of protection:

… when I was a child
whatever my mother thought would mean survival
made her try to beat me whiter every day
and even now the color of her bleached ambition
still forks throughout my words
but I survived
("Prologue")

"But I have peeled away your anger / down to its core of love," she says in "Black Mother Woman." One of the most important tasks for Lorde critics will be to follow these tangled threads of disappointment and steadfast yearning through the fabric of her work.

Just as the project of connection with her "sister outsiders" lay at the core of Lorde's writing, so too it informed her activist practice: for instance, through her work as a founding "mother" of Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa. Long before academics drew off most of the oxygen with their prattle of "alterity" and "dialogia," Lorde had connected to an extraordinary community of lesbians of color, among them such writers as Gloria Anzaldúa, Cheryl Clarke, Michelle Cliff, Jewelle Gomez, Cherrìe Moraga, Kate Rushin and Barbara Smith. Working largely outside institutional contexts, they built a "house of difference" in which action for survival was inextricably fused with utterance—in the process creating a model for more recent activism, including that of African-American gay male writers.

Near the end of her life, Audre Lorde took the African name Gamba Adisa ("Warrior—She Who Makes Her Meaning Known"). Because she had learned to cherish her nightmares, the powerful meanings her poems serve are neither singular nor fixed. It seems probable that once she can no longer safely be ignored, the effort to translate "the fused images beneath [her] pain" into palatable slogans will be the next line of defense. Lorde herself knew all about this timehonored tactic, writing in "The Day They Eulogized Mahalia": "Now she was safe / acceptable … / Chicago turned all out"; the needless deaths of children, untouchable by art, have the last word:

BURNED TO DEATH IN A DAY CARE CENTER
on the South Side
…
Small and without song
six Black children found a voice in flame
the day the city eulogized Mahalia.

As with any poet who really counts, there are no useful shortcuts. The only way to do justice to Lorde's meanings is to inhabit all her layers. The only way to honor her memory is to own the nightmare complications demanded by both poetry and hope.