Audre Lorde described herself as a ‘Black lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’; she was also a socialist, a writer, a teacher. But she is best known today for slogans taken from her poems, essays and speeches: ‘Your silence will not protect you’; ‘There is no hierarchy of oppression’; ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’ She is often included among the leading figures of the civil rights era and Black feminism – Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Diane Nash, Angela Y. Davis, Assata Shakur, Kathleen Cleaver – yet her influence was felt not at the height of the movement but during its nadir in the late 1970s, when the possibility of social revolution had disappeared.
Lorde’s poetry, and eventually her prose, came to prominence just as would-be revolutionaries were learning to live with the new dispensation. Different tactics were required, political relationships had to be rebuilt and new alliances considered. In the early years of retreat, Lorde offered a politics that dealt in the realities of survival as well as the necessity of defiance: she refused to give ground to white feminists or to a Black nationalism that assumed women’s subservience. Her critique of 1960s feminism and Black liberation bore none of the scars of the era’s internecine battles.
Lorde’s recent return to popularity, as an Instagram favourite and inspiration to the Black Lives Matter movement, has brought renewed attention to her work but has also, at times, had the effect of de-contextualising it. Alexis Gumbs’s biography, Survival Is a Promise, considers Lorde’s legacy as much as her life. Alexis De Veaux’s Warrior Poet, published in 2004, was a more traditional biography, though her account ended in 1986, six years before Lorde’s death from cancer at the age of 58. Gumbs argues that because Lorde’s legacy is now secure, she has been able to write a different kind of book, what she calls a ‘quantum biography where life in full emerges in the field of relations in each particle’. She is interested in Lorde’s poetry, she explains, not for its aesthetic or historical significance but as evidence of Lorde’s philosophy: a vision of the natural world that includes, but does not elevate, the human.