Audre Lorde: “Black, lesbian, warrior, poet”

A self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”, Audre Lorde dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. Born in New York City to West Indian immigrant parents, when young, she would memorise poetry and recall lines from poems to express herself, saying that “I literally communicated through poetry”. She began writing her own when she ran out of poems to express her feelings.  Lorde made contributions to feminist theory, critical race studies, and queer theory, blending personal experience with broader political aims to reshape the political, cultural and academic landscape.

Lorde’s lived experiences and political insights informed her contributions to feminist theory, critical race studies, and queer theory, deconstructing how aspects of identity, including class, race, gender, and other aspects of identity interrelate, are represented and have their representations manipulated to maintain the status quo.

Lorde’s poetry and prose were always profoundly personal and range from her emotional reactions to the worst miscarriages of justice and abetting of racial state violence to an entirely frank account of her struggle to overcome breast cancer and mastectomy in “The Cancer Journals” (available in the Library as part of “The Audre Lorde compendium”), in which Lorde explores coming face to face with mortality in a work that breached the pervasive silence surrounding cancer, illness, and the lived experience of women.

Audre Lorde in the Library

Read some of Audre Lorde’s works in the Library:

The Audre Lorde compendium: essays, speeches and journals 818.5408 LOR

I am your sister: collected and unpublished writings of Audre Lorde [ebook]

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house 810.72 LOR

Sister outsider: essays and speeches 818.5408 LOR

Your silence will not protect you 818.5408 LOR

Image credit:

Audre Lorde by K. Kendall, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons