Happy Birthday Audre Lorde:
Pivoting from Anger to Joy
Dr. Kayla Rodney, Instructional Designer, Clayton State University
Penguin Classics
Abstract: Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was an American writer, librarian, professor, philosopher, intersectional feminist, poet, and civil rights activist of West Indian heritage. A self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Lorde’s contributions to literature, feminist and queer theories, and critical race studies have left an indelible mark on society and academia. In celebration of Lorde’s 90th birthday, CRTc guest author, Dr. Kayla Rodney, explores Black, queer womanhood in Lorde’s work and its influences on her own life.
I recently began reading Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), by Audre Lorde in the unfilled time between phone calls, with an open mind. My friend, Maris Jones, who is teetering on the edge of her own constant Black, queer woman greatness, said “it’s a biomythography.” In all my years of reading and writing, I had never heard of a “biomythography” before, so for the first time in a long time, I was approaching something new (to me) and was feeling the forgotten excitement once again of opening a book and undressing its pages, something I hadn’t felt since graduating from my doctoral program a few years ago. Reading is such a sensual experience when we truly think about it.
I went to the library searching for something that, in itself, seemed like a myth, and as the universe and its funny nature would have it, the librarian couldn’t find the book during a first search. A mythical biomythography! So, the librarian did a second pass, finding the book tucked away in a different section, playing a game of hide-and-seek, or hiding away to make sure it was saved for me. With all these pre-reading shenanigans, I was prepared for this book to live up to its given genre, one created by the author along with a new spelling of her name, Zami.
Crossing Press
Zami opens with: “To whom do I owe the power behind my voice, what strength I have become, yeasting up like sudden blood from under the bruised skin’s blister?” (Zami 3). Then, she begins to list, and the list is all encompassing, from grandmothers, to lovers, to battered and bruised women fleeing into darkness from known dangers into the unknown. The “journeywoman pieces of [herself]”, she says. In less than three pages, she outlines for us that her understanding of Black womanhood is a chimera of feminine encounters that begin and end with her mother, those like her mother, and those she mothered, all coming together to make Audre, or Zami, which is “a carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers” (Zami 255). She, like the images of Black, queer, womanhood across time, is a compilation of stories both beautiful and grotesque borrowing from and adding to the narratives of previous generations working together. The Zami of her being formed the intersectional understanding she developed, fostered, and spread through her personal philosophy, writings, teachings, activism, and poetry.
Lorde grew up with an early (mis)understanding of race which put her square in the middle of a complicated dance across an active and electrified color line that her mother could only barely double-dutch so long as her father remained invisible. Having moved to America from the Caribbean in 1924, already “too old” and passing for “Spanish” (Zami 9), Lorde’s mother quickly learned that to be Black or Black adjacent meant having the American dream unraveled as one pulled thread on your only warm sweater in the middle of a cold winter. Her mother and father refused to acknowledge race as the cause of their disparities, and they thrived despite the “rudeness”, the spitting, the dismissal from the ice cream parlor. Lorde’s parents attempted, to the best of their ability, to shield her from what soon seeped through the cracks of the shelter they built for her out of hushed tones, shared looks, and success. She soon learned what we all come to grips with: Black excellence can’t shield us for long.
Audre Lorde and her partner, Dr. Gloria Josephs (1928-2019), via Black Women Radicals.
When I was first asked to write about Audre Lorde for her 90th birthday, I thought this piece would be so much more objective. However, if I have learned anything in my dive into Lorde, the one person you must face in the nakedness of your own truth is yourself because, “nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself” (“Eye to Eye” 146-147).
Lorde succumbed to breast cancer on November 17th, 1992. Twelve days later on November 29th, in a hospital in New Orleans, I was born to my own Black passe blanc mother, brown, with a full head of hair, and a mole on my leg that my Grandmommie said was very pretty. My mother, like Lorde’s, never had a hair out of place, hers, or mine. And like Lorde’s mother, though we did not live in luxury, we lived, and I was never the wiser to any disadvantage or disparity. If my mother could provide it, she would. Similar to Lorde, I thrived in reading, struggled with numbers, at one point questioned my own Black mother’s race, and was not elected class president in middle school. But eventually, I was shown the reality of my socioeconomic difference while attending an all-girls school in the garden district of New Orleans, where my classmates would leave in their luxury vehicles to their six figure homes, and I would go to my basement apartment with my proud social-worker mother.
Like Lorde, I eventually left that all-girls middle school and went to a high school where I discovered poetry, and writing, and sonnets, and every day became an amalgamation of lines. And like Lorde, like so many of us, whose mothers wanted badly to protect us from the inevitable, because in their wombs we were the planted seeds of their wildest hopes and dreams, I decided to be great. I believed if I could be great, nothing else should matter. But everything else does matter. And in their mattering, they sit between our shoulder blades, turning us each to Atlas carrying the weight of our own repressed joy. Black women leave the protective underwing of mothers who want the best for us just to mold ourselves into what we believe the world won’t hate. Oftentimes, our mothers, like Lorde’s, protected us from the hate of the world as best they could and simply encouraged us to “out achieve” it. So, under armors of degrees and accomplishments, accolades and high salaries, publication credits and presentations, behind little picket fences with husbands and dogs, sit little Black girls who want to be loved by the world the way our mothers love us, wholeheartedly and genuinely because don’t we all come from this earth? And isn’t this earth, in some way, all our mother? So, shouldn’t we be loved in the nakedness of who we are, just as our mothers loved us in our newborn nakedness? But instead, we masquerade as only what we have been told the world wants to see and expect everyone else to do the same, and when we encounter someone who isn’t, we are reminded that not only is the world trained to hate us— we have been trained to hate ourselves. We shame them, with so many boos and hisses, because how dare they force us to face ourselves and how inauthentic we have been?
That is what Lorde’s all encompassing approach to Black womanhood forces us to do. It leaves no one out, folding in the women on the fringes, advocating for the whole, and fostering love for all the different ways to be a Black woman in society.Lorde asks us to stop masquerading for the approval of people who will hate us anyway.
Robert Alexander/Getty Images
It’s tiring, it’s angering, it’s disempowering. When thinking of the anger that often motivated her, she says,
“[I]t seems that anger alone keeps me alive; it burns with a bright and undiminished flame. Yet anger, like guilt, is an incomplete form of human knowledge. More useful than hatred, but still limited. Anger is useful to help clarify our differences, but in the long run, strength that is bred by anger alone is a blind force which cannot create the future. It can only demolish the past. Such strength does not focus upon what lies ahead, but upon what lies behind, upon what created it—hatred. And hatred is a deathwish for the hated, not a lifewish for anything else” (“Eye to Eye” 152).
It may sting, deep in our cores, to examine how much of what we have built for ourselves was done out of spite rather than in spite of. The anger, the real anger, the “angry Black woman” we truly are, is not a raving stereotype making loud scenes because she did not get her way at the grocery store. Instead, she is much more quiet, much more refined, agreeable even. She’s sitting in an office somewhere, degrees on the wall, a full schedule of meetings, and still at times wondering “what for?”, because her anger was the fuel to her fire. And though she did what people said she couldn’t, all that she accomplished was what everyone else deemed valuable in the world. She essentially crucified herself to be resurrected in the image of those that nailed her to the cross. That doesn’t take away from the brilliance, the mastery, or the history that may have been made. But it does mean that for some, not all, the accomplishments simply dismantle the past without creating a future. Who are we now even with these amazing things under our belts? If these things do not define us, then what does? How do we begin to live, accomplish, act, and be in spite of rather than out of spite? How do we love ourselves in spite of? How do we have joy in spite of? How do we exist in the truth of who we are in spite of? Because these things surely cannot be done out of spite. Lorde teaches us that.
I’ve written a lot here that may read as projection, and on some levels, it is. As I quoted above, “I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness.” As we sit here on Lorde’s 90th birthday, reflecting on her writing, her ideals, and her history, it is imperative that we also reflect upon ourselves. In this Black History Month 2024, I don’t want us to throw away our accomplishments, and neither would Lorde, a fearless activist and an incredibly talented poet, scholar, author, teacher, and essayist. She was a thought leader and influenced much of the development of Black feminism and womanism. She would be the last person to tell you to throw your accomplishments into the trash. Instead, I want us to remember:
“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support” (“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” 112).
Essentially, whether you are in the house or the field, you are still enslaved. The goal is to be free, and the only person who can define freedom for you, is you. Today, in honor of Lorde, to the best of your ability in this racist, sexist, homophobic, capitalist society that often verges on the edge of dystopian, drop the master’s tools and love yourself in spite of. You’ve already done everything else.
Love,
Dr. Kayla Rodney, a woman with an armor of degrees
Works Cited
Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House*.” Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches, The Crossing Press, 1984, pp. 110-113.
Lorde, Audre. “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger*.” Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches, The Crossing Press, 1984, pp. 145-175.
Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. The Crossing Press, 1982.
Additional Readings / Resources
Audre Lorde in Berlin: An Online Journey
Audre Lorde Papers, Spelman College
Crenshaw, Kimberle. ”Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against
Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 6, Jul. 1991, pp. 1241-1299. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1229039?seq=4
Digital Audre Lorde Archive, Freie Universität Berlin
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About the Author
Kayla Rodney is an Instructional Designer at Clayton State University. She holds a PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Florida and a Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry from San Diego State University. In 2019, Dr. Rodney published her debut collection of poetry, Swimming Home (Unlikely Books), about home and the tremendous power of community, landscape, family, and water as she experienced in her hometown of New Orleans, Louisiana.
