Audre Lorde: Education and the Shaping of an Intersectional Icon

Introduction

Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was a self-described "Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet" who dedicated her life and talents to confronting all forms of injustice and oppression. Her work spanned poetry, essays, and autobiography, exploring themes of race, gender, sexuality, and class with a fierce and unwavering commitment to social justice. This article examines the formative influences and educational experiences that shaped Lorde's unique perspective and powerful voice.

Early Life and Education: Seeds of a Revolutionary

Audre Lorde was born Audrey Geraldine Lorde in New York City on February 18, 1934. Her parents, Frederick Byron Lorde and Linda Gertrude Belmar Lorde, were Caribbean immigrants. Her father, Frederick Byron Lorde, was born on April 20, 1898, in Barbados. Her mother, Linda Gertrude Belmar Lorde, was born in 1902 on the island Carriacou in Grenada. Lorde's mother was a light-skinned Black woman but sometimes passed as Spanish for employment opportunities. Lorde's father was darker than the Belmar family liked, and they only allowed the couple to marry because of Byron's charm, ambition, and persistence. After their immigration, the new family settled in Harlem, a diverse neighborhood in upper Manhattan, New York. Lorde was the youngest of three daughters. The experiences of her parents, navigating racial prejudice and economic hardship in a new country, undoubtedly shaped her early understanding of inequality.

Lorde was nearsighted to the point of being legally blind. Lorde's relationship with her parents was difficult from a young age. She spent very little time with her father and mother, who were both busy maintaining their property management business in the tumultuous economy after the Great Depression. When she did see them, they were often cold or emotionally distant. Raised Catholic, Lorde attended parochial schools before moving on to Hunter College High School, a secondary school for intellectually gifted students. Poet Diane di Prima was a classmate and friend. While attending Hunter, Lorde published her first poem in Seventeen magazine after her school's literary journal rejected it for being inappropriate. Also in high school, Lorde participated in poetry workshops sponsored by the Harlem Writers Guild, but noted that she always felt like somewhat of an outcast from the Guild.

Of her poetic beginnings Lorde commented in Black Women Writers: “I used to speak in poetry. I would read poems, and I would memorize them. People would say, well what do you think, Audre. What happened to you yesterday? And I would recite a poem and somewhere in that poem would be a line or a feeling I would be sharing. In other words, I literally communicated through poetry.

Higher Education and Self-Discovery

Lorde earned her BA from Hunter College and MLS from Columbia University. In 1954, she spent a pivotal year as a student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, a period she described as a time of affirmation and renewal. During this time, she confirmed her identity on personal and artistic levels as both a lesbian and a poet. On her return to New York, Lorde attended Hunter College, and graduated in the class of 1959. While there, she worked as a librarian, continued writing, and became an active participant in the gay culture of Greenwich Village. She furthered her education at the Columbia University School of Library Service, earning a master's degree in library science in 1961. Her time at Tougaloo College, like her year at the National University of Mexico, was a formative experience for her as an artist. She led workshops with her young, black undergraduate students, many of whom were eager to discuss the civil rights issues of that time. Through her interactions with her students, she reaffirmed her desire not only to live out her "crazy and queer" identity, but also to devote attention to the formal aspects of her craft as a poet.

Teaching and Activism: Shaping Young Minds and Challenging the Status Quo

Lorde taught in the Education Department at Lehman College from 1969 to 1970, then as a professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (both part of the City University of New York, CUNY) from 1970 to 1981. There, she fought for the creation of a black studies department. In 1981, she went on to teach at her alma mater, Hunter College (also CUNY), as the distinguished Thomas Hunter chair. As a queer Black woman, she was an outsider in a white male dominated field and her experiences in this environment deeply influenced her work. New fields such as African American studies and women's studies advanced the topics that scholars were addressing and garnered attention to groups that had previously been rarely discussed.

Her experiences with teaching and pedagogy-as well as her place as a Black, queer woman in white academia-went on to inform her life and work. Indeed, Lorde’s contributions to feminist theory, critical race studies, and queer theory intertwine her personal experiences with broader political aims.

The Black Arts Movement and the Power of Voice

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, many groups, including African Americans seeking greater equality and civil rights, used marches and nonviolent protests to make their voices heard. Basic constitutional rights were denied to African Americans for well over the first 150 years of the United States’s existence. The Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s was closely related to the Black Power movement. Lorde's poetry was published very regularly during the 1960s - in Langston Hughes' 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in several foreign anthologies; and in black literary magazines. In 1968, Lorde published The First Cities, her first volume of poems. It was edited by Diane di Prima, a former classmate and friend from Hunter College High School. Her second volume, Cables to Rage (1970), which was mainly written during her tenure as poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, addressed themes of love, betrayal, childbirth, and the complexities of raising children. Nominated for the National Book Award for poetry in 1974, From a Land Where Other People Live (Broadside Press) shows Lorde's personal struggles with identity and anger at social injustice. Despite the success of these volumes, it was the release of Coal in 1976 that established Lorde as an influential voice in the Black Arts Movement, and the large publishing house behind it - Norton - helped introduce her to a wider audience. The volume includes poems from both The First Cities and Cables to Rage, and it unites many of the themes Lorde would become known for throughout her career: her rage at racial injustice, her celebration of her black identity, and her call for an intersectional consideration of women's experiences. In Lorde's volume The Black Unicorn (1978), she describes her identity within the mythos of African female deities of creation, fertility, and warrior strength. This reclamation of African female identity both builds and challenges existing Black Arts ideas about pan-Africanism. Lorde's poetry became more open and personal as she grew older and became more confident in her sexuality.

Her early collections of poetry include The First Cities (1968), Cables to Rage (1970), and From a Land Where Other People Live (1972), which was nominated for a National Book Award. Later works, including New York Head Shop and Museum (1974), Coal (1976), and The Black Unicorn (1978), included powerful poems of protest. “I have a duty,” Lorde once stated, “to speak the truth as I see it and to share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigating pain.” Lorde’s later poems were often assembled from personal journals. Explaining the genesis of “Power,” a poem about the police shooting of a ten-year-old black child, Lorde discussed her feelings when she learned that the officer involved had been acquitted: “A kind of fury rose up in me; the sky turned red. I felt so sick. I felt as if I would drive this car into a wall, into the next person I saw. So I pulled over. I took out my journal just to air some of my fury, to get it out of my fingertips. Her poetry, and “indeed all of her writing,” according to contributor Joan Martin in Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, “rings with passion, sincerity, perception, and depth of feeling.”

Intersectionality: A Foundational Principle

One of the hallmarks of Lorde’s prose and poetry is her willingness to recognize, acknowledge, and honor the lived realities of women-not only those who share her subject position but also those who do not. Her thinking always embodied what we now know as intersectionality and did so long before intersectionality became a defining feature of contemporary feminism in word if not in deed. Lorde never grappled with only one aspect of identity. She was as concerned with class, gender, and sexuality as she was with race. She held these concerns and did so with care because she valued community and the diversity of the people who were part of any given community. She valued the differences between us as strengths rather than weaknesses.

Concerned with modern society’s tendency to categorize groups of people, Lorde fought the marginalization of such categories as “lesbian” and “black woman.” She was central to many liberation movements and activist circles, including second-wave feminism, civil rights and Black cultural movements, and struggles for LGBTQ equality. In particular, Lorde’s poetry is known for the power of its call for social and racial justice, as well as its depictions of queer experience and sexuality. As she told interviewer Charles H. Rowell in Callaloo: “My sexuality is part and parcel of who I am, and my poetry comes from the intersection of me and my worlds… [White, arch-conservative senator] Jesse Helms’s objection to my work is not about obscenity … or even about sex.

The Power of Language and the Dismantling of Oppression

In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Lorde states, "Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought…In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984), Lorde asserts the necessity of communicating the experience of marginalized groups to make their struggles visible in a repressive society.

She emphasizes the need for different groups of people (particularly White women and African-American women) to find common ground in their experiences in life, but also to face difference directly, and use it as a source of strength rather than alienation. She repeatedly emphasizes the need for community in the struggle to build a better world. Her most famous essay, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House", is included in Sister Outsider. Lorde questions the scope and ability for change to be instigated when examining problems through a racist, patriarchal lens. She insists that women see differences between other women not as something to be tolerated, but something that is necessary to generate power and to actively "be" in the world. This will create a community that embraces differences, which will ultimately lead to liberation. Lorde elucidates, "Divide and conquer, in our world, must become define and empower." Also, people must educate themselves about the oppression of others because expecting a marginalized group to educate the oppressors is the continuation of racist, patriarchal thought. She explains that this is a major tool utilized by oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Also in Sister Outsider is the essay, "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action". Lorde discusses the importance of speaking, even when afraid, because otherwise silence immobilizes and chokes us. Many people fear to speak the truth because of the real risks of retaliation, but Lorde warns, "Your silence does not protect you." Lorde emphasizes that "the transformation of silence into language and action is a self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger." People are afraid of others' reactions for speaking, but mostly for demanding visibility, which is essential to live. In "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference", Lorde emphasizes the importance of educating others. However, she stresses that in order to educate others, one must first be educated.

Empowering people who are doing the work does not mean using privilege to overstep and overpower such groups; but rather, privilege must be used to hold door open for other allies. Lorde describes the inherent problems within society by saying, "racism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance. Sexism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one sex over the other and thereby the right to dominance. Ageism. Heterosexism. Elitism. Classism." Lorde finds herself among some of these "deviant" groups in society, which set the tone for the status quo and what "not to be" in society.

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.

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International Influence: The Afro-German Movement

In 1984, Lorde started a visiting professorship in West Berlin at the Free University of Berlin. She was invited by FU lecturer Dagmar Schultz who had met her at the UN "World Women's Conference" in Copenhagen in 1980. During her time in Germany, Lorde became an influential part of the then-nascent Afro-German movement. Together with a group of black women activists in Berlin, Audre Lorde coined the term "Afro-German" in 1984 and, consequently, gave rise to the Black movement in Germany. During her many trips to Germany, Lorde became a mentor to a number of women, including May Ayim, Ika Hügel-Marshall, and Helga Emde. Instead of fighting systemic issues through violence, Lorde thought that language was a powerful form of resistance and encouraged the women of Germany to speak up instead of fight back. Her impact on Germany reached more than just Afro-German women; Lorde helped increase awareness of intersectionality across racial and ethnic lines. Audre Lorde provided a safe space for these Black German women to process and handle their emotions in any way that they seemed fit. To be othered by mainstream German society, and to be defined through others' perceptions of one's apparent “faults” (mixed heritage) can destroy one's sense of self. In addition, many of these women weren't able to fully express all facets of their being and found being pigeonholed by society immensely restrictive. Audre Lorde was able to begin to bridge the gap between these women's perceived identity by the German public and their self-actualized being. Lorde created a space for which these women could discuss their experiences and grow a Black German epistemology. In December 1989, the month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Lorde wrote her poem "East Berlin 1989" conveying her views of this historic event.

The Berlin Years: 1984-1992 documented Lorde's time in Germany as she led Afro-Germans in a movement that would allow black people to establish identities for themselves outside of stereotypes and discrimination. After a long history of systemic racism in Germany, Lorde introduced a new sense of empowerment for minorities. As seen in the film, she walks through the streets with pride despite stares and words of discouragement. Including moments like these in a documentary was important for people to see during that time. It inspired them to take charge of their identities and discover who they are outside of the labels put on them by society. The film also educates people on the history of racism in Germany. This enables viewers to understand how Germany reached this point in history and how the society developed. The film documents Lorde's efforts to empower and encourage women to start the Afro-German movement. What began as a few friends meeting in a friend's home to get to know other black people, turned into what is now known as the Afro-German movement. Lorde inspired black women to refute the designation of "Mulatto", a label which was imposed on them, and switch to the newly coined, self-given "Afro-German", a term that conveyed a sense of pride. Lorde inspired Afro-German women to create a community of like-minded people.

Confronting Mortality: The Cancer Journals and the Power of Visibility

Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1977. While dealing with the prognosis and subsequent mastectomy, she felt isolated because there were no publications or coping models that related to being black and lesbian. Lorde was diagnosed with liver cancer six years after being diagnosed with breast cancer. Lorde battled cancer for the final fourteen years of her life. She wrote The Cancer Journals, which won the American Library Association Gay Caucus Book of the Year Award in 1981. Her account of her struggle to overcome breast cancer and mastectomy, The Cancer Journals (1980), is regarded as a major work of illness narrative. In The Cancer Journals, Lorde confronts the possibility of death. Recounting this personal transformation led Lorde to address the silence surrounding cancer, illness, and the lived experience of women. For example, Lorde explained her decision not to wear a prosthesis after undergoing a mastectomy in the Journals: “Prosthesis offers the empty comfort of ‘Nobody will know the difference.’ But it is that very difference which I wish to affirm, because I have lived it, and survived it, and wish to share that strength with other women.

At her most vulnerable, Lorde gave the world some of her most powerful writing with her work in The Cancer Journals, which chronicled her life with breast cancer and having a double mastectomy. “But it is that very difference which I wish to affirm, because I have lived it, and survived it, and wish to share that strength with other women. If we are to translate the silence surrounding breast cancer into language and action against this scourge, then the first step is that women with mastectomies must become visible to each other.” With these words, she assumed as much control as she could over a body succumbing to disease and a public narrative that, until then, allowed a singular narrative about what it meant to live with illness.

Legacy and Enduring Influence

From 1991 until her death in 1992, she was the New York State Poet Laureate. In 1992, she received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle. Lorde identified issues of race, class, age and ageism, sex and sexuality and, later in her life, chronic illness and disability; the latter becoming more prominent in her later years as she lived with cancer. She wrote of all of these factors as fundamental to her experience of being a woman. She argued that, although differences in gender have received all the focus, it is essential that these other differences are also recognized.

As Allison Kimmich noted in Feminist Writers, “Throughout all of Audre Lorde’s writing, both nonfiction and fiction, a single theme surfaces repeatedly. Lorde’s honors and awards included a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A professor of English at John Jay College and Hunter College.

As a reader, it is gratifying to see the legacy Lorde has created and to see the genealogy of her work in the writing of the women who have followed in her footsteps. In one of her most fiery essays, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Lorde asks, “What does it mean when tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?” She quickly answers her own question: “It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.” Lorde gave these remarks in 1979 after being invited to an academic conference where there was only one panel with a Black feminist or lesbian perspective and only two Black women presenters. Forty years later, such meager representation is still an issue in many supposedly feminist and inclusive spaces. This is a reality we often lose sight of when we surrender to assimilationist ideas about social change. There is, for example, a strain of feminism that believes if only women act like men, we will achieve the equality we seek. In Lorde’s body of work, we see her defying this idea of the dominant culture as the default, this idea that she should write about only her oppression, but while doing so she never abandons her subject position. She is empathetic, curious, critical, intuitive. She is as open about her weaknesses as she is about her strengths.

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