Audre Lorde

Dzieła

• 1980The Cancer Journals (Dzienniki raka)

  Zapiski z dziennika i eseje o raku piersi i mastektomii: o strachu, milczeniu i odmowie ukrywania zmienionego ciała za protezą.

• 1984Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Siostra outsiderka: eseje i przemówienia)

  Piętnaście esejów i przemówień (1976–1984) o różnicy, gniewie, erotyzmie, milczeniu i rasizmie w obrębie feminizmu.

Stanowisko

Lorde wrote no systematic philosophy, but the essays and speeches collected in Sister Outsider (1984) have become classic texts of feminist and Black feminist theory. Their central idea concerns difference. Differences of race, class, age and sexuality between women should be neither denied nor merely tolerated; they are “a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic”. At a New York University conference in 1979 marking thirty years of The Second Sex she said that a feminism which ignores these differences uses “the master’s tools”, and “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. In “An Open Letter to Mary Daly” (1979) she criticised the theologian for drawing only on European goddesses and mentioning Black women only as victims; Lorde said she received no answer, but a reply from Daly was later found among Lorde’s papers. She treated anger at racism as information and energy rather than something to be suppressed (“The Uses of Anger”, 1981), the erotic as a source of knowledge and power distinct from pornography (“Uses of the Erotic”, 1978), and poetry as a necessity, not a luxury. “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” (1977), written after a first cancer scare, holds that “your silence will not protect you”. Zami (1982), which she called a “biomythography”, joined memoir, history and myth. Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks built on her work.

Życie i kontekst

Audre Lorde was born Audrey Geraldine Lorde in New York on 18 February 1934, the daughter of Byron Lorde from Barbados and Linda Belmar Lorde from Carriacou in Grenada, and grew up in Harlem. She studied at Hunter College (BA 1959), took a library degree at Columbia in 1961 and worked as a librarian. In 1962 she married the lawyer Edwin Rollins; they had two children and divorced in 1970. Her later partners were Frances Clayton and Gloria Joseph. In 1968 she was writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi and published her first collection, The First Cities. She taught at Lehman College, at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (1970–81) and from 1981 at Hunter College. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978 and wrote about it in The Cancer Journals (1980). With Barbara Smith and Cherríe Moraga she founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. From 1984 she taught as a visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin; with Black women in Germany, among them May Ayim and Katharina Oguntoye, she encouraged the self-description “Afro-German” and supported the volume Farbe bekennen (1986). In 1986 she moved to St Croix in the US Virgin Islands, took the name Gamba Adisa in a naming ceremony and was New York State Poet from 1991. She died of cancer on St Croix on 17 November 1992.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• The First Cities (poems, 1968)
• Coal (poems, 1976)
• The Black Unicorn (poems, 1978)
• Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)
• A Burst of Light (1988)