Lighting a candle: For Audre Lorde

I’m sharing this picture of a mural of a white feathered bird on a brown brick wall in Cambridge because in this piece I’m writing about an ancestor that uplifts me. The bird is outlined in red and though its body is small, perhaps quarter sized, its wings stretch towards the edges of the frame. Also the picture includes text that says “harvard square” and I first read the author I write about in this piece 13 miles away from Harvard.

Today I’m lighting a candle for Audre Lorde, Ibaye baye  tonu.

I was introduced to Audre Lorde’s words in a gender studies class at Wellesley. We read Zami, an autobiomythograhy. She was a Black woman with low vision, wearing the thick rimmed glasses I’ve worn since second grade. Lorde lived in the boroughs in New York that I walked not just in the over photographed touristy parts of Manhattan. In Zami, Audre writes about being a Black lesbian dancing at rent parties in the 1950s. Her pages chronicle her life as a daughter of Caribbean migrants working in a country that has consistently been cold and brutal to native and migrant. She urged those of us with less to push for compassion, dignity and justice in order to resist the multiple violences that the legislators continue to enact to this day. Audre hinted at her knowledge of Yoruban deities, naming her mythic lover Afrekete, an arara praise name for Yemaya, at the end of the book. 

I didn’t realize then how reading her at that time in my life inoculated me to hurt and disappointment at the way the world could reject, be violent towards, deny the humanity of people like me. I read her before I was really out to myself, before I was really clear about how to claim my realities as the queer daughter of Black immigrant parents from the Dominican Republic, before Oya, another Yoruban deity, claimed me as her daughter and I began to work on my odus in order to understand myself. I recognize now that her fierce witness was there for me when I was ready to face the world in my fullness. I don’t mean that the obstacles have not knocked me off my road many times just that because of her coming before me, speaking before me, writing before me, organizing before me, loving before me, I at least knew where to look for some tools to make my way through to the other side and back to the camino that is mine to walk. 

Also, her bio-myth-ography signaled to me that I could write the way I write now-letting poetry filter memoir, making way for the what didn’t happen or what hasn’t happened yet to be side by side on the page with documented facts, allowing eggun to help me let the message through and feeling free to play.

After that first connection, I went to her essay collections like Sister Outsider, and her poems in the Cancer Journals. I found the rigorous, disciplined, practice of being a revolutionary through everyday interactions in one and the vulnerability, honesty and determination in the other. It was Audre who kept whispering in my ear as I moved through my healing and growth-walk the talk-act in the world the way you want the world to act toward you. And also-fight for your life because no one else will.

Audre wrote about being in an interracial lesbian relationship and raising a Black boy in a world that did not love him. She wrote about the way that even women working on liberating the world of toxic patriarchy could turn around and push Black women to the side and push the needs of lesbian women amongst them outside the circle and not recognize their own unjust actions. Even when sick she could work her mind and pen to connect with others when society so often wants to turn away from cancer, preferring to console from a distance. 

I go to her speeches now often. I look for whatever original audio and video I can find. One of my whatssapp groups, a group of Dominican lesbian writers, posted  a photo of Audre during one of our chats that I saved in my photo library to look at often when I need to find the strength to persevere. It is a black and white snapshot from an archive. The bottom of the picture has Feb 99 stamped upside down on the white border. Audre sits in the middle of the frame on an aquatic sculpture holding a child on her lap. The child is dressed in light colored pants and a jacket. Audre has on a dark colored turtleneck and skirt. Her lighter colored pointy heeled shoes are poised one in front of he other to hold her weight as she sits on the structure. She has a light, perhaps beaded or pearled, necklace and dark rimmed glasses. Her hair is in a short Afro. She looks off to the right and smiles. The child looks off to the left. Behind the sculpture there are trees and sky. 

I’m grateful for the Black scholars that are working to introduce her to younger audiences. To the documentarians editing together interviews and archival footage of her impact in Germany, in the Caribbean, in the United States wherever she gathered with other Black women, and other third world women in the language of her day-what today would be Black, Indigenous and other people of color to craft an antidote to the negating hatred that those in power turn towards difference in order to cement and distract from their domination over the Earth’s people and Earth’s resources. 

There’s so much more to know. 

She was the poet laureate of New York!

I invite you to keep the flame burning for Audre Lorde. What do you know about her? What do you connect to about her? When did you first encounter her work? How do you use her work today? What about her stances challenge you today?

I light a candle for Audre Lorde today.

I’m working to share my writing with you because it is medicine for me and I hope it is medicine for you. I will be sharing some articles for free subscribers and paid subscribers on this platform. What I’m looking for is readers that want to write back to me, or that with your own work and actions that you share with me continue the conversation.