I have finished planting the tomatoes in this brief sun after four days of rain now there is brown earth under my fingernails And sun full on my skin with my head thick as honey the tips of my fingers are stinging from the rich earth —Audre Lorde, "Sowing"
i.
I am about to complete Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s new book—biography? perhaps to use Audre Lorde’s term, biomythography, or some blend of bio with the scale of the universe?—on Audre Lorde, Survival is a Promise. It is too soon to have fully formed thoughts. I do not think that quickly. I will have to sit with it for a while. I will have to return to Alexis De Veaux’s Warrior Poet. I will have to let the books sit alongside each other. I will have to listen to the conversation they have. And then, somehow, find a way to engage what they braid.
All of this is to say: I am not yet done. I have no final words. I have impressions. Early. Incomplete.
ii.
My friend Lutivini Majanja taught me how to read children’s voices. I read a lot of children’s fiction. But until I read Lutivini, I had not thought about the difference between how children see and hear and experience the world and how adults imagine children see and hear and experience the world. Despite once having been a child myself.
Lutivini honours the ways children conceive of the world. How they organize it, how they theorize it, how they move through its impress, how they leave their impress on it.1 The great pleasure—and difficulty—of reading her work is the invitation to abandon my sense of how children should think and feel and act. I have to unlearn what I know about children, how I think of them as adults-in-becoming, a stage, a bundle of psychoanalytic concepts and practices, simple oddities. I have, in fact, to recognize they are opaque to me. Opaque as Glissant would have it: that we meet across difference, and we create ways to bridge those differences.
In short, had I not been reading Lutivini’s work over the past decade, I would not have known how to read Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s writing on Audre Lorde’s childhood.
(Some names I must repeat in full all the time. I do not have the audacity to do otherwise.)
iii.
Young Audre holds the book close to her face and traces the pictures with her fingers. For Audre, before she wore glasses, the trees in the old and tattered children’s books and the trees at the park converge.
—Survival is a Promise
What is it about this image that is so compelling? Is it the intimacy of a finger tracing a tree? The finger moves across and into the world the tree inhabits. No, that is not quite it. Is it something about how an image in a book is something to feel with and for and through? Perhaps.
Audre’s is not a poetics of the view from over there. The poem only works if it brings everything so close you can breathe it in.
—Survival is a Promise
iv.
How do children make sense of the worlds they inhabit and create?
For some—I was once one of them—this is a properly psychoanalytic question.
Survival is a Promise demonstrates another way to approach this question.
As a child, Audre Lorde read poems from Mother Goose: The Old Nurery Rhymes. It was “quite possibly the first book of poems she ever held.” Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes,
In Mother Goose, Audre was faced with generations of British nursery rhymes that repeat the word “niggedly” over and over again and present caricatures of “evil Jews.” This is a book that includes a call-and-response game that ends with the last person tricked into saying, “I am a monk-key.” Somehow, the favorite Mother Goose poems of an illustrator born in 1867, who describes his greatest struggle as the “thin times of the Boer war,” became a touchstone for a little Black girl of West Indian heritage in Harlem.
—Survival is a Promise
v.
Is it simply that I recognize something of my Nairobi childhood in this description? Not reading Mother Goose. I am not sure I ever did. But reading the middle class staples of Tintin, including the very racist ones, but not knowing enough to recognize the grotesque blackface tradition with which Black figures were depicted; reading Enid Blyton, full of “gollywogs,” and not knowing enough to recognize the deep racism at work in these “beloved toys.” We read what was in the bookstores.
Were my parents careless? I do not think so.
Reading was sacred and special. They were pleased when I read. Reading delighted me.
vi.
I do not like reading biographies and memoirs. In part, it is my deep distrust of confession. In part, it is that such works tend to draw out my own stories. We trade stories. The work I am reading asks for my stories. And, sometimes, most times, I relate them.
vii.
In “Naming the Stories,” a stunning chapter, Alexis Pauline Gumbs speculates about how reading Mother Goose helped Audre Lorde shape her concepts, imagine her place, plot her present and her future.
I cannot reproduce the deeply bibliographic work in the chapter. I can only offer a few samples. All the italicized portions are taken from poems in Mother Goose.
Maybe Audre, the darker sister, found refuge in Rackham’s Mother Goose, which begins with a black sheep and ends with a child singing what care I how black I be . . . I am my mother’s bouncing girl?
Did this book reflect back to Audre the everyday unfairness of her life? Unfair like poor Solomon Grundy’s days of the week, born on Monday and already dead and buried by Sunday?
Did she identify with the three blind mice as she navigated the blur of her world?
Did these poems help her make sense of her own delayed speech and stutter and how actually least said is soonest mended-ded, ded, ded?
Did she save some of the nursery rhyme phrases for other chapters of her life when references to courting young gay ladies and kissing girls and making them cry would seem more relevant?
Some practices like studying the moon cycles and attending to bees would become significant parts of her adult life. She would also incorporate nursery rhymes in her activism to end violence against women and girls.
viii.
The thing I most remember about hearing and reading folk tales is that monsters are real. I should not permit myself to be seduced by monsters.
ix.
It is not simply that Audre Lorde carried the forms of poems she read as a child into her writing as an adult.
In her gorgeous, speculative work in this chapter, Alexis Pauline Gumbs maps how Audre Lorde was learning to build her imagination, how poems were something like keys to the map of her childhood home, how poems created a channel for feeling, how poems listened to the reader, how poems responded to the reader, how, in poetry, a reader might find the rhythms to a different kind of languaging.
I love that Alexis Pauline Gumbs takes Audre Lorde’s reading as a child so seriously. That she treats it as study—a child can study.
Black study, yes. Black study. Even when the text might be hostile or indifferent.
If you have access or can figure it out, see, for instance, the stunning “Pee Goes Quick” in Transition. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/3/article/903651