Audre Lorde first traveled to Africa in 1974, 2 years before Alex Haley published Roots in 1976 and 27 years before Dionne Brand published A Map to the Door of No Return in 2001.1 Roots—the book and the tv series—shifted the relationship between Africa and North America’s Black diaspora population. Relations that had once been moved by political alliance and mutuality were transformed by the explosion of heritage tourism, the rush to follow Haley’s trip to Africa to rediscover affective and ritual reconnection.
Where Haley’s book marked the possibility of return and reconnection, Dionne Brand’s Map opens with an unanswered question—she asks her grandfather where in Africa they are from, and he never answers. Brand writes,
The name of the people we came from has ceased to matter. A name would have comforted a thirteen-year-old. The question, however, was more complicated, more nuanced. That moment between my grandfather and I several decades ago revealed a tear in the world. A steady answer would have mended this fault line quickly. I would have proceeded happily with a simple name. I may have played with it for a few days and then stored it away. Forgotten. But the rupture this exchange with my grandfather revealed was greater than the need for familial bonds. It was a rupture in history, a rupture in the quality of being. It was also a physical rupture. A rupture in geography.2
If I were to attempt a claim about Lorde’s trips to Africa, it would be that they shuttle between repair and rupture.
Lorde first traveled to Africa in July 1974. She traveled with “her brood”: eleven-year-old daughter Beth, ten-year-old son Jonathan, and white partner and co-parent Frances, on a “five-week tour,” which went through Togo, Ghana, and what was then Dahomey, later renamed Benin.3 She experienced Lome, the capital of Togo, as a tourist trap, and was uncomfortable because she did not speak French. She preferred Ghana because English was spoken and also, more importantly, because it had long lived in her imagination.
The year my daughter was born Du Bois died in Accra while I marched in Washington to a death knell of dreaming which 250,000 others mistook for hope. —"Equinox
While in Ghana, the entire family visited Du Bois’s grave.4
Alexis De Veaux writes,
Ghana was closer [than Togo] to that “home part” of Africa Lorde was searching for. Being there affected her sensually. She was fascinated by the local landscape. She inhaled the constant aroma of corn and plantain baking; the corn growing everywhere had a smell that was dry and rich. The smell of Accra, its food, the proud, erect bearing of women carrying their wares on their heads, all reminded her of Barbados. Once, while dining in Kumasi, the rock cake desert drew her back to the memory of Newton’s—a West Indian bakery in Harlem where her mother bough rock buns sweetened with the taste of Grenada.5
For all she took from Ghana, Lorde still experienced the still vibrant life of colonialism. Wait staff generally deferred to her white partner, Frances, and assumed that Frances would take care of bills.6 Traveling with children was stressful, and the children were frequently bored.
Lorde wrote no poems during her first trip to Africa.7
Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes,
As soon as she got back from her first trip to West Africa in 1974, Audre wrote an ambitious proposal to City University of New York (CUNY) for a research grant to spend the 1974-75 academic year in Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania studying and documenting children’s songs and games. She was looking for continuities and contrasts among Caribbean, African American, and West African children’s games and stories. . . . She didn’t get the funding or take that trip, but she believed the connections were there.8
I am fascinated by this trip that was not taken, by how Lorde mapped it, what she wanted from it. Was the focus on children’s games a way to repair how her own children had experienced their trip to Africa? As somewhat boring. With little to do. Spending extended time in hotel rooms. Or taking tours intended for adults—to the infamous Elmina, for example, to see the dungeons in which the enslaved were held for the ships.
What would she have found in East Africa? What might Kenya and Tanzania have offered her?
In June 1962, the first African Writers Conference was held in Kampala. Attendees included Grace Ogot, Rebecca Njau, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, Dennis Brutus, Kofi Awoonor, Christopher Okigbo, and Okot p’Bitek. I wonder if Lorde knew about this conference and about the many poets who attended (Brutus, Okigbo, p’Bitek, Jonathan Kariara, and I would have to search to find which women poets attended). When she returned from West Africa in 1974, she spent time with Kofi Awoonor’s work—I can’t tell if they met or corresponded.9 So, she certainly knew about contemporary African poetry.
***
Lorde’s second trip to Africa was in 1977, when she traveled as a member of a Black U.S. delegation to Nigeria for the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC ’77).10 In total, 444 Black people traveled from the U.S. to Africa, and it was “the largest single group of black Americans to return to Africa at one time.”11
We must return to Alex Haley’s Roots. Roots was published in October 1976. The television adaptation aired in January 1977. And “within seven months of its release, Roots had sold more than 15 million hard cover copies.”12 No doubt, the size of the U.S. contingent to Nigeria owed something to the success of Roots. A different kind of affect-imagination was in the air.
Alexis De Veaux offers this lyrical description of the festival:
FESTAC ’77 was the most significant international gathering of the black cultural world to be held in post-independence Africa to that time. It was a mecca for more than seventeen thousand black artists who came from the Caribbean, Australia, South America, Canada, Europe, the United States, as well as throughout Africa, and it attracted to Lagos almost half a million spectators. Representatives of those who’d survived slavery, colonialism, genocide, discrimination, and apartheid, black people came from every nook and cranny of the globe. Never before had so many had an opportunity to reforge links to africa, to see the world through a common vision of black eyes, and to witness the unbroken thread of their common African heritage as inspired, timeless, and enduring. At times, some of the African American participants were so overcome emotionally, they cried hysterically, their tears a visceral reaction to the haunting, historic fact of their separation from the home of their ancestors.13
Difference intruded. “Lorde kept a polite distance between herself and other memebers of the American delegation, anticipating and heading off hostility toward her as a lesbian.”14 For most of the festival, she played straight.
Once when I walked into a room my eyes would seek out the one or two black faces for contact or reassurance or a sign I was not alone now walking into rooms full of black faces that would destroy me for any difference where shall my eyes look? —"Between Ourselves"
Two trips, two different cohorts, two different experiences.
In the first, a lesbian couple traveled with their children. An interracial lesbian couple. And race intruded. As did the demands of family. And the awkwardness of nationality.
In the second, a Black delegation traveled to represent the United States. And patriarchy intruded. And sexuality intruded. And nationality intruded. And heteronormativity intruded.
What could Africa be to Lorde?
After her first visit to Africa, Lorde fashioned herself through African aesthetics: “She increasingly appeared at readings and in public wearing a dashiki shirt and a gele, the signature wrap of African women. She was adorned in beads and jewelry. She became living proof of African foremothers and of their spiritual fusion within her.”16
In “The Winds of Orisha,” published in From a Land Where Other People Live (1973), Lorde had prefigured the transformation that happened after she visited Africa:
Impatient legends speak through my flesh changing this earth's formation spreading I will become myself an incantation dark raucous many-shaped characters leaping back and forth across bland pages and Mother Yemonja raises her breaks to begin my labour near water the beautiful Oshun and I lie down together in the heat of her body truth my voice comes stronger Shango will be my brother roaring out of the sea earth shakes our darkness swelling into each other warning winds will announce us living as Oya, Oya my sister my daughter destroys the crust of the tidy beaches And Eshu's black laughter turns up the neat sleeping sand —"The Winds of Orisha"
Lorde’s 1978 collection, The Black Unicorn, contains “A Glossary of African Names Used in the Poems.” The glossary includes place names (Abomey, Dan), names of deities (Eshu, Mawulisa, Orishala, Shango), and style (akai–tight narrow braids of hair wrapped with thread and arranged about the head to form the elaborate coiffure of modern Dahomean high fashion). I am not savvy enough to parse what Lorde chose to gloss and why. I am simply noting it.
Perhaps what strikes me most about Lorde’s poems featuring Africa is how they move through past and present, myth and fantasy, transformed into resources for living with and across difference.17
Audre Lorde wrote no poems during her first trip to Africa.18 The poems in The Black Unicorn were written after the trip. None of the essays in Sister Outsider speak directly to Africa, unlike the essays based on Russia and Grenada. Yet, Africa weaves through Lorde’s essays.
While traveling from Tashkent to Samarkand, she observes,
We passed through small villages where I could see little markets with women sitting cross-ankled on the bare earth selling a few cabbages or a small tray of fruit. And walls, behind which you could see adobe houses. Even the walls themselves reminded me very much of West Africa, made of a clay mud that cracks in the same old familiar patterns that we saw over and over again in Kumasi and south of Accra. Only here the clay is not red, but a light beige, and that is to remind me that this is the USSR and not Ghana or Dahomey.19
In other writing, I am trying to grapple with what it means that Lorde saw West Africa in the USSR, not through the presence of West Africans, but through the colours and textures and practices.20
***
What was Africa to Audre Lorde?
The day after she got the phone call from her doctor saying that she had a tumor in her breast, Audre wrote these words in her journal: “I want to see Africa again.”21
What might seeing Africa have done? What might it have enabled?
The Africas Lorde visited—with her family and with a U.S. delegation of Black people—were often difficult. No doubt, some of that difficulty came from the truncated, compressed time she spent there. Five weeks is not a lot of time to visit three countries. And she spent about two weeks in Nigeria for FESTAC ’77, much of which was spent navigating her sense of difference from the patriarchal and heteronormative U.S. delegation. Had she received the grant to spend a year in Africa, I can only imagine different possibilities might have emerged.
Audre Lorde in Africa: Between Repair and Rupture.
My intellectual trajectory lies along the path from Roots to A Map to the Door of No Return.
Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, 4-5.
Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 142.
Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 145.
Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 144.
Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 150.
Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 147.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Survival is a Promise, kindle
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Survival is a Promise, kindle
Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 170.
Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 171.
Sometimes I use Wikipedia! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roots:_The_Saga_of_an_American_Family
Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 172.
Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 173.
Audre Lorde, “Between Ourselves,” in Collected Poetry, 223.
Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 152
How glad am I that no Reviewer 2 is asking me to substantiate this claim!
Yes, I know. I repeat myself. It’s deliberate.
Audre Lorde, “Trip to Russia,” in Sister Outsider, 24.
Other writing is the manuscript for “Suture,” which will happen when it happens.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Survival is a Promise, kindle.
Loved this tracing of Audre’s relationship to Africa. I’ve been reading Survival is a Promise, similarly mapping each reference to Africa and African writers and activists she interacted with, to see what connections she was making for us. Now to read Warrior Poet…!