Audre Lorde's Biomythographies

thinking with the Alexises

If, in the last few decades, Audre Lorde has been one of the most cited and remixed Black lesbian poets across tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, and other spaces, speaking to a range of aesthetic and political positions, helping to tether many minoritized people to (sometimes) hostile lifeworlds, with the promise that survival is worth it, it might be because her own writing drew so capaciously from multiple other lives.

Alexis De Veaux writes that Lorde invented herself as much as she documented herself.

Lorde’s highly stylized literary imagination blended facts with fiction in her poetry, interviews, published journal entries, and prose, and framed much of what was publicly known about her childhood and life. Discursive interpretations of Lorde’s life, and much of the theory about her life and work, were dependent upon her published versions. Without the advantage of access to her unpublished journals, manuscripts, correspondence, to the private perspectives of family, friends, and associates, such readings of Lorde were valid as discourse, if not truth.¹

Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks about Lorde’s ethic of representativeness, especially in Zami:

Audre felt accountable to her entire generation, especially those women who were not able to write their own life stories. So she allowed her protagonist [“when she began to promote Zami, Audre repeatedly referred to it as ‘a novel’ and to the primary character Audre as ‘the protagonist’”] to experience things that may not have been part of her actual life, but were certainly experiences that she and her peers faced in the 1940s and 1950s.²

Were it not scandalous, we might say that like Walt Whitman, Lorde contained multitudes. Let’s be scandalous.

The scandal is less that I am invoking a white gay poet and more that Lorde’s tastes were clear.³ At Hunter High School in New York, “She was fascinated by the British Romantic Poets Keats, Byron, and Shelley, by the works of T.S. Eliot and the American poets Elinor Wylie and Edna St. Vincent Millay. The ‘emotional complexity’ and intensity of their feelings captured and inflamed her imagination.”⁴

It is probably unlikely that Lorde would have read the Black women of the Harlem Renaissance in school. And even though a figure like Georgia Douglas Johnson had been incredibly popular, her books bestsellers, I doubt her work was readily available for Lorde to access. Johnson was one of the few Black poets who published full-length collections—poetry is more likely to survive if published as a full-length collection, sadly. Other Black women poets like Anne Spencer, Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Helene Jackson were published in small magazines and anthologies.⁵ Though, Lorde admired Countee Cullen’s poetry and would have been familiar with Langston Hughes, if only because he was the most famous Black poet, and lived in Harlem.⁶

I wonder what Lorde would have thought of Glady’s May Casely Hayford’s “Rainy Season Love Song,” published in Caroling Dusk, edited by Countee Cullen.⁷

So explicitly erotic:

Out of the tense awed darkness, my Frangepani comes;
While the blades of Heaven flash around her, and the roll of thunder drums
My young heart leaps and dances, with exquisite joy and pain,
As storms within and storms without I meet my love in the rain

So explicitly lesbian:

Into my hands she cometh, and the lighting of my desire
Flashes and leaps about her, more subtle than Heaven's fire;
"The lightning's in love with you darling; it is loving you so much,
That its warm electricity in you pulses wherever I may touch.
When I kiss your lips and your eyes, and your hands like twin flowers apart,
I know there is lightning, Frangepani, deep in the depths of your heart."

What would Audre Lorde have made of the poet whose self-authored biographical note reads, “I was born at Axim on the African Gold Coast in 1904 on the 11^th of May to singularly cultured and intellectual parents.” And who took it as a mission to “imbue our own people with the idea of their own beauty, superiority, and individuality,” and did so by studying “the beautiful points of Negro physique, texture of skin, beauty of hair, soft sweetness of eye, charm of curves, so that none should think it a shame to be black, but rather a glorious adventure.”⁸

Would Audre Lorde have experienced herself differently as a child if she wore the lenses Gladys May Casely Hayford provided?

Sorry. Got distracted by poetry. Happens a lot.

Alexis De Veaux writes,

A writer who wrote extremely about herself in “mixed” genres, Lorde would emerge as an “expert on her own life and as the maker of a life on paper.” She remembered what she wanted to or needed to, as artist and historian. Thus, her narratives were self-conscious, literary, performances, an excavation, and synthesis of memory, imagination and truth.⁹

There was a lot of life on paper. “Over sixty unpublished journals,” Alexis De Veaux notes.¹⁰ Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes,

Audre had considered her legacy. She knew that her life, as the first and most visible out Black lesbian poet ever, was historic. She kept everything from her childhood poems to box after box of correspondence and a lifetime of journals. An Ivy League-trained librarian herself, she kept her drafts, her writings, other people’s writings about her, other people’s writings that informed her writing, transcripts, syllabi, flyers from events, and correspondence with the writers and activists she collaborated with around the world.¹¹

And more:

When I stood to gently open a box labeled “ephemera,” I expected to see photographs, conference programs, scrapbooks, or handmade gifts, like the ones I had pulled out of countless boxes that day. I did not expect my fingertips to graze human hair. But they did. That particular box of “ephemera” was full of Audre’s silver locks.¹²

Audre Lorde wanted to leave as much of her life and person as she could, including locks of hair from her own head.

***

Writing about the Gomantak Maratha Samaj (Goan Maratha Society), Anjali Arondekar notes that the society’s archives are abundant and that “the preferred genre is fiction where the seductions of the veracity archive are routinely undercut by the poetics of representation. We have abundance (in terms of materials) but ungraspability in terms of historical truth.”¹³

Abundance, Anjali writes—a friend, I can use a first name—shifts our critical orientations and practices. No longer are we tethered to the critical frames and methods that map loss and absence—mourning, melancholia, recovery, paranoia, reparativeness, even repair. In the Gomantak Maratha Samaj archives, Anjali finds that abundance is not data. More is not confirmation or affirmation or verification or weight. Abundance requires its own methods.¹⁴

***

When she was in high school, Audre Lorde wanted to be editor-in-chief of the high school literary magazine, Argus. Instead, she became secretary. The situation was “unbelievable” to her. Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes, “It was so unbelievable to Lorde that she did not become editor in chief that she stopped believing it. Later on in her life, Lorde would say that she was editor of Argus.”¹⁵ For some reason, I have been thinking about deconstruction’s “dangerous supplement.” Self-fashioning as “dangerous supplement.” If memory serves, the supplement is dangerous because it threatens the status of completion: it adds to what is complete, but in doing so, reveals that completeness is a fiction, for how can what is complete be added to? Lorde’s factions as dangerous supplements? Perhaps.

***

And of Audre Lorde’s friendship with Genevieve, her first love and the subject of many poems, Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes, “We don’t know how much of Audre Lorde’s depiction of her friendship with Genevieve in Zami overlaps with their historical relationship and how much moves into fantasy, revealing Lorde’s emotional longings or narrative desires.”¹⁶

***

It may not be noteworthy that Lorde’s autobiographies—in Zami, in interviews, in her journals, in her letters—walk the line between event and invention. All autobiographical efforts walk this line, sometimes between memory and history, other times between fact and fantasy. All autobiography is self-fashioning. Yet, I want to return to an earlier passage from Alexis Pauline Gumbs:

Audre felt accountable to her entire generation, especially those women who were not able to write their own life stories. So she allowed her protagonist [“when she began to promote Zami, Audre repeatedly referred to it as ‘a novel’ and to the primary character Audre as “the protagonist”] to experience things that may not have been part of her actual life, but were certainly experiences that she and her peers faced in the 1940s and 1950s.¹⁷

Much self-fashioning happens to repair one’s image or to provide oneself with a narrative that one feels they ought to have or to choose the version of self that best accords with one’s ambitions and principles. Rarely is self-fashioning taken as a way to narrate generational experience. If anything, much autobiography strives to distance oneself from a general patterns: one receives an epiphany and is changed; or one travels abroad and is changed; or one experiences a tragedy and is changed. In each of these instances, change distinguishes one from others.

I have no graceful way to conclude this. Perhaps only to say: the capaciousness of Lorde’s imagination and self-narration creates space for many of us to locate bits of ourselves within her life-work.

1. Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, xiii-xiv.

2. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Survival is a Promise, kindle edition.

3. It has been some times since I read scholarship on Walt Whitman, so I do not remember if he was circulating as a gay poet when Lorde was in high school. I know for sure he was for Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara in the 1950s and 1960s. But I also suspect that Whitman survived as a gay poet through and in gay literary circles in ways he might not have in other spaces.

4. Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 25.

5. I remain distressed that the volumes that collected these authors’ works in the 1980s and 1990s were published for university libraries and are wildly expensive and out of print.

6. Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 33.

7. Gladys May Casely Hayford, “Rainy Season Love Song,” in Caroling Dusk, edited by Countee Cullen, 198-200.

8. Caroling Dusk, 196, 196-197.

9. Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 13.

10. Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet, xii.

11. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Survival is a Promise, kindle.

12. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Survival is a Promise, kindle.

13. Anjali Arondekar, “Thinking Sex with Geopolitics,” WSQ, Women’s Studies Quarterly Volume 44, Numbers 3 & 4 (2016), 334.

14. I love Anjali’s book, Abundance: Sexuality’s History. Duke University Press, 2023.

15. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Survival is a Promise, kindle.

16. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Survival is a Promise, kindle.

17. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Survival is a Promise, kindle.