Audre Lorde was a lesbian poet, but she never would have stood for such a simple and over-generalized description of herself. Lorde, who once described herself as a “black feminist lesbian mother poet,” never felt comfortable being categorized solely as a black woman, a lesbian, or a poet.
Audre Geraldine Lorde was born in Depression-era Harlem to immigrants from the West Indies. Her mother's stories of the West Indies filled her childhood, and Lorde's love for writing, poetry, and words blossomed at an early age. In 1981 she told the Denver Quarterly that “[w]ords had an energy and power and I came to respect that power early. Pronouns, nouns, and verbs were citizens of different countries, who really got together to make a new world.”
As a girl, Lorde, who would one day use her poetry as a form of activism, would recite a poem to answer the simple question of “How are you?”
Eventually, her feelings could not be expressed by the words of others and Lorde began to write her own poems. She wrote her first piece in the eighth grade and eventually became the editor of her high school's arts magazine. Lorde's first love poem was published in Seventeen magazine.
In 1954, a 20-year-old Lorde spent time at the National University of Mexico as a student. She later described this pivotal time in her 1982 book Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. For her, the time spent in Mexico was one of “affirmation and renewal because it confirmed [her] identity on personal and artistic levels as a lesbian and poet.” Upon her return from Mexico, Lorde attended Hunter College, worked as a librarian, continued to write poetry, and became an active participant in the gay culture of Greenwich Village.
1961 saw Lorde earn her master's degree in library science from Columbia University. It was also at this time that, despite being a lesbian, Lorde married attorney Edward Ashley Rollins. The couple had two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan, before divorcing in 1970.
Lorde's poetry was published regularly throughout the 1960s. The decade saw Lorde's incarnation as an activist within the civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements. Eventually, Lorde felt that her poetry had to be more than appealing, it also had to work toward change. “I loved poetry, and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest,” Lorde explained in Claudia Tate's book Black Women Writers at Work.
Lorde's first volume of poetry, The First Cities, was published in 1968 and was praised for not utilizing the “confrontational tone” prevalent in 1960s African American poetry. Although her voice and tone were distinct, they still came from a familiar place. Dudley Randall, a poet and critic, said in a review of The First Cities that Lorde “does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit, in the bone.”
Cables to Rage, a second volume of poetry, was published in 1970 and contained, “Martha,” the poem that most affirmed Lorde's homosexuality with lines like, “we shall love each other here if ever at all.” The other poems in Cables to Rage also addressed themes of love, betrayal, childbirth, and raising children. Lorde also hoped that Cables to Rage, which she mostly completed while working at Tougaloo College, would in part function as a form of protest against racism and sexism.
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