SURVIVAL IS A PROMISE
The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
528 pages, $35.
“POETRY is not a luxury.” “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.” “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Much of the writing by groundbreaking Black feminist poet and essayist Audre Lorde is eminently quotable, perfect for this soundbite age. A photograph of Lorde in front of a blackboard on which is written “Women are powerful and dangerous” has become a familiar, widely shared image. In response to attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and women’s and LGBT rights, the words of the self-described “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” have lately gone viral, turning her into an online superstar.
The first full study of Audre Lorde’s life since her death in 1992, Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, urges us to look at Lorde as more than just a meme. As its author, fellow poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs, writes: “We need her survival poetics beyond the iconic version of her that has become useful for diversity center walls and grant applications. We need the center of her life, the poetry society at large has mostly ignored, preferring to recycle the most quotable lines of her most quotable essays (necessary as those essays are!).”
Having been given nearly complete access to Lorde’s extensive archives, and with the blessing of her final partner, Gloria Joseph, Gumbs dives deeply into the poet’s life and work, offering the reader a wealth of previously unavailable material. The poet “kept everything from her childhood poems to box after box of correspondence and a lifetime of journals.” The author shows that she is very much like her subject, who said in a 1987 radio interview: “My eyes are always hungry for detail.” Gumbs revels in such items as the budding poet’s favorite nursery rhymes, and checks the year that Lorde claimed to have heard a particular song against the year of its release.
Gumbs’s research became unexpectedly topical when she uncovered the source of a rift between Audre Lorde and June Jordan. The two poets stopped communicating in 1982 in the wake of Jordan’s opposition to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the massacre of more than 2,000 people in Shabra and at the Shatila refugee camp. Although previously close to Lorde, the often volatile Jordan was angered by Lorde’s lack of support for her. Jewish lesbian poet and essayist Adrienne Rich managed to remain connected to both poets, passing along news to each about the other. Although they continued to teach each other’s work, and while some documents will remain sealed until 2050, it appears that Lorde and Jordan never spoke or corresponded again.
Lorde used the word “biomythography” to describe her 1982 book Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, a word that could also apply to Survival Is a Promise, which is not a standard biography but a unique and personal poetic, scientific, and biographical meditation. Gumbs states in the prologue: “This is a quantum biography where life in full emerges in the field in relation to each particle. This is a cosmic biography where the dynamic of the planet and the universe are never separate from the life of any being.” She uses various forms and prose structures to tell Lorde’s story from a variety of angles, as if through a fast-paced kaleidoscope. A chapter on the poet’s life at Hunter College High School, for example, is interspersed with lines from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Renascence,” her favorite poet and poem at that time. Later, Lorde’s teaching years at Hunter College are illuminated through comments from former students, including Sarah Schulman, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Jewelle Gomez, Donna Masini, and Lorde’s own daughter, Elizabeth Rollins-Lorde, who also attended her mother’s poetry workshop.
Many chapters of Survival Is a Promise are structured around a specific topic, such as “Hair,” for example, or viewed through Lorde’s correspondence and interactions with individuals like poets Essex Hemphill and Pat Parker. The author finds numerous links between Lorde and science or the natural world: “Audre referenced the natural world in her poems, not as a metaphor for human relations but as a map for how to understand our lives as part of every manifestation of Earth.”
Some of Gumbs’s poetic analogies work to great effect, as in using Lorde’s visit to Ghana’s Elmina Slave Castle and its infamous “The Door of No Return” to equate the African slave trade to a particle accelerator or “atom smasher … shattering bloodlines, shattering social contracts … shattering language groups in order to funnel down to an individual unit of capital.” Other connections, like linking Lorde’s experiences in Berlin with Afro-German women to the songs of mother whales communicating with their offspring, are not as successful.
Referencing a lecture by the Caribbean-Canadian poet Dionne Brand in a discussion about the relationship between her work and Lorde’s, Gumbs comments: “Brand’s talk was to subvert the colonizing structures in the books that influenced her education and to critique what they taught her was possible about telling a life story.” Survival Is a Promise attempts a similar critique and subversion of the established structures of biography. As Gumbs makes clear from the start: “this is not a normative biography linearly dragging you from a cradle to a grave.”
As such, however, it is only partially successful. Several of the author’s lyrical leaps and poetic connections are not entirely convincing. Although the book is smoothly written throughout, a succession of chapters that move across time and place without clear chronological markers in the second half of the book occasionally leaves the reader feeling adrift. While erudite and impressively researched, this singular survey of the life of Audre Lorde ultimately feels oddly unsatisfying.
Reginald Harris is a writer and poet based in Brooklyn.
