Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2024).
Within the diaspora of writings that stemmed from the American civil rights movement and second wave feminism, Audre Lorde’s work remains a distinctive achievement with eternal promise. As Lorde phrased it, “What I leave behind has a life of its own.” Whether it is her essential essay on the consequences of our silence, her determination to unite all women against the oppressions of race, homophobia and patriarchy, or her poems of radical tenderness, Lorde’s words are sparks that illuminate a path towards the revolutionary potential of tomorrow.
But who was Audre Lorde? The question begets others: how did she live? What did she embody? Did she always live up to her ideals?
Survival is a Promise, the latest book by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, reflects on these questions, and many more, while transcending the boundaries of what is expected from the biography genre.
Lorde’s connection to the Earth
Rather than a conventional linear narrative, Survival is a Promise is a cosmic biography according to Gumbs, one that converges Lorde’s 1982 biomythography Zami with both her poems and diaries in a structure never done before. This analysis is then interspersed with Gumbs’ own interpretation of events, using her knowledge of Lorde’s life, alongside scientific, philosophical and psychological underpinnings, to produce a fresh telling of the self-described “warrior poet” through her connection to the natural world, as the earth for Audre was a conscious entity that is “always telling us something about our conduct of living as well as our abuse of the covenant we live upon.”
The nucleus of the book consists of Gumbs drawing from a vast array of anatomical parts, minerals, periodic elements, natural phenomena and scientific concepts to establish a link between their significance in our cosmic ecosystem and specific aspects of Audre’s life.
For instance, Gumbs associates the mining process of refining graphite from coal with how Lorde challenged the refining of her Black identity by society at-large. The second last line of Lorde’s famous poem, Coal, is, “I am Black because I come from the Earth’s inside.” Coal is the blackness of the earth, a form of energy that Gumbs describes as the “persistence of life” in that it provides “light eons after photosynthesis has ended.” In shaping her own identity, Lorde wrote in a short bio on how she learned to “love even when there is no sunlight.” Just as coal produces energy before being refined into something different, (such as graphite), Lorde learned to accept herself as she was, refusing to have her Black identity be reconstructed by others. As Gumbs beautifully articulates, inside Lorde was a “soft black archive of buried photosynthesis.”
One chapter describes how Gumbs discovered a lock of Lorde’s gray hair while browsing an archive collection. Lorde’s hair, which invoked Rastafarian culture and Black power, was an expression of autonomy in defiance of the acceptable hairstyles of the time for Black women. By archiving what Gumbs calls the “afterlife of skin,” Lorde showcased how her rebellion against the barriers imposed on her by racial capitalism remained alive and intact even after her death from cancer in 1992—evidence of her eternality. Another chapter bridges the heliotropic myth of sunflowers with Audre’s longtime love for Frances Clayton. Another connects abyssal plains and platonic lesbian friendships. All of these analogies converge, creating a map of understanding Lorde’s life as part of every manifestation of the natural world.
Socialism and the Goddess of the Winds of Change
The cosmology of Audre Lorde would not be complete without analyzing her beliefs in the supernatural and how it shaped her writing and activism. While Audre was the daughter of first generation Black immigrants, she was also the daughter of Oya, the goddess of the winds of change in Yoruba culture. As daughter of this personified deity, Audre saw in herself the purpose of driving change in a direction that returned the universe to proper balance and flow. Born in tumultuous political conditions, where every Black person around her faced the plight of deeply entrenched systemic racism, where every woman was subordinated under the patriarchy, Audre from Harlem embraced herself as the inheritor of the winds of change from a young age and remained committed to the role until the end of her life.
Socialists had a heavy presence in 1950s New York. Activist organizations were responding to racial and economic injustice on the onset of the civil rights movement and making their voices heard on every street corner, including the one where Audre lived. Heavily influenced by their words, Audre’s activism began to grow. Her activism remained steadfast heading into the 1970s, especially when it came to advocating for safe spaces for Black lesbian feminists, a commitment that remained evident in her actions as well as in her poetry and prose.
Audre was an active member of Black feminist community spaces such as the Combahee River Collective, which prioritized anti-capitalist principles and arose in response to the racism of the white feminist movement. Lorde’s experience as Black lesbian in 1950s New York served as the catalyst for her 1982 work Zami, in which she describes the experiences of her fellow “lost sisters” who, like Lorde, were the embodiment of everything McCarthyism targeted during its peak in the mid-century.
The silences to be broken
With all of the solidarity Lorde had for the displaced and dispossessed, what remains a disappointment when analyzing her legacy is her silence on the Israeli occupation. The Palestinian exception is very real and continues to manifest itself throughout various institutions who are ostensibly progressive.
Lorde’s silence is even more devastating when learning that she was good friends with June Jordan, also a Black lesbian feminist poet, who dedicated a plethora of her work towards Palestinian liberation during the 1980s Israeli invasions. It was in fact their disagreement over Zionism that ruined their friendship. Jordan’s last written words to Lorde were. “You have behaved in a wrong and cowardly fashion. That is your responsibility. May you live well with that.” Because of Jordan’s alignment with Palestinian cause, she was blacklisted by the New York Times and had the majority of the literary community speak out against her. When stating the women that stood up for her in her essay “Life After Lebanon,” Jordan did not include Lorde.
It is quite surreal learning that the Black feminist poet who wrote the words “your silence will not protect you” was silent on Palestine, especially when it mattered most in supporting her friend. Perhaps the lesson to draw from this reality is that we must be critical of all historical figures and understand their contradictions as one of the many manifestations that connect them to the earth.
For Audre, what she did for the people she spoke for was astounding and will remain long after her existence, as displayed in Survival is a Promise. It is imperative that we take the promise of survival that Lorde portrayed and continue to fight the constant struggle for the liberation of those displaced by racial capitalism—or as Lorde says, “bridge some of those differences between us.” Only then can Audre’s voice, alongside ours, continue to create celestial ruptures in the collective atmosphere of indifference.
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