Sister Outsider

by Audre Lorde

  These assumptions of power relationships are being questioned because Frances and I, often painfully and with varying degrees of success, attempt to evaluate and measure over and over again our feelings concerning power, our own and others’. And we explore with care those areas concerning how it is used and expressed between us and between us and the children, openly and otherwise. A good part of our biweekly family meetings are devoted to this exploration.

  As parents, Frances and I have given Jonathan our love, our openness, and our dreams to help form his visions. Most importantly, as the son of lesbians, he has had an invaluable model – not only of a relationship – but of relating.

  Jonathan is fourteen now. In talking over this paper with him and asking his permission to share some pieces of his life, I asked Jonathan what he felt were the strongest negative and the strongest positive aspects for him in having grown up with lesbian parents.

  He said the strongest benefit he felt he had gained was that he knew a lot more about people than most other kids his age that he knew, and that he did not have a lot of the hang-ups that some other boys did about men and women.

  And the most negative aspect he felt, Jonathan said, was the ridicule he got from some kids with straight parents.

  ‘You mean, from your peers?’ I said.

  ‘Oh no,’ he answered promptly. ‘My peers know better. I mean other kids.’

  An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Richfn1

  Adrienne: What do you mean when you say that two essays, ‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury’ and ‘Uses of the Erotic’ are really progressions?

  Audre: They’re part of something that’s not finished yet. I don’t know what the rest of it is, but they’re clear progressions in feeling out something connected with the first piece of prose I ever wrote. One thread in my life is the battle to preserve my perceptions – pleasant or unpleasant, painful or whatever …

  Adrienne: And however much they were denied.

  Audre: And however painful some of them were. When I think of the way in which I courted punishment, just swam into it: ‘If this is the only way you’re going to deal with me, you’re gonna have to deal with me this way.’

  Adrienne: You’re talking about as a young child?

  Audre: I’m talking about throughout my life. I kept myself through feeling. I lived through it. And at such a subterranean level that I didn’t know how to talk. I was busy feeling out other ways of getting and giving information and whatever else I could because talking wasn’t where it was at. People were talking all around me all the time – and not either getting or giving much that was useful to them or to me.

  Adrienne: And not listening to what you tried to say, if you did speak.

  Audre: When you asked how I began writing, I told you how poetry functioned specifically for me from the time I was very young. When someone said to me, ‘How do you feel?’ or ‘What do you think?’ or asked another direct question, I would recite a poem, and somewhere in that poem would be the feeling, the vital piece of information. It might be a line. It might be an image. The poem was my response.

  Adrienne: Like a translation into this poem that already existed of something you knew in a preverbal way. So the poem became your language?

  Audre: Yes. I remember reading in the children’s room of the library, I couldn’t have been past the second or third grade, but I remember the book. It was illustrated by Arthur Rackham, a book of poems. These were old books; the library in Harlem used to get the oldest books, in the worst condition. Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’ – I will never forget that poem.

  Adrienne: Where the traveler rides up to the door of the empty house?

  Audre: That’s right. He knocks at the door and nobody answers. ‘“Is there anybody there?” he said.’ That poem imprinted itself on me. And finally, he’s beating down the door and nobody answers, and he has a feeling that there really is somebody in there. Then he turns his horse and says, ‘“Tell them I came, and nobody answered. That I kept my word.”’ I used to recite that poem to myself all the time. It was one of my favorites. And if you’d asked me, ‘What is it about?’ I don’t think I could have told you. But this was the first reason for my own writing, my need to say things I couldn’t say otherwise when I couldn’t find other poems to serve.

  Adrienne: You had to make your own.

  Audre: There were so many complex emotions for which poems did not exist. I had to find a secret way to express my feelings. I used to memorize my poems. I would say them out; I didn’t use to write them down. I had this long fund of poetry in my head. And I remember trying when I was in high school not to think in poems. I saw the way other people thought, and it was an amazement to me – step by step, not in bubbles up from chaos that you had to anchor with words … I really do believe I learned this from my mother.

  Adrienne: Learned what from your mother?

  Andre: The important value of nonverbal communication, beneath language. My life depended on it. At the same time, living in the world, I didn’t want to have anything to do with the way she was using language. My mother had a strange way with words: if one didn’t serve her or wasn’t strong enough, she’d just make up another word, and then that would enter our family language forever, and woe betide any of us who forgot it. But I think I got another message from her … that there was a whole powerful world of nonverbal communication and contact between people that was absolutely essential and that was what you had to learn to decipher and use. One of the reasons I had so much trouble growing up was that my parents, my mother in particular, always expected me to know what she was feeling and what she expected me to do without telling me. And I thought this was natural. My mother would expect me to know things, whether or not she spoke them …

  Adrienne: Ignorance of the law was no excuse.

  Audre: That’s right. It’s very confusing. But eventually I learned how to acquire vital and protective information without words. My mother used to say to me, ‘Don’t just listen like a ninny to what people say in their mouth.’ But then she’d proceed to say something that didn’t feel right to me. You always learned from observing. You have to pick things up nonverbally because people will never tell you what you’re supposed to know. You have to get it for yourself, whatever it is that you need in order to survive. And if you make a mistake you get punished for it, but that’s no big thing. You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for. This is the way genuine learning takes place. That’s a very difficult way to live, but it also has served me. It’s been an asset as well as a liability. When I went to high school, I found out that people really thought in different ways – perceived, puzzled out, acquired information verbally. I had such a hard time. I never studied; I literally intuited all my teachers. That’s why it was so important to get a teacher who I liked because I never studied, I never read my assignment, and I would get all this stuff – what they felt, what they knew – but I missed a lot of other stuff, a lot of my own original workings.

  Adrienne: When you said you never read, you meant you never read the assignments, but you were reading?

  Audre: If I read things that were assigned, I didn’t read them the way we were supposed to. Everything was like a poem, with different curves, different levels. So I always felt that the ways I took things in were different from the ways other people took them in. I used to practice trying to think.

  Adrienne: That thing those other people presumably did. Do you remember what that was like?

  Audre: Yes. I had an image of trying to reach something around a corner, that it was just eluding me. The image was constantly vanishing. There was an experience I had in Mexico, when I moved to Cuernavaca …

  Adrienne: This was when you were about how old?

  Audre: I was nineteen. I was commuting to Mexico City for classes. In order to get to my early class I would catch a six o’clock turismo in the village plaza. I would come out of my house before dawn. You know, there are two volcanoes, Popocatépetl a
nd Iztacchuatl. I thought they were clouds the first time I saw them through my windows. It would be dark, and I would see the snow on top of the mountains and the sun coming up. And when the sun crested, at a certain point, the birds would start. But because we were in the valley it would still look like night. But there would be the light of the snow. And then this incredible crescendo of birds. One morning I came over the hill and the green, wet smells came up. And then the birds, the sound of them I’d never really noticed, never heard birds before. I was walking down the hill and I was transfixed. It was very beautiful. I hadn’t been writing all the time I was in Mexico. And poetry was the thing I had with words, that was so important … And on that hill, I had the first intimation that I could bring those two together. I could infuse words directly with what I was feeling. I didn’t have to create the world I wrote about. I realized that words could tell. That there was such a thing as an emotional sentence. Until then, I would make these constructs and somewhere in there would be a nugget, like a Chinese bun, a piece of nourishment, the thing I really needed, which I had to create. There on that hill, I was filled with the smell and feeling and the way it looked, filled with such beauty that I could not believe … I had always fantasized it before. I used to fantasize trees and dream forest. Until I got spectacles when I was four I thought trees were green clouds. When I read Shakespeare in high school, I would get off on his gardens and Spanish moss and roses and trellises with beautiful women at rest and sun on red brick. When I was in Mexico I found out this could be a reality. And I learned that day on the mountain that words can match that, re-create it.

  Adrienne: Do you think that in Mexico you were seeing a reality as extraordinary and vivid and sensual as you had been fantasizing it could be?

  Audre: I think so. I had always thought I had to do it in my head, make it up. I learned in Mexico that you can’t even make it up unless it happens, or can happen. Where it happened first for me I don’t know; I do remember stories my mother would tell us about Grenada in the West Indies, where she was born … But that morning in Mexico I realized I did not have to make beauty up for the rest of my life. I remember trying to tell Eudora about this epiphany, and I didn’t have the words for it. And I remember her saying, ‘Write a poem.’ When I tried to write a poem about the way I felt that morning, I could not do it, and all I had was the memory that there must be a way. That was incredibly important. I know that I came back from Mexico very, very different, and much of it had to do with what I learned from Eudora. But more than that, it was a kind of releasing of my work, a releasing of myself.

  Adrienne: Then you went back to the Lower East Side, right?

  Audre: Yes, I went back to living with my friend Ruth, and I began trying to get a job. I had had a year of college, but I could not function in those people’s world. So I thought I could be a nurse. And I was having such a hard time getting any kind of work. I felt, well, a Practical Nursing license, and then I’ll go back to Mexico …

  Adrienne: With my trade.

  Audre: But that wasn’t possible either. I didn’t have any money, and Black women were not given Practical Nursing fellowships. I didn’t realize it at the time because what they said was that my eyes were too bad. But the first thing I did when I came back was to write a piece of prose about Mexico, called ‘La Llorona.’ La Llorona is a legend in that part of Mexico, around Cuernavaca. You know Cuernavaca? You know the big barrancas? When the rains come to the mountains, the boulders rush through the big ravines. The sound, the first rush, would start one or two days before the rains came. All the rocks tumbling down from the mountains made a voice, and the echoes would resound and it would be a sound of weeping, with the waters behind it. Modesta, a woman who lived in the house, told me the legend of La Llorona. A woman had three sons and found her husband lying in another woman’s bed – it’s the Medea story – and drowned her sons in the barrancas, drowned her children. And every year around this time she comes back to mourn the deaths. I took this story and out of a combination of ways I was feeling I wrote a story called ‘La Llorona.’ It’s a story essentially of my mother and me. It was as if I had picked my mother up and put her in that place: here is this woman who kills, who wants something, the woman who consumes her children, who wants too much, but wants not because she’s evil but because she wants her own life, but by now it is so distorted … It was a very strange unfinished story, but the dynamic …

  Adrienne: It sounds like you were trying to pull those two pieces of your life together, your mother and what you’d learned in Mexico.

  Audre: Yes. You see, I didn’t deal at all with how strong my mother was inside of me, but she was, nor with how involved I was. But this story is beautiful. Pieces of it are in my head where the poetry pool is, phrases and so on. I had never written prose before and I’ve never written any since until just now. I published it under the name Rey Domini in a magazine …

  Adrienne: Why did you use a pseudonym?

  Audre: Because … I don’t write stories. I write poetry. So I had to put it under another name.

  Adrienne: Because it was a different piece of you?

  Audre: That’s right. I only write poetry and here is this story. But I used the name Rey Domini, which is Audre Lorde in Latin.

  Adrienne: Did you really not write prose from the time of that story until a couple of years ago, when you wrote ‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury’?

  Audre: I couldn’t. For some reason, the more poetry I wrote, the less I felt I could write prose. Someone would ask for a book review, or, when I worked at the library, for a precis about books – it wasn’t that I didn’t have the skills. I knew about sentences by that time. I knew how to construct a paragraph. But communicating deep feeling in linear, solid blocks of print felt arcane, a method beyond me.

  Adrienne: But you’d been writing letters like wildfire, hadn’t you?

  Audre: Well, I didn’t write letters as such. I wrote stream of consciousness, and for people who were close enough to me this would serve. My friends gave me back the letters I wrote them from Mexico – strange, those are the most formed. I remember feeling I could not focus on a thought long enough to have it from start to finish, but I could ponder a poem for days, camp out in its world.

  Adrienne: Do you think that was because you still had this idea that thinking was a mysterious process that other people did and that you had to sort of practice? That it wasn’t something you just did?

  Audre: It was a very mysterious process for me. And it was one I had come to suspect because I had seen so many errors committed in its name, and I had come not to respect it. On the other hand, I was also afraid of it because there were inescapable conclusions or convictions I had come to about my own life, my own feelings, that defied thought. And I wasn’t going to let them go. I wasn’t going to give them up. They were too precious to me. They were life to me. But I couldn’t analyze or understand them because they didn’t make the kind of sense I had been taught to expect through understanding. There were things I knew and couldn’t say. And I couldn’t understand them.

  Adrienne: In the sense of being able to take them out, analyze them, defend them?

  Audre: … write prose about them. Right. I wrote a lot of those poems you first knew me by, those poems in The First Cities,fn2 way back in high school. If you had asked me to talk about one of those poems, I’d have talked in the most banal way. All I had was the sense that I had to hold on to these feelings and that I had to air them in some way.

  Adrienne: But they were also being transformed into language.

  Audre: That’s right. When I wrote something that finally had it, I would say it aloud and it would come alive, become real. It would start repeating itself and I’d know, that’s struck, that’s true. Like a bell. Something struck true. And there the words would be.

  Adrienne: How do you feel writing connected for you with teaching?

  Audre: I know teaching is a survival technique. It is for me and I think it is in general; the only w
ay real learning happens. Because I myself was learning something I needed to continue living. And I was examining it and teaching it at the same time I was learning it. I was teaching it to myself aloud. And it started out at Tougaloo in a poetry workshop.

  Adrienne: You were ill when you were called to go down to Tougaloo?

  Audre: Yes, I felt … I had almost died.

  Adrienne: What was going on?

  Audre: Diane di Prima – that was 1967 – had started the Poets Press. And she said, ‘You know, it’s time you had a book.’ And I said, ‘Well, who’s going to print it?’ I was going to put those poems away because I found I was revising too much instead of writing new poems, and that’s how I found out, again through experience, that poetry is not Play-Doh. You can’t take a poem and keep re-forming it. It is itself, and you have to know how to cut it, and if there’s something else you want to say, that’s fine. But I was repolishing and repolishing, and Diane said, ‘You have to print these. Put ’em out.’ And the Poets Press published The First Cities. Well, I worked on that book, getting it together, and it was going into press … I had gotten the proofs back and I started repolishing again and realized, ‘This is going to be a book!’ Putting myself on the line. People I don’t even know are going to read these poems. What’s going to happen?

  It felt very critical, and I was in an absolute blaze of activity because things were so bad at home financially. I went out and got a job; I was with the two kids in the daytime and worked at the library at night. Jonathan used to cry every night when I left, and I would hear his shrieks going down this long hall to the elevator. I was working nights, and I’d apprenticed myself to a stained-glass window-maker, and I was working in my mother’s office, and making Christmas for my friends, and I became very ill – I had overdone it. I was too sick to get up, and Ed answered the phone. It was Galen Williams from the Poetry Center asking if I’d like to go as poet-in-residence to Tougaloo, a Black college in Mississippi. I’d been recommended for a grant. It was Ed who said, ‘You have to do this.’ My energy was at such a low ebb that I couldn’t see how. It was very frightening to me, the idea of someone responding to me as a poet. This book, by the way, hadn’t even come out yet, you understand?