By the time I met Audre Lorde, she was more poetry than person, more word than body. My first encounters with Lorde were with her poetry in a Black queer studies class I took in college in the 2010s. I quickly became ashamed that I, a New York-born queer Black Caribbean American (not so unlike Lorde), did not know who this ancestor was. Raised in a semi-conservative West Indian American household and enrolled in college during the reign of Tumblr, I was only just becoming privy to my queer Black elders and ancestors. They were harder to find back then. Before the performative racial solidarity of our era sent liberal gender and sexuality studies professors and university administrators scrambling for Audre Lorde posters to include in diversity and inclusion offices and on so-called inclusive syllabi, images of Lorde weren’t so common. I still remember googling her to see what she looked like — an auntie from New York whose words and wisdom could move one to change themselves and the world around them.
This is not your typical cradle-to-grace biography.
The Lorde I met in college wrote sensual, if not overtly sexual, poems that bristled against the conservatism I was unlearning. I read Zami on my own, then essays in Sister Outsider and The Cancer Journals, and met a Lorde who was shameless, aggressive, formidable, and unabashedly queer. I envied her bravery and freedom. The Lorde I met in college was a legend, but it would be years before I would dive deeper into her work and life. The Lorde I met was so intensely mortal. Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ new biography of Lorde, Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, showed me her eternal life. It showed me how what Lorde left us has taken on “a life of its own.” Gumbs’ book is a biography of Lorde’s literary lives and afterlives.
How do we remember our legends?
What do we learn from what they left behind?
Gumbs takes up these ambitious questions and more in her celebratory biography of the “Black, lesbian, feminist, mother, warrior, poet,” essayist, and activist, Audre Lorde. Survival is a Promise traces Lorde’s development as a poet and the lasting impact of her poetry on the lives of others, particularly queer Black and Brown people around the world. This is not the first biography of Audre Lorde. Survival is a Promise exists in a lineage that begins with Lorde’s biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, published in 1982. Zami is a semi-fictional, at times completely fabulated account of Lorde’s coming-of-age. A queer classic, Zami covers Lorde’s struggle to learn how to read and speak as a youngster, her intense friendships and trysts, her factory work, her travels to Mexico and early activism. It does not cover her later years or her development as a poet, even though her poetry occasionally bursts onto the page. Three years after Lorde’s death in 1992, Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson released the documentary A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde, which includes interviews of Lorde in the company of companions, friends, and mentees discussing her life, activism, and poetry. Alexis De Veaux’s 2004 award-winning biography, Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, centers the life of a more mature Lorde, from her youth through her second bout with cancer. In De Veaux’s account, selfhood and sisterhood are the primary themes. De Veaux brilliantly weaves in the stories of a vibrant cast of characters who enriched Lorde’s life. Nevertheless, Lorde’s relationship with poetry and, more broadly, with the written word is a tertiary concern in Warrior Poet. This is where Gumbs, who was mentored by De Veaux, departs from the lineage. With access to Lorde’s manuscript archives, Gumbs brings to life the interiority of Lorde’s poetry, the influence of Lorde’s early avid reading on her work, and the impact of her poetry on the world around her — and the world around us.
Lorde the human — the flawed, the temperamental, the beloved, the polyamorous — seems to take a back seat to the legend.
Survival is a Promise consists of 58 short chapters (one for each year of Lorde’s life) and is divided into 10 parts. An epigraph — a quote from Lorde’s work about survival and the art of living — accompanies each part, lyrically tying together the entire work. Nevertheless, this is not your typical cradle-to-grave biography. Survival is a Promise is what Gumbs terms a “quantum biography” that traces the themes in Lorde’s poetry through her life and afterlives, among mentees, students, lovers, and friends. One of the boons of the book is that the chapters can be read in any order because the narrative is nonlinear, providing additional nuance and highlighting continuities and themes of warfare, tempests, radiation, the cosmos, technology, mortality, survival, and community. Readers can gain new insights by reading the book in a new way every time.
Gumbs, one of the first to research in Lorde’s collection at Spelman College, weaves untapped archival material together with interviews, published poems and essays, video footage, and photography. Gumbs focuses on Lorde’s poetry, writing, theories of health and well-being, theory of Earth and the cosmos, and the role of technology in her work and life. She braids in anecdotes and metaphors about nature, climate, geology, the divine, and the essence of life itself, giving a timely and fresh take on Lorde’s life and legacy. This is all very on-brand for Gumbs. Black feminism, technology, climate, Earth, and well-being have been central in her four previous works, culminating (for now) in nothing less than an opus centering the iconic Audre Lorde.
Born amid the Great Depression, disabled as a youngster, raised during the atomic age, lost her closest friend in her teen years and her father in her early adulthood, came of age during the peak of McCarthyism, mothered two children, and contended with cancer twice, all while transforming and expanding feminism and women’s poetry in the U.S. and around the globe: Lorde was a force. Her warranted anxieties mirror many of our own. Gumbs unwaveringly demonstrates that Lorde was concerned for her well-being and saw her survival as imbricated with the well-being and survival of those around her, the natural world, and the universe. Perhaps survival felt like a precious and fleeting privilege afforded to too few Black lesbian mother warrior poets to live vibrant, useful, and useable lives — to live in a way that would be meaningful beyond mortality. Though “life on other stars” may await, as Lorde writes in Zami, we are here now with nothing but “wild hope” in a jar. In dialogue with Zami, Gumbs shows us that Lorde’s poetry is elemental wisdom for helping us survive this wave of devastating endings and begin again with more radiance and love than ever before. Survival is a promise, indeed.
Yet, at times, Survival is a Promise reads more like a biography of Lorde the myth rather than one of Lorde the poet, the person behind the art. Lorde’s art and artistic and political legacies are celebrated on every page, but Lorde the human — the flawed, the temperamental, the beloved, the polyamorous — seems to take a back seat to the legend. For example, the book features little to no discussion of how Lorde’s tumultuous marriage with Ed Rollins, her many sexual trysts outside of her partnership with Frances Clayton, or her impolitic pursuits and sexual relations with mentees influenced her life, much less her poetry and broader body of work. There is barely any discussion of Lorde’s struggles with mental health, nor her use of amphetamines and cannabis during her young adult years, working dead-end jobs to gain a foothold, finish school, and ultimately become a librarian and later artist. We don’t hear much about any of her professional slights and setbacks in academia as she navigated a feminist landscape dominated by white women, nor her struggles to negotiate appropriate medical leave from her academic jobs and fellowships, which Gumbs has discussed in essays elsewhere. At times the book veers toward an angelic-mythical representation of Lorde — a portrayal that even Lorde would likely reject given her wayward representation of herself in Zami.
Lorde wanted us to use her, to use her life as “a map” toward greater wisdom about ourselves and our world.
I am not sure that an idealized vision of Lorde serves us fully in the present. Queer youth and young adults — many of whom smoke weed and take amphetamines, hold menial jobs, seek escape in imprudent trysts with coworkers, have endured unfulfilling marriages, have had affairs, have divorced, have pursued polyamorous relationships or engaged in playful casual sex, have been denied the care and medical leave they needed — deserve to see a little bit of their challenges and even their more wayward ways in the venerable Lorde. I remember Lorde the imperfect. I remember Lorde the flawed. I remember Lorde coming in and off the page a little too hot. I needed all of her when we met. Moreover, Lorde wanted us to use her, to use her life as “a map” toward greater wisdom about ourselves and our world. A person, even an icon, need not appear perfect to be a legend in death.
Nevertheless, Survival is a Promise teaches us much about how Audre Lorde’s platonic loves — the Earth, the universe, and many of the individuals and expanses contained therein — shaped her work. The book does far more justice to her legacy and memory — the myth to accompany the biomythographer. Indeed, Survival is a Promise celebrates the promise of Lorde’s poetic legacy, leaving the reader with a greater sense of the “shape of [Lorde’s] impact” on the world and the many lives of the work she left us all. If survival is indeed a promise, Gumbs certainly keeps it by honoring Lorde’s legacy, her “eternal life” as Gumbs aptly put it. Nevertheless, the Lorde we lost — the human who produced all the canonical queer poetry, litanies, homilies, and shameless mess in New York and all over the world, who “surrendered to her mortality and released what she could not control” — remains just out of reach.
Elise A. Mitchell is an assistant professor of Black history at Swarthmore College, where she teaches and researches the vibrant history of Black life, gender, and healing. Her essays and award-winning research articles have appeared in the Atlantic: Ideas, Black Perspectives, The Funambulist, Slate, and several academic journals.
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