Audre Lorde Audre Geraldine Lorde was born in New York City of West Indian parents. She also wrote under the name of Rey Domini. She grew up in Manhattan and attended Roman Catholic schools. Lorde attended Hunter College in New York City from 1951 to 1959. She continued her education at Columbia University in 1961, where she earned her master’s degree in library science. Lorde also worked as a librarian and married Edward Ashley Rollins with whom she had two children, Elizabeth and Johnathon; she and Rollins divorced in 1970. Lorde considered 1968 to be the turning point of her life. She left her job as head librarian at the University of New York to become a lecturer and creative writer.
She recieved a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and accepted the poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. It was at Tougaloo that Lorde published her first volume of poetry,The First Cities. The First Cities was considered innovative and refreshing. Critics also described it as a quiet introspective book. Another book of poetry written by Lorde, Coal, was the first of her volumes to be released by a major publisher. In Coal, Lorde expresses her feelings of love and appreciation for her blackness.
Lorde’s The Black Unicorn, written in 1978, is considered her most complex and successful work. In The Black Unicorn, she uses symbols and mythologies of African goddesses. (Martin 79) Another important work of Lorde is her first book of non-fiction, The Cancer Journals, written in 1980. This work is about herself, her struggle with breast cancer and her mastecomy. In The Cancer Journals Lorde explores the feeling of hopelessness and despair as she faces death itself. She felt that this book gave her strength and power to explore her experience with cancer and to share it with other women. Lorde described herself as “a black-lesbian feminist mother lover poet”.
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(Bell Scott 109) Claudia Tate says of Lorde that she “derives the impetus of her poetry’s force, tone, and vision from her identity as a black women who is both a radical feminist and an outspoken lesbian, and as a visionary of a better world. In stunning figurative language she outlines the progress of her unyielding struggle for the human rights of all people” (Bell -Scott 113) She wrote about her anger toward racial oppression, and personal hardship. She wrote many essays about being a black woman in the feminist movement, including the compilations Sister Outsider and Uses of the Erotic. One of the most widely used quotes in the feminist movement today comes from the title of one essay in Sister Outsider entitled The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. (Wilson 144) Lorde wrote from her heart. She loved writing poems. She was an articulate person who could read poems and memorize them.
However, when she was younger she was inarticulate, and she did not speak until the age of five. She started to speak when she began to read and write poetry at the age of about twelve. Her parents did not encourage her to write poetry. She learned, rather, from her mother’s strangeness and her father’s silences. Lorde published her first poem at the age of fifteen. She had written of her first love affair with a boy in Hunter High School, but her teacher told her it was too romantic.
On her own, Lorde sent the poem to Seventeen magazine because the school would not print it. Lorde wrote of racism in the feminist movement, sexism among African Americans, and of lesbians and love. She not only wrote for herself, but for her children and women as well. She wrote for people who could read her, who would be able to hear what she had to say. She wrote for women who had no voice of their own. She particularly wrote for black women because she felt there were very few voices for black women out there.
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She wrote for the women terrified to speak because they are taught to respect fear more than themselves. Lorde wrote particularly for women of color in many countries. She was one of the founding members of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, which published the works of women of color. She felt it was her responsibility to speak the truth with as much beauty and precision as possible. She felt her responsibility was in writing for and of women because there are many voices for men and not enough for women. Lorde died of liver cancer in 1992 at the age of 58.
She was a talented woman who touched the lives of many through her writing, and her teachings will live on. Through history down to the present day, injustice because of race, color, and religion are common ground in our society. Power by Audre Lorde is a work which focuses on a trial which is seen through the eyes of a poet. This black woman expresses her feeling of fury as to the disadvantages accorded to those which arent part of the white dominant culture even through the eyes of law. She blames the racist system and those who run it as being the root of the problem; they have too much power. Audre chooses to explain her thoughts in a poem instead of a rhetorical manner of writing.
A jury acquitted a cop that killed a ten-year-old black child simply because of his color. This is utter proof of the injustice that black folks suffer at the hands of whites. Power is all about the injustice that black people are suffering due to white supremacy. This young innocent child died only because of the hate that a white man with a gun had against a dark skinned human being. The blinding injustice in this story is that the jury knows that the cop killed the child only because of his color, the jury even heard the proof on a tape:I didnt notice the size or nothing else only the color (Lorde 797).
Killing someone is illegal in all its aspects and forms, nobody has the right to do that. How come a cop that the jury and even the judge heard on a tape, saying to a young child: Die you little mother*censored*er( Lorde 797).
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The cop is acquitted from a murder when the court has the proof that he did it only because of the fact that hes white and has reputable job.
Here we hav! e a good example of the injustice of a white mans justice system. The court should be the first one to denounce this crime; instead they use an almost entirely white jury to bend the truth and make it seem like the killer is innocent. When we read the poem, we can feel that Audre is trying to denounce all that injustice through deep feelings of anger which are even present in her dreams. Even the one black woman on the jury is herself suffering of injustice as she is forced by the Caucasian men of the jury to vote in favor of the cop being acquitted. The whites use their power to make their own justice. The black woman declares: They convinced me meaning they force her into her decision.
Power and its abuse is another main theme of this poem. Throughout the whole story, we feel the overwhelming power of the whites over the blacks. They think that they can do whatever they want because they are dominant in this country and have been abusing this advantage for centuries now. We can understand the fury of Audre Lorde being black and mistreated herself. Another example of the white man and his power is that during the trial of that cop, there was 11 white men and only 1 black woman. In addition of being black, she was a woman.
Woman had no more authority than black people did back in the years this trial was being held, presumably the 1950s. Theres not only the power of the white people but also the superior role of the man in society present in this case. The black womans opinion didnt make much of a difference to the rest of the jury. She lost the only power she ever had. Domination of whites over blacks is all we experience throughout this poem. It depicts the frustration of a woman who has to submit herself to the authority and power of white people. Audre Lorde expresses her emotions and feelings through poetry which reaches many people of every kind. This method skillfully combines art and knowledge through her use form and sound to create her own style of poem. She doesnt write in a poetic fashion, her poetry is of the lyrical mode. Talking to the reader through her poetry is her style.
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The form and sound of this poem makes us realize a true feeling of being showed the right path to take as to the denunciation of racism in the justice system. Its a declaration of human rights and the abuse of the system which some people bend to their own convenience. She demonstrates this through the anger expressed from beginning to the mind-boggling conclusion of this poem. Further, the form Audre uses gives use a feeling of being taught a lesson that in form of a poem will touch a worldwide audience. Audre Lordes dramatic feelings of anger and fury towards a corrupt justice system are clearly unheard in front of a biased jury who in turn acquits a guilty, white, racist, child killer. The justice system is extremely corrupt when dealing with a white man convicted of killing a black person even though evidence proves hes guilty.
Whites abuse their power to keep their reputation clean and to further make their rivals look terrible. Racism isnt right, juries are sometimes guilty of crimes even faced with brutal facts: I didnt notice the size or nothing else only the color.( Lorde 797) Words Count: 1, 653.
Bibliography:
Bell -Scott, Patricia. Life Notes: Personal Writings by Contemporary Black Women. New York: Random House, 1994. Christian, Barbara.
Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. Michigan: Zondervan Publishers, 1995. Georgoudaki, Ekaterini. Audre Lorde: Reivising Stereoytypes of Afro-American Womanhood. New York: Harper Collins, 1991. Lorde, Audre. Selected Works.
New York: Harper Collins, 1995. Martin, Joan. The Unicorn Is Black: Audre Lorde In Retrospect. New York: Random House, 1997. Wilson, Anna. Audre Lorde And The African American Tradition: When The Family Is Not Enough.
New York: Random House, 1992..