Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
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Survival is Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
By Alexis Pauline Gumbs
“Survival is Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde By Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Audre Lorde is another writer, like Baldwin, before our current time whose words find deep resonance with the current challenges we face. If one wants to feel the impact of Lorde’s work in the present go to Alexis Pauline Gumbs ig page and watch her video the day after the election. Gumbs takes an Audre Lorde poem, reads it aloud so we can feel the poem’s vibratory energy and breaks it down into a call to action.
I have been reading this book in small doses since early fall. I like Gumbs and Lorde being a slow and steady companion. I did not know Lorde and Baldwin’s proximities in time and space, both born in Harlem a mere ten years apart and yet somehow Lorde seemed to occupy a different historical moment.
Gumbs’ treatment of Lorde is exquisite, it is a speculative biography so deeply informed by research, and a unique combination of scholarly precision and personal engagement. Somehow, Gumbs is able to capture the other-wordly, cosmic aspect of Lorde’s life and work while remaining incredibly grounded - which I suppose must be true to Audre Lorde herself.
As a cis, het, white guy, I will never not want to be learning from the intellectual, creative and spiritual space continuously carved into our culture, especially by Black and Indigenous queer feminists. The path forward is, to me, clearly blazed by artists from these movement spaces. On my TBR list is the anthology from the Combahee River Collective meetings from the mid 1974 -1980. They published a statement in 1977 that can be read here.
I have yet to read Lorde’s Cancer Journals, needing to titrate my diving into cancer literature as it remains a potent topic for me. But, for those of us reading here, it’s essential to name that the idea of wellness as a personal commitment came from Audre Lorde claiming caring for herself as personal, political and spiritual practice after being diagnosed with cancer. Wellness spaces are largely an embarrassment to Lorde’s legacy and to what Audre Lorde had to confront in order to claim this space of self-healing for herself.
-Michael McMahon
