Promise Kept

Audre Lorde is dead. Long live Audre Lorde.

When a French or British monarch dies, it is custom for royal subjects to proclaim this seeming paradox: The queen is dead! Long live the queen! Their aim is to acknowledge the demise of a monarch (an individual) while affirming the persistence of the monarchy (the institution). I say 
fuck European royalism with its vicious hierarchies, its “divine” rights and repressions, its imperial schemes, and the world-historical harm it has wrought upon this Earth—but if there is something to salvage from the awful wreckage of Euro-royalism, it is this willingness to assert life in death.

Audre Lorde died of cancer in 1992 at age fifty-eight, and yet she endures. Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) by Alexis Pauline Gumbs is at once a reverent acknowledgment of Lorde’s death and an ardent insistence on her survival. Gumbs chronicles the life and work of this Black feminist iconoclast whose poetry, prose, teaching, mentorship, activism, and love made and changed worlds. Lorde unleashed “a burst of light,” a blazing beacon that is still aglow. Gumbs’s prose is an exquisite gem that catches the light and reveals Lorde in prismatic color.

The Ecological Lorde

Maybe we should turn to physics rather than royals in search of words to describe the ephemeral-eternal Lorde. The Law of Conservation holds that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It may change form, function, location, and perceptibility—but it is not lost, it does not die. In Survival Is a Promise, Lorde is as much a dynamic energy and force as she is a person. That energy radiates and reverberates beyond biological life and beyond biographical convention. So in addition to the biographical Lorde, we meet the biomythical Lorde (made of dreams and longings as much as flesh and blood—following her 1982 biomythography Zami); the oceanic Lorde (a self-proclaimed daughter of the transoceanic Middle Passage and daughter of the Yoruban sea goddess Yemaya); the botanical Lorde (rising up in the soil of a Staten Island garden, where Lorde lived in the 1970s and ’80s, or a yard in St. Croix, where she spent the last six years of her time on Earth); the photosynthetic Lorde (basking in sunshine and clearing the air to bequeath “us a breathable world,” says Gumbs); the volcanic Lorde (capable of searing heat and seismic eruption—a self-described “angelic and maniacal hysteric fueled by endless furies”); and the astrophysical Lorde (who said that when she died, she’d “go out like a fucking meteor”).

Collectively, these Lordes comprise what we might call the ecological Lorde. After all, ecology maps the interactions and interrelations among living beings and between living beings and their natural environments. Here Lorde emerges as a force of nature and supernature interacting with other forces of nature and supernature, participating in a vast ecosystem of soil, flowers, lovers, art, friends, politics, tectonic plates, classrooms, storm systems, star systems, and more—from the quantum to the intergalactic. In Gumbs’s own words, “this biography will consider what Audre considered and what organized her life: weather patterns, supernovas, geological scales of transformation, radioactive dust.” This is as much ecology as biography—as much the story of a teeming, bustling, symbiotic world as an account of a single life.

First, Death

After a brief prefatory chapter, Gumbs introduces Lorde: “At her first funeral, Audre sat in the front row with tears in her eyes.” Gumbs is describing a 1985 ceremony inaugurating the Audre Lorde Women’s Poetry Center at Hunter College in New York City. When the center launched, Lorde was joyfully alive—while also enduring breast cancer and the prospect of imminent death. Those proceedings resembled a funeral in several respects: People came together to eulogize her, to look back upon her life, to extol her achievements, and to honor her legacy. (And that legacy is magnificent: Lorde was poet laureate of New York who published over a dozen dazzling poetry collections; she was an essayist and memoirist whose sentences became slogans for liberation movements; she was a celebrated professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Hunter College; she was a co-founder of the groundbreaking Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press; and she was a fervent freedom fighter in struggles for racial, sexual, and ecological justice.) That Gumbs opens with a funeral rather than a birth initiates the book’s refusal of neat and normative timelines—“this is not a normative biography linearly dragging you from a cradle to a grave,” Gumbs writes—and reminds us that death can constitute a beginning. Likewise, the subsequent chapter opens, “When Audre Lorde began her afterlife on November 17, 1992,” leading with death and treating it as birth into an afterlifeworld.

Gumbs sections Survival Is a Promise into ten parts with fifty-eight chapters. The number of chapters coincides with the number of years in Lorde’s biological life, but there is no one-to-one correspondence between chapter and year. Many chapters light up briefly on a scene, event, person, question, or insight that reveals something of Lorde and the worlds where she lived.

For example, we glimpse Lorde’s youth in Harlem as the child of Caribbean immigrants and the youngest of three sisters. We learn that her parents, Linda and Byron, were hard on her—perhaps to harden her against the racism and misogyny arrayed against Black girls in 1930s and 1940s America. We follow her teenage adventures with a group of self-avowed outcasts at Hunter College High School for Girls who called themselves “the Branded.” We behold her burgeoning poetic prowess and read her early publications in Seventeen magazine. We regard her brief marriage to Edwin Rollins—a gay white man who was her friend—in a union that brought the birth of her children, Elizabeth and Jonathan. We study her achievements as a teacher and mentor to college students. We observe her global impact as artist, activist, and community-builder. We witness her long battle with cancer and the myriad ways it transformed her thinking and praxis. We accompany her journeys to St. Croix (where she lived with her lover, Gloria Joseph) and Germany (where she built community with Afro-German feminists and sought experimental cancer treatment) in the final years of her life.

The list above is too schematic to capture the narrative innovation of Survival Is a Promise. The book moves in directed spirals, orbiting around themes—like the danger in silence or the clarity that comes with grief—even as those themes migrate, undulate, and shapeshift across time and space. These spirals might trace the path from a line of poetry scribbled in a high school journal to the revival of the words in a canonical poem published decades later, and then back to the scribble. These spirals might carry us from that Poetry Center dedication ceremony, back to the decades-long poetry career that earned Lorde the honor of a namesake center, and then forward again to the ceremony. As I ponder the spirality of the text, I find myself wondering: Why do we say spiraling out of control? Sure, airplanes spiral out of control, but spirals are also often consistent with cosmic order: DNA helixes, planetary orbits, galactic migrations, kinky hair, and falling leaves that twirl before re-joining the earth from which they sprang—all of these entail spirals. Meanwhile, there is a violence in disciplining a life story into a straight line—narrow and rigid and flat.

Not limited in scope to Lorde’s public life, official roles, and formal accomplishments, the book also takes up Lorde’s inner lives. Gumbs devotes extended attention to Lorde’s wishworlds and dreamscapes, her artistic imagination, her longings for social transformation, her musings and worries. Take Lorde’s childhood, for instance. Gumbs writes deftly about Lorde’s fear of the dark, her conversations with an invisible guardian angel, her love of nursery rhymes (early models of poetic possibility), and her dreamy journal entries about high school crushes and family turmoil. Gumbs also details Lorde’s childhood visual impairment, which informed her lifelong poetic and political propensities. As an adult, Lorde remarked, “I’m functionally blind at any ten feet, but I have a focal point that’s about three inches in front of my eyes . . . I have a very microscopic vision. I love to look deeply into things.” The limits of Lorde’s optometric vision stoked a critical looking practice, a talent for poring carefully over the words and worlds around her.

Likewise, the book attends to tiny details like the lack of any precipitation the night Lorde was born; or the orange blossom lace embellishment on her mother’s wedding dress; or the notes Lorde scribbled on the back of a flyer for a Kitchen Table fundraiser; or poet Pat Parker’s request for advice on how to cook beets in a letter between the dear friends. This attention to the small does not diminish the book’s big-spiritedness. In fact, this focus contributes to the magnanimity of the work, its readiness to honor and tend to the little things. Gumbs knows that minor matters help craft who we become. Much of the book is a symphony of minor notes.

Lorde enjoyed many lovers across her fifty-eight years, but I want to home in on two remarkable romances that Gumbs describes at length. Lorde met Frances Clayton in the late 1960s at Tougaloo College, a small historically Black institution in Mississippi where Lorde was poet-in-residence and Clayton was a visiting professor in psychology. The Black poet and white psychologist fell in love, returned to New York City together, built a bustling life on Staten Island, raised the two children Lorde had already borne, and also raised a garden of fruit, vegetables, and flowers. Then there is Gloria Joseph, an Afro-Caribbean feminist scholar and freedom fighter who was Lorde’s lover, partner, and caregiver in the final years of Lorde’s life. The two cultivated love and life on another island, St. Croix, where they kept bees, harvested coconuts, gathered shells, and photographed the devastation of Hurricane Hugo in 1989. Remarkably, with both of these lovers, Lorde spent much time tending the earth. 

Lorde’s friendships are central to this story, too. For the warrior poet, friendship was a praxis and nexus where art, love, education, organizing, and collaborative world-making all flourished. Lorde befriended many poets in those fifty-eight years: Pat Parker, Diane Di Prima, Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, Essex Hemphill, and Joseph Beam among them. It’s thrilling to see these names juxtaposed, like the line-up of an epic anthology of warrior poetry that I long to read. The details of Lorde’s relation to June Jordan are especially instructive—in part, because of Jordan’s own iconicity as poet. But there is another reason their friendship journey feels especially poignant today. For all their affinity and solidarity as Black queer feminist poets who lived with cancer, the two reached an impasse over an issue that still divides progressive communities: the ongoing atrocities in Palestine. While both advocated for Palestinian freedom from Israeli settler colonialism, Jordan believed that Lorde’s position on the crisis was far too conciliatory—or worse, “cowardly.” After this rift, it appears that the two never revived their previous closeness. If, on some register, their friendship “died,” it persisted in an afterlife of mutual gratitude: though the two apparently lost contact, they continued to read and teach and extol one another’s work.

Just as death is decisive to this chronicle of Lorde’s life, several deaths were decisive in shaping Lorde’s perspective and praxis. For instance, Lorde was sixteen when her adolescent friend and lover, a Black girl named Genevieve, died by suicide. Lorde spent much of her life searching for signs from the girl, listening and looking out for subtle messages from an afterlife. In the course of that search, Lorde would find and found poetic worlds; she wrote a bounty of plaintive poems and lyrical eulogies for Genevieve across the span of decades. Two months before her own death, Lorde would reverently and gleefully recite a poem about Genevieve while gathered with friends in Berlin.

In 1953, Lorde’s father died of a stroke. The poet later insisted that his death was a consequence of “repressed suffering,” a “repression that she believe[d] exploded her father’s blood vessels.” He was a brooding man who harbored anger at the indignities of anti-Blackness and colonialism—and a man who steeped his rage in silence. His life and death became poignant object lessons for Lorde, shaping her practices of mothering and activism, both infused with “her desire to create another way of life beyond her father’s silences.” She believed that silence would not protect you; worse yet, it could kill you.

Later, the murder of Clifford Glover—a ten-year-old, ninety-pound Black boy who cops shot in the back in 1973 because he supposedly “fit the description” of a robbery suspect—outraged and haunted Lorde. His death compelled her to resign her post teaching English to law enforcement trainees at John Jay College. Though she once believed her work could intervene in the culture of law enforcement, her conscience demanded divestment from the school. According to Gumbs, the boy “became one of Audre Lorde’s most important poetry teachers,” revealing “new information about her rage and its potential in her embodied response to his death.” In other words, a deceased child trained Lorde in the “Uses of Anger” eight years before she would deliver her iconic 1981 speech of the same name.

In one of the book’s most moving passages, Gumbs ponders a poem that the young boy transcribed in his elementary school classroom—a Halloween-themed poem written from the perspective of a jack-o-lantern plucked from a pumpkin patch, carved into a smile, and set on display. Gumbs uses lines from the poem as the basis for a trenchant meditation on the child’s death and life, on anti-Blackness, on police violence, on childhoods stolen, on the sanctity of teaching, ono the sanctity of poetry. Like Lorde, Gumbs devises a poetics to process and memorialize Glover’s passing. Both the biographed and biographer know that grief devastates and also motivates; it paralyzes and also galvanizes.

Poetic Science

Gumbs’ book deserves and demands attention in Poetry not merely because its subject is the preeminent warrior poet—but also because it is an epic, prose-poetic rumination on a life. Although it is not formatted in verse, the book mobilizes an intricate poetics to tell Lorde’s story. Throughout Survival Is a Promise—as in many poems that move me—beauty is not treated as distraction or decoration but rather is honored as a vessel for revelation. Throughout the book—as in much of the poetry I admire—meaning opens to myriad possibilities rather than shrinking into a definitive, solitary answer. By the author’s own admission, a sense of “wonder” prevails over a posture of “expertise” between these covers (though Gumbs, an independent scholar and award-winning author of multiple books, is an expert whose tremendous research skills and writerly talent are on vivid display). Lorde’s legacy is too often reduced to curt phrases plucked out of context: the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, your silence will not protect you, poetry is not a luxury. Against this tendency to oversimplify, Gumbs provides extensive context, nuance, and close reading of Lorde’s statements. Whether regarding verses of poetry, entries in journals, published essays, interview footage, or excerpts of letters, Gumbs approaches them all with the same meticulous attention.

Beyond her extraordinary skill as a poet and reader of poetry, it turns out that Gumbs is a sort-of scientist too. She describes scientific phenomena with both beautiful and pedagogical precision; her meditations on such varied phenomena as T-cells, hair, and volcanic activity all exemplify this poetic science. Concerning T-cells, for example, Gumbs writes, “I think of T-cells as the warrior poets of our blood, constantly transforming what we’ve been through into useful information toward survival.” In this instance, she illuminates affinities between T-cells and warrior poets—both guardians of well-being—and honors the role of poetry as a practice of self-preservation. On the matter of hair, Gumbs muses, “What is hair? The afterlife of skin. The cells that keep on growing even after we die. The body’s process of transforming and leaving a trail. Hair is evidence.” Here, she regards hair as a map and archive of a life that continues its work even beyond death. Regarding a volcano in the Caribbean Sea, Gumbs declares, “Kick’ em Jenny would be an island now if not for what geologists call ‘ancestral collapse.’ Instead, she is an underwater volcano falling in on herself again and again. At any moment she could cause a region-wide tsunami . . . Kick’ em Jenny has refused to become an island. Her refusal is cinematic, destabilizing. Why won’t she cool down?” Gumbs imagines the volcano, already feminized in local parlance, as a feminist troublemaker practicing refusal. (For her part, Gumbs is a self-proclaimed “Black feminist troublemaker.”)

As I read, it dawned on me that publishers should commission poets to collaborate in writing science textbooks. Poets might marshal their knack for detail, metaphor, beauty, wonder, complex description, and sensuousness into systematic descriptions of biophysical phenomena and natural worlds. Poetry and Popular Science should co-convene a hybrid issue on the poetics of science and invite Gumbs to write the introduction.

We

Some people call Black women queens as a gesture of affirmation and veneration. As for me, I do not want or need to liken a Black woman to a monarch in order to honor her. After all, a queen is only a queen when she has subjects and minions who obey and bow before her. I want to build a world where one needn’t be vaunted as royalty to be powerful and free. I seek a world where everyday people are empowered and liberated—not because of rarefied bloodlines or grandiose titles, but for the sheer fact that they are people. Lorde famously described herself as “lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” but I have never heard nor read her claim the “queen” honorific. Survival Is a Promise yields far more capacious titles for Lorde. In addition to “lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” this book reveals a Lorde who is akin to flower, volcano, tree, star, whale, honeybee, diamond, meteor, burst of light, and more.

It might also be tempting to call Lorde a singular artist, a singular Black feminist, in order to honor her remarkable gifts and achievements. However, Gumbs reminds us that Lorde was also plural, numerous, countless. Lorde was part of a we, not a royal we but a common we comprised of Black diasporans, working-class folks, Third World women, poets, queer people, liberation-seekers, world-makers, lovers, and survivors who “were never meant to survive.” Gumbs knows herself to be part of that we, too. Whereas biographies are frequently written from a feigned position of objectivity—as though the author must disappear and dematerialize their body in order to make space for their biographical subject—Gumbs announces her affectionate affinity for Lorde. She emphasizes her personal embrace of a Black feminist warrior poet ethos, her loving labor in crafting the book, and her membership in a beloved community of Lordeans. Regarding Lorde’s eternal life, Gumbs writes:

I cannot leave this legacy to chance. I want Audre Lorde’s legacy to reach the waiting hands of generations. Because my life cannot be my life without honoring her life. Lorde’s writing, her impact on our movements, her fierce offering of love, are elemental in my life. The universe from which my every breath is made. And I am not the only one.

Lorde is utterly indispensable to Gumbs’s sense of self and practice of creativity. Likewise, this biography is not merely a work of research or scholarship: it is a practice of love and care.

Indeed, Survival Is a Promise manifests Black feminist care that is both meticulously careful (full of rigor) and lavishly caring (full of love). It is crucial to situate this biography in a suite of recent biopoetic works authored by Gumbs in which she marshals rigorous and loving attention to Black women cultural workers and world-makers. These include Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (2016) in honor of Black feminist theorist and cultural critic Hortense Spillers; M Archive: After the End of the World (2018), in honor of the Trinbagonian spiritual seeker and Black queer theorist M. Jacqui Alexander; Dub: Finding Ceremony (2020), in honor of Jamaican anti-colonial philosopher and novelist Sylvia Wynter; and the forthcoming June Jordan: Love Is Lifeforce, about its namesake poet and freedom fighter. Gumbs is creating an expansive archive, practice, and model of this Black feminist care.

With all its attention to the ecological Lorde, this biography also belongs in the burgeoning traditions of Black and feminist ecocriticism. Gumbs explains, “Audre referenced the natural world in her poems, not as a metaphor for human relations but as a map for how to understand our lives as part of every manifestation of Earth.” In Lorde’s own words, “The earth is telling us something about our conduct of living as well as our abuse of the covenant we live upon.” This is a call for environmental justice, a petition for humans to honor the natural worlds we inhabit, a warning against the wanton defilement of Earth, a reminder that our lives are at stake. Central to Black and feminist ecocriticism is the knowledge that women, Black people, poor people, and Indigenous people are especially vulnerable to ecological degradation and catastrophe; that our environmental crisis is a feminist issue, a labor issue, a queer issue, a decolonial issue, and a Black liberation issue; that insights from these communities and movements are essential for saving us from extinction.

Survival Is a Promise is biography, poetry, eulogy, elegy, ecology, and testimony. It does not merely describe Lorde’s survival; it bears witness to her survival. Audre Lorde teaches us that “if we do what we need to be doing then we will leave something that continues beyond ourselves. And that is survival.” This book is fruit and proof of her life: a promise kept. It is also a reminder that we were never meant to survive—and yet, improbably, miraculously, eternally, here we are.