New Biography Opens a Portal Into the Life and Work of Audre Lorde

In Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, Alexis Pauline Gumbs offers an erudite, meticulously researched biography of the legendary Black lesbian feminist poet that simultaneously functions as homage, incantation, critical inquiry, collective exploration and poetic evocation. Gumbs writes that “following Audre’s lead I care more about offering well-researched wonder than I do about closing down possibilities through expertise.”

If Audre Lorde saw her poetry as a “corrective to the dominant narrative of the news,” Gumbs furthers this legacy by refusing to claim ownership of the facts — instead, she opens the text of Lorde’s life and afterlife to wonder. “We need her survival poetics beyond the iconic version of her that had become useful for diversity center walls and grant applications,” Gumbs writes, creating a portrait not just of Lorde but of the worlds that formed her and continue in her name.

This interview centers Audre Lorde’s refusal of hierarchies, and the ongoing legacy of Black, lesbian and feminist resistance. Gumbs talks about resisting the conventional biographical arc to invoke the collective work of memory, and creating a biography that spotlights Audre Lorde’s failures as well as her successes, allowing for a more honest, intimate and wide-ranging exploration.

Mattilda Sycamore: I love how in the book you are still immersed in your research process, you say that you are still searching, and it’s this search that gives the book a momentum, a pulse that feels close to poetry.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs: It’s eternal. My curiosity about Audre Lorde will never end. Maybe it’s because I never got to meet her, or because learning about her always offers me new questions for my own life, but the more I learn about Audre Lorde, the more I wonder. And that’s what I’m hoping happens for the readers of this book. They will certainly learn about Audre Lorde, but I hope they finish the book even more curious about how her life can teach all of us and what she might be saying if she was still living now.

You say that, “This is not a linear biography dragging you from a cradle to a grave.” What does resisting the traditional biographical arc allow you to offer?

Well, I am insisting that the story is not over and it can never end. Audre Lorde is not merely a historical figure; she is a presence. She is a present possibility in our lives. And one of the reasons that her life functions that way is because she didn’t think of her life in linear terms. Though I am very interested in the conditions of her birth and of her death in the midst of a meteor shower she seems to have predicted in her own writing as a teenager, it just cannot contain the aliveness of someone who conjured an “ancestor Audre” to speak to in her own poems. Someone who felt even her cancer cells had subjectivity and destiny. Someone who wrote, “I shall be forever,” and sincerely meant it, but not on an individual scale. Her aliveness persists right now because her aliveness was not about one life. It was about a possible relationship to life itself.

One chapter, “A Litany of Survival,” consists entirely of quotes from Lorde’s students conjuring the experience of being in the room with her — you let their words stand on their own, and you place them in conversation with one another. How does polyvocality relate to survival?

One of the clearest and most sacred ways that Audre Lorde lives today is through her students. Several of those students have become my teachers and so I am a direct witness to how her impact rings through the ways they write and teach and mentor generations. asha bandele was the first of Lorde’s students to mentor me, and then Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Jewelle Gomez, and [others]. And as I listened to Audre’s poetry students in particular, I realized that they are in fact a poem of her survival.

Some of her students even created a group called The Stations Collective, named after a poem by Audre Lorde, and they went all over New York City reciting their teacher’s poetry after she moved away to St. Croix. This is how insistent they were that her voice must be present in their communities. They, along with her other mentees and loved ones, are the people who made Audre Lorde an intergenerational possibility.

All that is to say, yes, polyvocality is crucial to survival. Because survival is not individual. It is collective. The individual cannot survive. But the collective can. Audre knew the secret to eternal life: Let your voice offer other people their own truer, stronger voice. Those voices were really crucial for me to feature in the book. So in that chapter I just curated their harmonies with each other and got out of the way.

So much of this book is about an ongoing legacy of Black, lesbian and feminist resistance, and you do a great job of showing the specificity of Lorde’s life while never separating her from the worlds she lived in.

It is a difficult task, and it does go against the dominant logic of biography to invite readers into the life of a person who did not see herself as separate from her community or from this planet. It also meant I did not have access to the comfortable delusion of my own separation from Audre Lorde. I can only be as separate from her as I can be from air or from water. And I am hoping that readers experience that, too. That Audre’s vulnerability is not an interesting spectacle, it is our own vulnerability. And Audre’s power is not an unachievable exception, it is our own power. As she said to a cheering crowd of over a thousand people gathered to honor her: “That energy you feel? It doesn’t belong to me. It’s yours. You made it, and you can do whatever you want with it.”

You write that Audre Lorde was the first Black writer with mainstream support who consistently proclaimed her sexuality as central to her identity. To her, lesbianism, Blackness and feminism were intertwined — she refused any hierarchy of oppression or celebration, and I wonder if you could speak to this legacy.

This is so important. Because it means that with her life, with her approach to life, with her insistence that every part of herself and every one of us and all life were interconnected, she offered not just an example of what one life could be, she activated a field of possibility. It’s a completely different condition of being. She lived a generative, erotic, Black insistence on freedom that everyone around her insisted was impossible. But because of her integrity, that life was never again impossible. It was never impossible for me.

There are so many intimate and complicated relationships in this book, but two that really struck me were with Barbara Smith and June Jordan, both Black queer women writers who pushed Lorde to be more outspoken in her work and politics.

For Audre Lorde, relationship was everything. It was her primary school. It was her most rigorous way of learning about herself and of understanding the complexity of political possibility. And she cared about the people in her life deeply and passionately. And remember, this is someone who believed that speaking the truth was a life-or-death necessity. And no one’s truth lines up with someone else’s truth perfectly 100 percent of the time. Not even within one person … but that’s another story.

And so there really were no meaningful relationships in Audre Lorde’s life that did not contain both deep collaboration and also conflict at some point. Because Audre always believed that she had something to learn and maybe even something to teach based on feelings of disappointment or disagreement with people she cared about. And it speaks to her respect for Smith and Jordan and many others because she was not really willing to collaborate with someone who she was not also willing to struggle with. In the best cases, those conflicts were clarifying and led to even deeper collaboration. But not always.

One conflict, between June Jordan and poet Adrienne Rich in 1982, speaks very clearly to our current moment. Rich, who was Jewish, publicly identified as a Zionist after the Israeli government-sponsored Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians during the Lebanese Civil War, and Jordan called her out. Barbara Smith took a more subdued stance that Lorde supported, and Jordan found complicit. You write that you have found no evidence that Lorde and Jordan ever reconciled. I wonder if you could speak to this rupture.

Exactly. This particular rupture feels both tragic and telling to me. It was a lasting break and it also speaks directly to the time we are living in now. Those were the major reasons I felt it was important to write about this particular conflict, even though it was the hardest part for me to write. Mostly because I wish it wasn’t true. Somewhere deep inside I still hope that somehow, in some place that has escaped the archival record and the memories of everyone I interviewed, they did reach back and find each other. Because the reality is that Smith, Jordan and Lorde and even Rich all opposed Israeli imperialism. They all believed in the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination. And so this conflict was really about tone, at the end of the day. And it’s not that nuance doesn’t matter. And certainly, among all these poets, the words we use and identify with matter. But what happens when people committed to the same important urgent accountability, the lives and freedom and self-determination of the Palestinian people, for example, get so caught up in policing each other’s approaches that we lose each other as comrades in achieving our shared goals? I see versions of this happening over social media in our movements right now, and unfortunately, it weakens the impact of our solidarity and dissolves our power. We lose each other. But we need each other. And we need the other versions of ourselves and the other worlds our conflicts could teach us if we stayed engaged.

One of the gifts of this book is how you allow Audre Lorde her full humanity — not just her accomplishments, but her failures. Not just her courage, but her fears. How did this impact you as someone who has dedicated your life to uplifting her work?

I have the benefit of writing and teaching about Audre Lorde at a time in which her legacy is secure. Which means, unlike some of the people who have actually made sure that we would have her necessary voice in our lives, I don’t have to protect her from herself. Her work is strong. It has proven itself already by changing countless lives. No one can take that impact away. And it was important to Lorde that we learn from not only her successes but also her mistakes. Her mistakes were important to her. She journaled about them at length, not to vent, but to study what her self-perceived failures could teach her. I think she wanted to offer us more compassion for ourselves, too. We too can learn from our failures and still be powerful.

The reality is, I am dedicated to sharing the life and work of Audre Lorde because her poetry saves my life, transforms my life, helps me reimagine life daily. I think it can do that for anyone. That’s the depth of the rigor she had with herself. And the reality is I am not a perfect person. The poems of a perfect person would not be relevant to my imperfect life. And no one reading this is perfect. That’s why we need the vulnerable, changing, complex poetry of a vulnerable, changing, complex poet to accompany us in our vulnerable, changing, complex relationship to this poem of being alive together. Now.