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Summary
Summary
Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was the author of The Cancer Journals, and an icon of American womanhood, poetry, African American arts and survival. She created a mythic identity for herself that retains its vitality to this day. Alexis De Veaux demystifies Lorde's iconic status, charting her childhood; her marriage to a white, gay man with whom she had two children; her emergence as an outspoken black feminist lesbian poet; and her canonisation as a seminal poet of American literature. Lorde's restless search for a spiritual home finally brought her to the island of St Croix in 1986. estate, personal journals, and interviews with members of Lorde's family, friends and lovers. Assessing the cultural legacy of a woman who personified the civil rights struggles of the twentieth century, De Veaux pays homage to one of the most courageous, singular voices of American letters.
Author Notes
Alexis De Veaux is chair of the Women's Studies Department at the University of Buffalo (SUNY).
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This biography of Audre Lorde, the self-described "black, lesbian, feminist, mother, poet warrior" who died of metastasized breast cancer in 1992, at age 58, captures the complexities of a charismatic figure whose every personal move was indeed political. De Veaux, chair of the women's studies department at SUNY-Buffalo, draws from over 60 of Lorde's unpublished journals as well as testimony from friends and family, though she points out with academic caution in her introduction that this is only a "subjective" story. De Veaux divides her book between Lorde's "two lives," her emergence from a difficult Harlem childhood to a celebrated literary career and, later, her struggle with cancer. Born in 1934 to Caribbean immigrants, Lorde had a persistent, haunting feeling of being an outsider. An early interracial marriage to Ed Rollins brought two children, but Lorde came to find deeper satisfaction in lesbian love, embarking on a decades-long relationship with Frances Clayton and maintaining erotic friendships with activists and poets who informed and shaped her work. By the 1980s, Lorde's writings were internationally recognized, and she continued to articulate her ideas on race, sexuality and gender in groundbreaking ways, eventually bravely documenting her personal experience with breast cancer. This account does not include Lorde's final days, focusing instead on her working years. While De Veaux occasionally slips into academic-speak, she is a skilled biographer, pulling together the contradictory facts of Lorde's public and private personae with ease. Subjective it may be, but Warrior Poet is also a satisfying portrait of a brave life. 16 pages of photos not seen by PW. Agent, Charlotte Sheedy. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Choice Review
As authorized biographer for this important African American writer and activist (1934-92), De Veaux (women's studies, SUNY, Buffalo) had access to a wealth of material, everything from Lorde's 60 journals to the "yellow and white Chinese chiong som" dress she wore at her wedding to legal-aid attorney Edwin Rollins. De Veaux's resources for understanding the "brilliant, intimidating, visionary" feminist include crucial interviews with Rollins; the couple's two children; sociologist Gloria Joseph, Lorde's companion; and such writer friends as Adrienne Rich, Michelle Cliff, and Diane di Prima. Determined to do "justice" to Lorde and also to the "historical record," De Veaux relates both the great generosity and the many infidelities of the charismatic essayist, poet, speaker, and "biomythographer." De Veaux's decision to conclude her account in 1986, six years before Lorde died, seems questionable, although she explains that Lorde's "spiritual homelessness" ended that year when she joined Joseph in the Virgin Islands. De Veaux admits her own unwillingness to "overemphasize the cancer" that overshadowed the author's final years; Lorde herself wrote unflinchingly about her disease in The Cancer Journals (1980). The fullest available discussion of Audre Lorde, this is an absorbing book. ^BSumming Up: Essential. All collections. J. W. Hall University of Mississippi
Kirkus Review
A welcome refresher course on the life of the poet, feminist, lesbian, and political progressive. Resilient, mean, and angry, ur-iconoclast Audre Lorde (1934-92), author of The Cancer Journals, was a force of nature with the power of a hurricane. This black lesbian was quick to point out the racism that ran through the feminist movement, and she didn't miss the fact that leftists didn't necessarily accept homosexuality. All her life, Lorde was very much an outsider, a fact that is important to her biography. She brought a volatile mix of sex, sisterhood, race, and Afro-Caribbean spiritualism--a "house of difference"--into the world of poetry, which was being tossed by its own transformations at that time. De Veaux (Women's Studies/SUNY Buffalo) digs fruitfully and urgently at Lorde's ability to express the power and potency of the erotic as energy for social change, an approach that could be overwhelming but was always worthy of attention. Though at times she writes of her subject's social personal, and sexual life in jarring academese ("Audre's intensified insistence that Ed communicate his innermost feelings was contradictory to his more traditional notions of masculinity, causing him to resist the feminization of his intimate self"), De Veaux also shows great dexterity in painting a very complicated character. Lorde had double standards when it came to commitments, she struggled against "deep suspicion" of other black lesbians, she possessed a subversive ability to disrupt both the hegemony of mainstream publishing and the anti-hegemony of white feminist lesbian publishing. Her biographer displays a clean grasp of her poetry's evolution as it moved from non-imitative to re-creational, encompassing African-based spiritualism and embracing the boundaries of identity while refusing to be confined by them. Perhaps a bit dry for so fiery a character, but the author proficiently succeeds in capturing both Lorde's importance and her complex personality. (16 pp. b&w photos) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Lorde, who died of liver cancer at age 58 in 1992 after surviving breast cancer some years earlier, described herself as a black feminist lesbian poet, but she was much more. Not only did she assume multiple identities (e.g., mother, lecturer, librarian, and political activist), but in 1991 she became the first African American and first woman to be designated New York State Poet. In this revealing portrait, De Veaux (chair, women's studies, SUNY at Buffalo) leaves no stone unturned, revealing that Lorde was an angry woman who battled depression and was in psychoanalysis for quite some time. While she apparently loved white women, she also hated them, suspecting that many were racist. What's more, she dated a Jewish man before coming out as a lesbian and for seven years was married to a white gay man, a union that produced two children. After 17 years with her white partner, Lorde left her and moved to the home of an African American woman in St. Croix, where she spent the last six years of her life. Ultimately, this is a story of both survival and loss and a moving tribute to someone who considered herself an outsider but who achieved success as a highly regarded poet. Recommended for women's studies collections in academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/03.]-Ann Burns, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. xi |
| Acknowledgments | p. xv |
| Life 1 | |
| Part 1 "The Transformation of Silence ..." (1934-54) | p. 3 |
| Part 2 "Poetry Is Not a Luxury" (1954-69) | p. 47 |
| Part 3 "Uses of the Erotic ..." (1970-77) | p. 109 |
| Life 2 | |
| Part 1 "The Black Unicorn" (1978-83) | p. 197 |
| Part 2 "The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance" (1984-86) | p. 333 |
| Epilogue | p. 363 |
| Notes | p. 369 |
| Bibliography | p. 425 |
| Index | p. 437 |
