A Celebratory Take on Audre Lorde’s Brave, Hard, Unconventional Life

SURVIVAL IS A PROMISE: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Audre Lorde was in an auditorium at Stanford reading “Power,” a poem about Clifford Glover, a 10-year-old African American boy fatally shot by the police in 1973, when the walls began to shake. Lorde did not notice the earthquake, mistaking some audience members’ sudden flight to the exit as an unwillingness to listen. She raised her voice and kept reading. In her canonical poetry collection “The Black Unicorn” (1978), she swears an oath to stick it out: “May I never lose that terror that keeps me brave.”

Anecdotes of endurance like this one enliven “Survival Is a Promise,” a new biography by Alexis Pauline Gumbs of the self-identified “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” who died in 1992. For the past two decades, the gold standard of Lorde biographies has been Alexis De Veaux’s groundbreaking “Warrior Poet” (2004), the only comprehensive resource regarding Lorde’s life aside from her semi-fictionalized autobiography, “Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.” With “Survival Is a Promise” Gumbs, a scholar and poet herself, takes a different tack, delivering an unabashedcelebration of Lorde, a legally blind girl with a stutter and Caribbean roots who became the first Black poet to deliver a solo reading sponsored by the Academy of American Poets.

Unconventional in structure as well as tone, “Survival Is a Promise” features brief chapters arranged by topic — Lorde’s fondness for bees; locks of her hair now preserved at Spelman College; her photographs of St. Croix after Hurricane Hugo — along with Gumbs’s ecological, geological and cosmic reflections. Gumbs explains, for example, Lorde’s symbiotic relationship with her long-term partner Frances Clayton, who gave up a tenured position in psychology at Brown to live with Lorde and her children, through the orientation of sunflowers in relation to the sun.

There is no room for Lorde’s flaws in this book; she is a goddess, an avatar, an icon. As an entry point into Lorde’s poetry, though, Gumbs’s persuasive close readings create a virtuous circle, shining a light on how the life generated the poems, which now elucidate that life. Her goal is to steer us away from the one-liners — “My silences have not protected me. Your silence will not protect you” — that have too often been Lorde’s legacy and focus us instead on the poet’s forthright voice, on the political and emotional resonance of her work: “As a diamond comes into a knot of flame/I am Black because I come from the earth’s inside.”

Lorde was born in 1934 in Harlem to immigrant parents from the island of Grenada. Her light-skinned mother, Linda, worked as a dishwasher until her employer discovered that she wasn’t Spanish and fired her. She later helped Lorde’s father, Byron, who ran a real estate office for Black families excluded from the housing market. In her journal, Lorde wrote, “I had one of those grotesque childhoods that turns a person into a poem.” Her parents expected total obedience from Audre and her two sisters — De Veaux says Audre’s mother beat her almost daily for her “insolence” —though her father also encouraged reading, bringing home pallets of books won for cheap at auctions.