Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Allen Lane, £12.99
by Henry Bell
Gumb begins this lavishly published and lushly detailed biography of the great poet, teacher and civil rights activist Audre Lorde, with an image. She describes herself lying on the floor, surrounded by a halo of books: Audre Lorde’s hurricane-stained copies of her own work. Gumb is taking a selfie, revelling in these physical relics entrusted to her by Lorde’s lover, in Lorde’s memory. The physicality, the reverence, the direct link to Lorde, and the poetry of Gumb’s writing all tell us that we are in safe hands, as is Lorde’s library and her legacy.
This is a book that is in many ways more than a biography. It is a collection of poem-essays in which Gumb is working in tribute to and in dialogue with Lorde and her life. There is sometimes the feeling of a poet approaching a master, and it is possible that at times Gumb’s reverence for Lorde has her turn away from serious critical engagement, but this is rare and overall the relationship of biographer to subject is enriched by the clear devotion that is felt. We are on a journey with Gumb deep into Lorde’s poetry and politics and her enthusiasm – as all sincere enthusiasm always is – is infectious.
Where Gumb perhaps does not want to challenge the poet’s work, she is not afraid to challenge Lorde’s own interpretation of her life. Though Lorde explains her non-verbal early life as a choice, Gumb interrogates this and posits a more profoundly disabled childhood, in which the screams and determination of Lorde were a response to needs that were neither expressed nor met. Gumb follows this thread into Lorde’s later life — drawing out her fury at those who have a voice but will not use it, and her deep empathy for those who are not heard.
As Lorde wrote in Litany for Survival:
when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.
Today Lorde’s image is perhaps best known for its place on “diversity centre walls and grant applications” – a sort of byword for a now deeply commodified and co-opted politics of revolutionary self-care. A recent headline in the satirical women’s magazine Reductress reads “‘Joy Is an Act of Resistance!’ Says White Woman Who Engages in No Other Acts of Resistance'”. And yet beneath this defanged and denatured version of Lorde’s legacy is her deep poetics of survival and politics of liberatory justice that is in fact essential. It is this legacy that Gumb rightly recovers.
Throughout the book Gumb deploys the hurricane as a symbolic force in Lorde’s life and in the life of the black US. The same force that produces the hurricane brought the trade winds on which European slavers travelled and by which they transported the black enslaved people. It is the same force which creates the fertile land of the Caribbean and the southern US. It is as storms that Gumb has the Harlem Renaissance, The Combahee River Collective and the New Jewel Movement arrive. Hurricanes punctuate and frame the book.
Audre Lorde in 1980. Credits: K Kendall/CC
This deep connection between climate, place, people, poetry and politics is central to the book and to Lorde’s work. It cannot help but make one thing of what industrialised capital is now doing to supercharge those forces through climate change. The planet, Lorde says, is a covenant, the Earth is a relationship.
Such clarity is typical. Audre’s position as an eternal outsider – a black professor in the white academy, a lesbian poet in black literature, a disabled activist in an ableist society – gives her the perverse gift of truly being able to see the world around her. The systemic violence of her life could have engendered great bitterness, as any one of the many incidents of racism, homophobia and misogyny recounted by Gumb demonstrate, but instead they were a wellspring of poetry and empathy.
Survival is a Promise is a book of micro-essays, episodic glimpses of Lorde’s life. The book follows the logic of what interests Gumb, and what interested Lorde. It is a method that is often enthralling and occasionally infuriating depending on whether the reader and author are on the same page. It could be described as a black feminist, materialist, eco-poetic methodology, but above all it is a human approach to biography and one fitting of a deeply human subject.
Often it is unclear what the purpose of a political or poetic biography is, how are we supposed to relate the life to the work, what are we supposed to take from both. Here Gumb leaves us in no doubt: she tells us that Lorde wanted people to learn from her mistakes, and to learn how to learn from their own mistakes. She wanted movement, progress, and the practice of acquiring wisdom. Gumb undoubtedly carries that work forward.
