The Afterlives of Audre Lorde
Even if you don’t know who Audre Lorde is, you’ve probably encountered her ideas in the world or, at the very least, scrolled past them on social media.
Lines from her poems and essays are just as likely to appear in an Instagram post as on a protest sign or in a pamphlet for an academic conference: “We were never meant to survive.” “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” “Your silence will not protect you.” Lorde’s most oracular line, however, is not as popular, though she said it frequently into her later years. “What I leave behind has a life of its own.” She knew that her work was shifting consciousness.
Expanding it. And that it would outlive her. Lorde rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s as one of the most lauded thinkers and multigenre writers of her time.
She penned ferocious essays on lesbian parenting and healing Black self-hatred. She traveled extensively and wrote about what she saw, connecting the struggles of Black women living under apartheid in South Africa to the United States’ invasion of Grenada and articulating new visions of feminism.
