Writing Power: Identity Complexities and the Exotic Erotic in Audre Lorde's Writing
2004; Volume: 37; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2165-2678
Autores Tópico(s)Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
ResumoAudre Lorde is often cited as an icon for defining and asserting multiple identities in her life as well as in her prose, poetry, and mythic autobiography. Lorde has been tapped as profound urban, American poet by academics, claimed as foremother by diasporic black lesbians, and cited as only canonical black lesbian writer for white academic lesbians. (1) Most often, Lorde's identity as Caribbean descendant is glossed over with mention of her parental heritage, even though numerous critics analyze her use of African diasporic mythology and imagery. Notable exceptions to this occurrence are Trinidad-born Carole Boyce Davies's analysis in her Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of Subject and in Haitian-born Myriam Chancy's Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile. Davies asserts that Lorde resolves her Caribbean identity in her biomythography, Zami. Chancy sees Lorde's and other Afro-Caribbean women's writings as move self-love and self-awareness and toward revolution of consciousness, which could one day affirm beauty and wisdom of Black women and end [their] alienation, which she believes will facilitate the return (219). Both critics find resolution to Lorde's exile status through her positing of cultural, political, and gender-relative subjects in personae, issues, and objectives of her writing. In her essays, especially those in Sister Outsider, Lorde as feminist and cultural theorist provides basis for framework to view society and to assess activist social engagement. She does this from gaze of woman with many identities: Black woman, lesbian, mother, poet, Caribbean descendant, political activist, and teacher, to name only few of. Her poignant and absorbing prose and poetry about surviving breast cancer and facing terminal cancer add other roles. What becomes clear is that throughout her writing life, Audre Lorde tried to honor and celebrate her identities. In particular, her role as activist/intellectual accords with established intellectual tradition of many Caribbean writer activists who, as Jamaica Kincaid says, must leave Caribbean because if they stay home they will stop writing (131). One of most prominent of those intellectuals, C. L. R. James, in describing the could very well be describing Audre Lorde's actual production: [T]he artist is product of long and deeply rooted national tradition.... He appears at moment of transition in national life with results which are recognised as having significance for whole civilised world. By combination of learning (in his own particular sphere), observation, imagination and creative logic, he can construct personalities and relations of future, rooting them in past and present. By that economy of means which is art, he adds to sum of knowledge of world and in doing this, as general rule, he adds new range and flexibility to medium that he is using. (185) Although James cannot cite great Caribbean using his somewhat elitist and male-centered criteria in this 1959 lecture at University of West Indies, Jamaica, his definition portends unique impact of Lorde's major contribution to women's literature and women's studies as poet, novelist, and feminist theorist. With rise of postcolonial theoretical formulations regarding Caribbean literary and artistic output, works of major African Caribbean writers are often analyzed and categorized by well-known theorists; their theory still turns on Western phallocentric (master) or feminist 'gynocentric' (mistress-master) philosophy (Davies 39). However, African Caribbean writer, born in metropolitan center as Lorde was, writes of a place I had never been to but knew out of my mother's mouth (Zami 256). It follows that Lorde's activism as black woman, lesbian activist, and artist in United States becomes representative of individual quests for freedom of choice in romantic and sexual partnerships and, ultimately, as microcosmic glimpses of struggle for human (and democratic) rights (Kemp 76). …
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