Audre Lorde - A Burst of Light: and Other Essays

A BURST OF LIGHT

and Other Essays

Audre Lorde

Foreword by

Sonia Sanchez

Mineola, New York

To that piece of each of us which refuses to be silent.

Copyright

Copyright 1988 by Audre Lorde

Foreword 2017 by Sonia Sanchez

Cover illustration 2017 by Jen Keenan

Excerpt from Paul Robeson Gwendolyn Brooks.

First published in Family Pictures, Broadside Press, in 1970.

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Ixia Press edition, first published in 2017, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by Firebrand Books, Ithaca, New York, in 1988. A Foreword by Sonia Sanchez has been specially prepared for this edition.

International Standard Book Number

ISBN-13: 978-0-486-81899-3

ISBN-10: 0-486-81899-3

IXIA PRESS

An imprint of Dover Publications, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

81899301 2017

www.doverpublications.com/ixiapress

Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge with gratitude all the women whose loving feedback helped make the essay A Burst of Light happen. In particular, Frances Clayton, Blanche Cook, Clare Coss, Adrienne Rich, and Gloria Joseph; with special thanks to Judy D. Simmons of Essence magazine for her skilled and insightful editing, and Nancy K. Bereano of Firebrand Books for her patience and support.

Contents

Sadomasochism:
Not About Condemnation

I Am Your Sister:
Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities

Turning the Beat Around:
Lesbian Parenting 1986

A Burst of Light:
Living with Cancer

Foreword

That time

we all heard it,

cool and clear

Warning, in music-words

devout and large,

that we are each others

harvest:

we are each others

business:

we are each others

magnitude and bond.

Paul Robeson by Gwendolyn Brooks

My Dear Sister Audre,

It is today. Not yesterday. Hoy ha llegadotoday has arrived. Sometimes I have gotten lost in this journey called today, where nothing moved, when I gathered up the countrys hysteria, when I looked at the worlds delirium, when I saw America try to disagree with its blood. But I always remembered your voice, feasting on love and intellect, across telephone wires as you talked, your voice a prayer in exile, pushing past the debris of human sacrifice.

A new century appeared, my dear Sistera fragile bird caught in its past wing flow. This new century arrived and we saw death, generational death, peeling our skins down to our blood plasma. And I asked you question after question, distracted by the scandal of billionaires accessorizing their flesh with newly minted coins. Where are we on this food chain of life to be eaten so easily century after century, decade after decade? Are these meditations of insane men and women from a takeout menu, imperializing our taste buds til we sweat, crouched junkies of an American dream, vomiting into the ears of our unborn fetuses? Are we like our ancestors, fated to end hanging from a morning sky of death?

I return to A Burst of Light for light. Communion. I need to remember the solitary earthquake of your breath, making us remember our blood.

Lo Pursimo: Your words explaining this American apartheid of 1986, still resounding in our 2017 ears. You remind us again how slow the economic process has been for the majority of African Americans in America and Africans on the continent. You remind us again how fast Black blood has been shed on both continents. We remember names we had forgotten: Eleanor Bumpers, a 66-year-old Black grandmother killed by two shotgun blasts from the NYPD during eviction proceedings; Allene Richardson, 64 years old, gunned down by a Detroit policeman; 10-year-old Clifford Glover shot in Queens by a policeman in front of his stepfather; 15-year-old Randy Evanss brains blown out while he sat on a stoop talking to a friend. We see that Black lives have never mattered to America, to Africa.

Lo Profundo: Sister Maya Angelou wrote about the privilege of being a Black woman. She said it was not a passive exercise; it required work that at times could be painful. Pain often accompanies privilege, she added. And your privilege of being a Black lesbian came with pain dancing in the eye of your pores. In your clarity about Black women uniting in spite of their pain, in spite of their sexual differences, we see the logic and power of all Black women, all queer women, all women, organizing, coming together in order to live. Survive. Be. Remember our humanity. Indeed: Make God finally break the habit of being man.

Lo Pursimo: We hear you questioning your life. Days. Hours. The questions and answers you discovered as you began your journey with liver cancer. We hear the sound of bravery in your teeth. And we store in our blood the memory of your voice. Your genius, your words linking continents, making us broaden our minds.

Lo Profundo: Sister Grace Boggs said: My revolution is to share my/ our love, beauty and our history[herstory], experiences, successes and failuresof exits and entrances, to make space for our souls.

In Japan its said that the words of the soul reside in a spirit called kotodama, or the spirit of words, and that the act of speaking words has the power to change the world. Your words, my dear Sister, helped us to change the world. You rescued us from the tyranny of racism, sexism, homophobia, class and economic poverty... You. Prodigious singer. Of life and actions. And words...

finally... to

remember... you gave

light to our eyes.....

In love/struggle/peace Sister Sonia Sanchez

June 8, 2017

Sadomasochism : Not About Condemnation

An Interview with Audre Lorde by Susan Leigh Star

Without a rigorous and consistent evaluation of what kind of a future we wish to create, and a scrupulous examination of the expressions of power we choose to incorporate into all our relationships including our most private ones, we are not progressing, but merely recasting our own characters in the same old weary drama.... S/M is not the sharing of power, it is merely a depressing replay of the old and destructive dominant/ subordinate mode of human relating and one-sided power, which is even now grinding our earth and our human consciousness into dust.

Audre Lorde

I SPENT JUNE and July of 1980 in rural Vermont, an idyllic, green, vital world, alive in a short summer season. I teach there summers and winters. One afternoon, Sue (another teacher) and I lay sunbathing on a dock in the middle of a small pond. I suddenly imagined what it would be like to see someone dressed in black leather and chains, trotting through the meadow, as I am accustomed to seeing in my urban neighborhood in San Francisco. I started laughing as one of the parameters of the theater of sadomasochism became clear: it is about cities and a created culture, like punk rock, which is sustained by a particularly urban technology.

Later in the week, Sue and I drove over bumpy dirt roads far into the Northeast Kingdom, the most rural area of Vermont, to interview Audre Lorde. Again, I was struck by the incongruity of sitting in the radiant sunshine, with radiant Audre and Frances and Sue, listening to bobwhites and watching the haze lift far down in the valley, and the subject of our conversation seemed to belong to another world.