This is not a normative biography linearly dragging you from a cradle to a grave” writes self-described “queer Black troublemaker” Alexis Pauline Gumbs, whose new biography of Audre Lorde attempts to trace the life of the pioneering Black feminist thinker through the land, air and water that surrounded her. Gumbs takes her lead from the smallest details of Lorde’s poems and the earthly conditions that influenced her: she uses “supernovas, geological scales of transformation and radioactive dust” to give shape to the events of Lorde’s life, maintaining that “the scale of the life of the poet is the scale of the universe”.
In doing so she reckons with an under-theorised element of Lorde’s poetry – her consistent engagement with nature. Gumbs asks: how might we think of Audre Lorde, not as a hollow symbol of Black feminism, but as a thinker whose own survival in a world premised on her extinction required her to take up the task of self-defence through poetry and political action? She approaches Lorde as one would a mentor, mother, sister, auntie, lover – with curiosity and mutual respect, through 58 fragmentary chapters to be approached by the reader in any order.
