A new biography of Audre Lorde by the poet and scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs is only the second full-length text treatment of the author, who was born in 1934, 16 months after Plath, in Harlem. Taking its title from a passage in a draft of Lorde’s 1984 essay “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger,” Gumbs’s layered and original Survival Is a Promise deeply engages with Lorde’s poetry and prose. It also takes a full accounting of her life, including aspects that another biographer might consider ephemeral. Major figures and events are held up for analysis alongside false starts, mistakes, words stricken from typewritten manuscripts. Gumbs finds meaning in the locks of shorn hair she discovers in Lorde’s archive and in the fauna of St. Croix, where the author drew her final breaths. Foregrounding the often-difficult conditions that shaped her, Gumbs’s book revels in Lorde’s lush multiplicity, moving through the ebbs and flows of her life with both precision and lyricism and expanding the limits of what a biography can be and hold and feel like.
Lorde was a prolific creator. In her 58 years, she wrote enough poetry to fill a dozen collections, many essays and speeches, and a memoir she called a biomythography; she also co-founded the historic feminist press Kitchen Table to promote women writers of color. She held a central belief in the liberatory possibility of language, which had been instilled in her early on by her Bajan book-collecting father and a Black librarian at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. (That branch is now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.)
Lorde was an outcast in her family (because she was the darker-skinned daughter of a woman who sometimes passed for white) and at her elite high school (because she was Black). Perhaps to soothe these cuts to her soul, she pursued connections with chosen family, and equipped herself with knowledge of ancestors, spirits, nature, and the stars. Other poets were a guiding force. At Hunter College High School, Lorde worked on the literary magazine alongside the future Beat poet Diane di Prima. With a group of other outcast girls, the two held séances on the floor of a schoolroom, where they conjured the ghosts of dead Romantics such as Lord Byron and John Keats and called themselves “the Branded.” “The poetic lineage Lorde and the Branded claimed was compelling and visionary and bleak,” Gumbs writes. “They identified with the fallen.”