Audre Lorde on St. Croix
Audre Lorde, the radical feminist and award-winning poet, inventor of the term “Blackfullness.” founder of The Women’s Coalition of St. Croix, spent the last seven years of her celebrated life on St. Croix with her partner Gloria Joseph, a St. Croix native. Ms. Lorde’s achievements during her time spent on the island still resonate loudly throughout our community.
In her biomythography “Zami” Ms. Lorde uses her writing style to convey her feelings of mistrust in the mainland. She left the States behind for good in 1989, desiring a change of pace and environment, after struggling with cancer on three separate occasions.
“It became very clear to me I had to change my environment, that I needed a situation where I could continue my work for as long as I was blessed to continue it, but without having to face the pressures of New York. I need to live my life where stepping out each day was not like going to war. I no longer had the desire or stamina to deal with subways, shoveling snow and traffic.”
Along with Ms. Joseph, the two women worked to establish the formation of the Women’s Coalition of St. Croix (WCSC) in 1981. The organization, which now provides advocacy and counseling, focuses on domestic violence and sexual assault, dating violence and stalking, The WCSC has become the most prominent and crucially important organization in its sphere of services on St. Croix.
Of her poetic beginnings, Ms. Lorde commented: “I used to speak in poetry. I would read poems and I would memorize them. People would say, well what do you think, Audre? And I would recite a poem and somewhere in that poem would be a line or a feeling I would be sharing. In other words, I literally communicated through poetry. And when I couldn’t find the poems to express the things I was feeling, that’s what started me writing poetry, and that was when I was twelve or thirteen.”
Ms. Lorde’s poetry was influenced after her move to St. Croix, mainly because her community and surroundings had changed. For Audre Lorde, being a poet was more than merely producing written work, it was about looking at the world in a certain context and involving herself in the community around her.
“Poetry is a way of articulating and bringing together the energies of difference within those communities, so those energies can be used by me and others to better do what must be done,” she stated.
Ms. Lorde wrote about daily life in St. Croix, the injustices of the time, whereby islanders were being paid less by Hess Oil than the white workers who came from the States. She wrote about the communities she belonged to, like the U.S. colonial community and the Black women’s community.
While living in St. Croix, she changed her name during an African ceremony. She took the name, “Gamba Adisa,” which means, “Warrior: She who makes her meaning clear.”
Audre Lorde has been described as a womanist, a lesbian, a Black American feminist, a poet, warrior, survivor and a theorist. Born in the United States in 1934, Ms. Lorde spent most of her life in New York. She was raised by conservative immigrant parents in Harlem and later attended Hunter College and Columbia University. She was known for her poetry and activism against sexism, homophobia and racism. She taught at Hunter College, John Jay College and founded several organizations including Sister in Support of Sisters in South Africa, an organization dedicated to addressing the apartheid and its effects on women. She also founded the Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.
Her accolades include a National Book Award for her 1988 prose collection “A Burst of Light” and the Gay Caucus Book of the Year Award in 1981. She was the New York State Poet Laureate between 1991-1992. As a spoken word artist her delivery has been called powerful, melodic, and intense by the Poetry Foundation. Her poetry and prose largely deal with issues related to civil rights, feminism, lesbianism, illness, disability, and the exploration of Black female identity. She was central to many liberation movements, including second-wave feminism, civil rights, Black cultural movements, and struggles for LGBTQ equality. In particular, her poetry is known for the power of its call for social and racial injustice, as well as its depictions of queer experience and sexuality.
“My sexuality is part and parcel of who I am,” she told Callaloo magazine in an interview. “And my poetry comes from the intersection of me and my worlds.”
Ms. Lorde was a noted prose writer as well as poet. Her account of her struggle to overcome breast cancer and mastectomy, The Cancer Journals (1980), is regarded as a major work of illness narrative.
“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my nose holes - everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!”
During their time together on St. Croix, the two women survived the catastrophic horrors of Hurricane Hugo in 1989. A letter she wrote to a friend in the aftermath of the storm on May 1, 1990 describes the storm’s impact:
Dear Friend,
“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat their mistakes. It is necessary to remember the nightmare experience and extraordinary heroisms of the hurricane. But it is also important that we remember those lessons, both immediate and long term, learned in the bleak days afterward.
No one who experienced it will ever forget that night when the hurricane winds rode us down to a stand and the trees gave up their leaves and the land almost gave up her name. Sometimes at night the wind blows and the storm sounds start to howl and whistle from the sea and I am still afraid…
“We venture forth, wet, trembling, exhausted, and relieved to be alive. The sky over our wrecked and roofless rooms is sodden and wet. The front door is blocked with fallen timbers from the roof. All the glass doors have been blown in and the porch is totally gone except for a concrete slab. The living room is completely open on two sides.
The house is a heartbreaking shambles of almost unrecognizable wreckage, with the kitchen, workroom, dining room, and living room a mass of splintered wood, shattered glass, and jumbled-up sodden papers and foodstuffs. It looks like some mean-spirited and powerful monster has gone on a jealous rampage through our home.”
She ended the letter with a message that seemed to define her life’s purpose:
“The earth is telling us something about our conduct of living, as well as about our abuse of this covenant we live upon. Not one of us can believe himself or herself untouched by these messages, no matter where she or he lives, no matter under what illusion of safety or uninvolvement we may pretend to hide. Each one of us has some power that can be used, somewhere, somehow, to help save our earth.”
“My friend, I wish you were living down the road. Rocky as it may be, it is still also the most beautiful,” she spoke of her adopted St. Croix. “Gloria and I would take our walking sticks after a long day’s work, and the three little bluefish Curtis just brought by, and go and clean them down on the beach, throwing the guts to the seabirds. We’d bring the fish over to your house, and all sit around and have a fish fry over driftwood coals, swapping stories of how it was, and how it is, and how it is surely going to be.”
Audre Lorde - 1834 - 1992
Note: The resoundingly successful art exhibition “Blackfullness” recently closed its long run at the Fort Frederik Museum, in Frederiksted. The term “Blackfullness” was coined by Audre Lorde in 1990 as she wrote in “Above the Wind” about what she loved about her chosen community St. Croix.
“There is a large and ever present Blackfullness to the days here that is very refreshing for me.”
The group show was presented by Commissioner Jean Pierre L. Oriol’s Department of Planning and Natural Resources (DPNR); and curated by Chief Curator Monica Marin of DPNR’s Division of Libraries, Archives and Museums. The exhibition called on artists from across the Virgin Islands, the African-Caribbean Diaspora and/or artists who were connected to the region to submit their work.
A brief review of the exhibition can be found in the current edition of the St. Croix Times under the Gallery News section. Well-known Crucian artist Elisa McKay also published an extensive review in the St. Croix Source.
The St. Croix Times believes Ms. Lorde would have been honored to have her name attached to such a grand exhibition.
