Thanksgiving Landscapes
The way Lorde describes the natural scenery surrounding Moscow in "Notes From a Trip to Russia" is conspicuously evocative of America, in spite of the Soviet setting. "The trees were Thanksgiving-turned and the sky had that turkey, laden grey, pumpkin color," she writes. These images vividly recall the atmosphere of late autumn for an American reader, and also emphasize Lorde's own American-ness. Her observations are described through an almost exaggeratedly American lens, suggesting that Lorde herself feels increasingly conscious of her own nationality and background in the context of Russia. At the same time, these images hint that Russia and America are not so different as they seem: with a few tweaks to the language used to describe the U.S.S.R., it begins to seem familiar.
Margarine
In "Uses of the Erotic," Lorde vividly describes the type of margarine her family used when she was a child. The white margarine came "with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag." After allowing the margarine to soften, she writes, they would "pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag, releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine." Afterwards, they "would knead it gently back and forth, over and over, until the color had spread throughout the whole pound bag of margarine." Lorde uses this image as a metaphorical representation of the erotic, in which the erotic heightens and intensifies all experience just like the kernel intensifying the color of the margarine. On another level, though, this collection of visual and tactile images simply evokes erotic enjoyment. The description of coloring the margarine is so loaded with sensory detail that it actually gives the reader a sensory, erotic experience, allowing Lorde to demonstrate her point directly.
Morning in Mexico
In her interview with Adrienne Rich, Lorde remembers the first time she felt inspired to write poetry about the world around her, during her days as a student in Mexico. She recalls waking up in pre-dawn darkness and seeing snow on the distant mountaintops. On the morning on which she felt inspired, she remembers, "I came over the hill and the green, wet smells came up. And then the birds, the sound of them I'd never really noticed, never heard birds before." To describe the everyday experience of her life in Mexico, Lorde uses visual images. However, to describe the experience of being overwhelmed by beauty, she pivots to images of sound and smell. By switching the mode of sensory description and in particular by using the highly evocative, emotionally intense language of smell, Lorde recreates the sublimity of this particular experience.
Black self-hatred
A passage in "Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger" uses visual imagery to make Lorde's own teenage body resemble a rugged landscape. She recalls trying to whiten her skin with lemon juice "in the cracks and crevices of my ripening, darkening, body," and loathing the darker skin on certain body parts, including "the folds of my neck and the cave of my armpits!" These descriptions are unusual for portraying a body. Words such as "crevices," "darkening," and "cave" are usually associated with wilderness. Thus, these images demonstrate Lorde's feelings of fear of, and alienation from, her own body, induced by racism and misogyny. Like an untamed landscape, the body in this passage exists outside of its inhabitant's control or understanding, and poses a threat to her safety. At the same time, these images hint at a broader argument, one Lorde makes repeatedly—that Black women possess strength and complexity, often hidden in response to hostility and oppression.
