Summary
In this long interview with the feminist writer Adrienne Rich, Lorde discusses a broad range of topics including her life as a teacher, her relationship to language, and the importance of intuition.
She explains to Lorde how, in her younger years, she might recite part of a poem as the answer to a question asked of her, causing Rich to muse that poetry was, for Lorde, a type of language. In fact, Lorde says, she was driven to write when she realized she needed to express things and could not find a preexisting poem with which to do so. She recalls realizing one day while living in Mexico, when she was nineteen, that the overwhelming beauty around her could in fact be put into words, and perhaps demanded to be put into words by virtue of its beauty. Only through writing poetry about her feelings, Lorde says, did they feel real and true. When Rich asks Lorde about her teaching career, Lorde explains that teaching is a survival technique, requiring the teacher to stay alive in order to learn and teach. In the midst of a chaotic period in her family life and career, she was invited to teach as a poet-in-residence at Tougalou College in Mississippi. Lorde had once wanted to go South as a freedom rider, but did not after a friend's mother begged Lorde and the friend not to for their own safety. Now, years later at Tougalou, a historically Black college, Lorde nurtured close relationships with students and emphasized emotional openness. Previously, in Black artistic circles and her own family, she says, her art, her sexuality, and her interests had been tolerated but always considered mere phases or oddities. Her closeness with students at Tougalou felt revelatory and convinced her that she needed to teach afterwards.
Shortly after, while her old Tougalou students were visiting New York, Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed. In the ensuing emotional uproar, Lorde accepted a teaching job at the S.E.E.K program, a compensatory-education program in New York. Teaching grammar alongside poetry and writing, Lorde realized that grammar is inexplicable from artistic language, and that mastering it can be liberatory. Next, Lorde taught mostly-white students at Lehmann college about racism in preparation for their teaching in New York public schools. She saw that these students were unaware of how their attitudes towards Black children affected them emotionally. Moreover, Lorde wondered about how Black teachers, seeking to teach in white-run public schools, adopted the ideals and language of the oppressor in their dealings with Black children. Lorde also recalls watching Black and Puerto Rican student protestors at City College, and feeling helpless at the exploitation and objectification of the women among them: younger women seemed unwilling to engage in feminist actions. Lorde then began teaching at John Jay, a former police college with largely Black and Puerto Rican incoming students. Conflicts there led some of her enemies to try to expose her as a lesbian, which made her more eager to openly claim her identity as a defense. Lorde argues that men and women within oppressed communities have the ability to weaponize their shared oppressions against one another rather than work together to overcome them.
Lorde then addresses critics who claim that she reinforces a stereotypical image of the "emotional dark female." Rationality and emotion are not dichotomous or separated, and to think of them as such, says Lorde, is a patriarchal approach. Both men and women possess the internal "Black Mother," though women may to a greater extent, especially since men are taught to ignore and repress this poetic impulse. Words and concepts that have been used to denigrate women (like eroticism and emotion) must be reclaimed and rehabilitated. Rich mentions to Lorde that she often requires "documentation" to support Lorde's intuitive ideas, since, otherwise, the gap between Black and White women's experiences is simply too difficult to overcome. Lorde argues that requests for "documentation" often feel like expressions of doubtfulness, while Rich argues that they are instead requests for help, to aid in her understanding of Lorde's experiences. Lorde then describes her reaction to a white police officer's killing of a Black child during her years at John Jay, and the subsequent trial, in which the jury was composed of eleven white men and one Black woman, leading to the writing of her poem Power. She also recalls learning about her cancer diagnosis, and realizing that she had no models of behavior, since no Black lesbian feminists with cancer had written about their experience prior to herself. The realization that only she herself could offer help in that situation prompted Lorde's speech at the MLA conference about "The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action." Rich comments on the connection between this sentiment and Lorde's earlier point about writing poems to express thoughts she could not find in other existing poems, bringing the interview full circle.
Analysis
In this interview— just as in the previous two pieces in this collection— Lorde is directly communicating with and responding to a fellow thinker and writer. In this case, of course, she is doing so not through an open letter or other written medium, but through a recorded interview, edited and transcribed for readers. The tone of this piece, though, is altogether different from the previous two. Lorde and Rich are evidently close friends as well as fellow poets and feminists. Rich frequently references Lorde's poetry and prose work, making clear that she is familiar with her writing, but the two also speak often of their personal relationship and reference conversations they have had and comments the other has made in passing. This makes the interview a rewarding read for several reasons. It provides a fresh look at Audre Lorde through the lens of a friend, and allows readers to see how the writer expresses herself in conversation as well as in writing. Lorde and Rich establish a serious but familiar conversational tone, interrupting one another and finishing each other's thoughts, which makes the interview feel like a freewheeling stream-of-consciousness journey through Lorde's thoughts. Furthermore, since Adrienne Rich is a famous lesbian feminist poet and essayist in her own right, readers get a privileged glimpse into the thought processes and relationship of two well-known writers. Finally, this interview can serve as a kind of reading list, curated by a fascinating and intelligent reader, for someone who is looking to learn about Lorde's writing. Rich is quick to connect Lorde's arguments and recollections to her poems, essays, and speeches, and readers can use these connections to decide which of Lorde's works will be interesting to them.
One of the most interesting aspects of this interview is Lorde's focus on her relationship to language. In spite of her fame as a writer, she argues that she has always had trouble expressing herself with language. This difficulty, she argues, has led her to take up poetry: unable to find words to express herself, Lorde relied on the words of poets, until, finding that other poets had not yet said all she wanted to say, she took the work of creating new poems upon herself. Lorde suggests that poetry, which involves a slower and more intentional approach to language, is in fact a preferable mode of discourse for someone whose emotions often feel inexpressible through everyday speech. This echoes Lorde's claims in "Poetry Is Not a Luxury," where she describes poetry as a tool to connect the emotional, internal life with rational, outward-facing thought.
