We’re still learning to read Audre Lorde, who should have been 79 today. We’re still learning to become the collectivity, the “we,” that would make reading Audre Lorde possible. The Audre Lorde that I think is especially worth reading is not the Audre Lorde that reads like a bumper sticker. Nor is it the Audre Lorde that settles the score, once and for all, the Audre Lorde who puts the full stop on the conversations we’ve needed to have before we’ve had them. The Audre Lorde I’m interested in is perhaps too queer to set things straight for us politically. Which also means that it’s also not the Audre Lorde who exists as an alibi. The Audre Lorde that’s most interesting to me is the Audre Lorde who is a complex, often contradictory historical figure, a figure whose brilliance resides not in her individual insight but in her capacity to creatively animate and inhabit the very contradictions in which she lived. It is that kind of brilliance that makes her A. Lorde and not, well, a Lord; that is, not a god-like figure whose authority is to be deferred to once and for all, but someone whose life and work provide an rich world of problems, questions, and ideas worth thinking with, borrowing from, confronting, and, of course, disagreeing with. I’m interested in claiming Audre Lorde as a human. Which is to say that in many ways, she was not, ultimately, that much unlike you or me. Even in her radical difference. Even because of it.
2087
stormborns
tangentwithtanner
pixelskylines
snowghoul
