I cannot in any kind of faith tease it out as a strand. I must add that these things are not separable. More than anything, more than about New York City in the '50s, more than being Black and gay and poor and female in that uneasy time, more than about the sensuality of food and the precise pleasures of style, more than about hustle and poetry and Audre's fraught relationship with her mother and the longing for an unknown home, for Granada and Carriacou, it is about loving women. I did not know this was a book about love. i fucking love you, Audre Lorde! such a guiding influence. she celebrated and she mourned and she deepened my spirit. she showed me how our lives are of our own creation, how our biography is our personal mythology is our own personal reality is our own personal way that we define ourselves in order to survive.

she told me about her own weaknesses, her own cruelties, and how she was able to move past them and to forgive them, to forgive herself by understanding herself. she told me about growing up in harlem she told me what it felt like to be an outsider. she told me stories of that life and those stories were filled with poetry and passion. this was a lady who had felt pain in her life and would be able to understand my pain as well. this was a woman with so much empathy and understanding for the people around her. but as i got to know her, her innate gentleness became clear. she was a stern, moody, melancholy woman who had lived a life of so many ups and downs.

In college, in the late 80s and early 90s, i discovered that i had two aunts. Lorde was State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992. In 1980, together with Barbara Smith and Cherríe Moraga, she co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. It is particularly noteworthy for the poem 'Martha', in which Lorde poetically confirms her homosexuality: 'e shall love each other here if ever at all.' Later books continued her political aims in lesbian and gay rights, and feminism. Her second volume, Cables to Rage (1970), which was mainly written during her tenure at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, addressed themes of love, betrayal, childbirth and the complexities of raising children. Dudley Randall, a poet and critic, asserted in his review of the book that Lorde 'does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit, in the bone.' Her first volume of poetry, The First Cities (1968), was published by the Poet's Press and edited by Diane di Prima, a former classmate and friend from Hunter College High School. During this time, she was politically active in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements. Lorde's poetry was published very regularly during the 1960s - in Langston Hughes' 1962 New Negro Poets, USA in several foreign anthologies and in black literary magazines. Audre Lorde was a revolutionary Black feminist.

Zami by audre lorde