We don’t usually review literary biographies, but this is not a typical literary biography. Gumbs’ book about Black poet Audre Lorde is a work of enthusiasm, gratitude, and transformation. It shows not just the impact of Lorde upon those who knew her, but her impact on the world at large and even the impact of every great teacher on those left behind after they are gone.
Audre Lorde (1944-1992) lived a rich life as a Black woman, lesbian and champion of female sexuality, mother, writer, poet, civil rights activist, professor, and friend. Gumbs chronicles all of this – plus Lorde’s many and varied relationships with colleagues, students, disciples, lovers, and enemies – in careful detail. Just as importantly, Gumbs intersperses this narrative with reflections in a poetic prose that at times is like a companion to Lorde’s story and at other times a creative form of encounter of a student with her somehow still-present teacher.
For example, while narrating what was a difficult panel discussion in May 1978 at the National Conference of Afro-American Writers at Howard University, where Lorde and others faced homophobic and sexist attacks, before telling us that Lorde regretted not standing up better for a colleague, Gumbs offers this intermezzo: “In a typewriter, between each hammering letter and the page there is the ribbon, absorbing shock, making the impact meaningful. The ribbon, ink made flat and long and ready to spool, is the part of the typewriter that has to be replaced most often.”
At other times, Gumbs’ prose adds vitality, not to the events of Lorde’s life but to resurrect the poet’s voice — as in this passage from a chapter called “Solstice”:
“A sunflower is a multitude of blooms, spiraling toward and away from each other. A hurricane is a counterclockwise spiral building speed with wind and water, sometimes even blocking out the sun. Remembering the sound of the summer rain outside their window in Staten Island, Audre wrote:
‘rain like my blood speaks
in alternate whispers
roaring giving and taking seeking destroying
beseeching green sprouts
in our struggling garden
blessing the earth as it suffers’ ”
This is from Lorde’s poem, “From the Greenhouse.” And Gumbs returns to reflecting on hurricanes some more, a page later, concluding that chapter with the sentence: “You could study it for a lifetime: the behavior, the psychology of a storm.” Gumbs sees Lorde’s life through this lens and hundreds of others in the process of revealing her as a teacher who taught Gumbs to pay attention, to love others but also oneself, to look for moments for learning every day and in unexpected places, and to recognize the enormous political potential of a single human life.
