How does one write a biography of a hurricane? And how could any biography capture the life and essence of Audre Lorde, the Black lesbian feminist poet and community builder? In Alexis Pauline Gumbs, herself a queer Black feminist poet and community activist, Lorde has found the perfect interlocutor. Gumbs’ writing is multilayered, poetic and beautiful, making this book more than a biography. It’s a meeting of two minds.
Gumbs foregrounds Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde in Lorde’s affinity with the natural world. She expounds upon the science of trees, whales, honeybees, particle physics, tectonic plates and more, and then poetically connects these sections to Lorde’s life. But this structure is more than metaphor: Gumbs shows how the poet created literal guides for survival. For example, the destructive force of hurricanes is a recurring theme throughout Lorde’s work. It serves to illuminate her passionate experiences with love and desire, and her rage at racist violence. But it also nods to her Afro Caribbean roots: As a baby, her father survived a deadly hurricane in Barbados. Lorde herself survived the devastation of Hurricane Hugo in Grenada, where she lived toward the end of her life.
Those less familiar with the school of Audre Lorde may know of her work through prose sound bites like “your silence will not protect you” and “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In this biography, Gumbs shifts focus from Lorde’s feminist essays to her poetry, relying on verses to frame Lorde’s life, from her experience as a “speech-delayed” child in midcentury Harlem to her emergence as a central node in second-wave feminism. The importance of speech and the power of reading shapes Lorde’s experience from the beginning, and her debates about Black and white feminisms and lesbian identity in the 1970s and ’80s continue to inform intersectional and queer feminisms today.
Calling her subject “The Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother Audre Lorde,” Gumbs does not pretend to be an impartial observer, and the biography is all the better for it. Lorde’s body of work continues to nourish generations of poets and activists, particularly Black and queer feminists. While readers from these communities have joyous reason to celebrate the publication of this book, Survival Is a Promise bears an important and hopeful message for us all: Survival is a communal act of care.