The Afterlives of Audre Lorde

Lorde’s consciousness and politics — and queerness — nurtured Gumbs’s own growth as she matured and entered academia, writing her Ph.D. dissertation on the literary practices of the Black queer feminist thinkers Lorde, Alexis De Veaux, Barbara Smith and June Jordan. Gumbs continued her research on Lorde, and whatever she learned, she shared. She began hosting workshops in her living room called “School of our Lorde,” which eventually morphed and moved online. (They continue to this day; recently Gumbs hosted a writing workshop about Black women, government and power linking Kamala Harris’s bid for the presidency and the killing of a young woman, Sonya Massey, by the police in her own home.) Unprompted, people sent her Lorde paraphernalia for study and safekeeping: broadsides of her poems, the program from her funeral.

In 2019, Gumbs joined some friends to watch De Veaux, who by then had become her mentor and chosen family, on a podcast called “Who Yo People Is,” in which Sharon Bridgforth, the interlocutor, interviewed De Veaux about writing the first official biography of Lorde, which came out in 2004. Bridgforth wondered aloud why someone hadn’t written another biography. “And everyone turned and looked at me,” Gumbs recalled, laughing. “I was hiding behind my water glass.” At the time, Gumbs didn’t see biography as part of her multidiscplinary practices. But she had long admired De Veaux, and felt honored to be her spiritual successor. Then someone else reached out to her about writing a book soon after that. “At a certain point, to keep deflecting something is disrespectful,” she says.

Gumbs is the latest in a line of Lorde biographers. In 1995, the filmmakers Michelle Parkerson and Ada Gay Griffin preserved what Lorde looked and sounded like in their documentary “A Litany for Survival.” “Warrior Poet,” De Veaux’s book, which was published in 2004, is a sprawling and meticulously researched detailing of Lorde’s life and her indelible impact on the late-20th-century liberation movements. During the height of her living fame, her ideas — what those close to her called Lordeisms — were often oversimplified or compressed into a line or two. “Warrior Poet” was done at the request of Lorde’s estate, which tasked De Veaux with turning stone monument back into flesh and blood. Gumbs draws from much of the same material, along with newly digitized and archived interviews that surfaced in recent years. And she also seems to employ what the historian Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation,” dreaming into knowledge gaps of Lorde’s archive. This imaginative work is an effort to render Lorde as fully and humanely as possible. Gumbs identified Baker, the Harlem librarian, as a crucial shaper of Lorde’s creative life. She finds mirroring between the nursery rhymes Baker read to Lorde and poetic structures deployed by Lorde deep in her career. Gumbs draws links between Lorde’s interest in polyamory and the pollination and growth patterns of sunflowers. These details connect Lorde’s life with universal, even cosmic, concerns. As Gumbs started considering what she had come to know about Lorde over the years, she realized one of Lorde’s most powerful theories had not yet been popularized.

“There is no time that I can find in Audre Lorde’s life where she was not thinking about our relationship with this planet,” Gumbs told me. “I don’t hear people saying that Audre Lorde is an environmental advocate. But she was.” Once she started looking, she saw it everywhere. “Gender, sexuality, race and transnational feminism all flow from ecology. That’s the way she thought about it, and that’s the way she articulated it.” Lorde never uttered the phrase “climate change,” for example, but she published a scathing series of letters from her home on St. Croix after surviving Hurricane Hugo, a Category 5 storm, in 1989. She was critical of the government’s militarized response, its characterization of survivors as looters and cautioned against the conditions that led to the disaster in the first place. “If we do not learn the lessons of Hurricane Hugo, we are doomed to repeat them. Because Hugo will not be the last hurricane in this area,” she wrote.