Audre Lorde’s transatlantic routes/roots

Audre Lorde’s transatlantic routes/roots

'Her visceral embodiment was a lifeline. We could feel her blood running through our blood. She came into my life at the time I needed her. We are part of that root structure. That is our ancestry.'

-Pratibha Parmar on Audre Lorde’s impact on Black Feminists in the UK

One month after I turned in my proposal for the biography that would become Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde my mother, my sister, my brother-in-law and my nieces all left me and moved permanently to London. Okay well technically, it was not really me they were leaving. Just the Trump-era United States. And they were moving to London, the place of my mother’s birth, for a big job opportunity, not necessarily as an act of protest.

I promised to visit and kept mapping out my research plan for the first biography in 20 years of Audre Lorde, the self-described “Black Feminist Lesbian Warrior Poet” who transformed American literature in the second half of the 20th century.

But COVID-19 locked the world down and I couldn’t visit. Even worse, my mother got COVID in the early days of the pandemic when travel between the US and the UK was impossible and I felt completely helpless. As a member of a diasporic family with relatives all over the world, I took my first flights as a tiny infant. I still fall asleep like a baby as soon as a jet starts taxiing down the runway. I never imagined that I, a frequent flyer, would be unable to travel to be at the side of an immediate family member facing a deadly illness.

Thankfully, my mother survived COVID. But, locked in my apartment (should I say flat?) writing, I was struck for the first time by the grave reality of transatlantic distance. And in order to refuse the helplessness I initially felt, I found ways to get to my family members. If not physically than energetically. I instituted daily video calls with my mother and with my sister and nieces that I still keep up to this day. I went through the childhood photo albums my mother left with me because they were too heavy to transport to London and thought about what it meant for my mother, the daughter of Windrush migrants from Jamaica to return to England and watch her granddaughters live the early childhood years she had lived in London before moving back to Jamaica as a pre-teen.

And as I continued to write about Audre Lorde I realized that not even the Warrior Poet, whose parents migrated to Harlem, NY from the island of Grenada could help me traverse the distance to England. My approach to writing about 'the eternal life of Audre Lorde' focuses on the ways that the life of a so-called individual become intergenerational through their impact, not only on other people in their fields, but on the definition of what theorist Kevin Quashie would call 'aliveness' that becomes possible through their way of being with the people who their work touches. And even within lifetimes our travel to each other means much more than transportation, it asks us to figure out what it really takes to connect.

A significant stream of Audre Lorde’s continued existence and deep connection lives through contemporary and foundational Black British feminist artists such as Ingrid Pollard, Pratibha Parmar, Jackie Kay, Maud Sulter (who is now living her own eternal life) and many more. In my interviews with Pratibha Parmar, Jackie Kay and Ingrid Pollard for Survival is a Promise, I noticed that they spoke of Audre Lorde as a family member. Jackie Kay mentioned the importance of Audre Lorde’s advice while she was pregnant with her son. Pratibha Parmar used the word 'ancestry'. Jackie Kay remembers Audre feeding her a black fig from the tree in her yard when she visited her in New York. Pratibha Parmar says 'we are part of that root structure'. And the film that the 'Late Start Video Collective' which included Pollard, Parmar, and Shaheen Haq and Viv Bietz made during one of Audre Lorde’s 1984 visits to London shows Lorde sitting in a living room with Jackie Kay, Olivette Cole-Wilson and Shaila Shah, reaching across context to create Black feminist solidarity, and something more than that. A transatlantic field of relation.

'She was so happy to be with us, she was so interested in us', Ingrid Pollard told me, explaining how the definition of 'Black Feminism' that Black British Feminists created which included African, Caribbean, Asian and other non-white feminists excited Audre who was committed to imagining how a global majority could find each other and work together across difference. They were holding this meeting of the minds in the wake of the failure of the 1984 International Feminist Bookfair, where Audre refused to speak after white feminists barred these same Black feminists from attending her keynote event.

Audre Lorde’s relationships with Black British Feminists invite us to ask what keeps us apart. Is it the carbon heating the oceans between us or is it our refusal to witness each other’s tears? Is it a deadly contagious disease or is it the auto-immune short-sightedness of bigotry and racism?

In about two weeks I will be travelling in person to London to share the Penguin UK edition of Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde which is dedicated to my little nieces who have British accents now and are teaching me about the wonder of 'ice lollies' and the importance of using the 'bin' instead of littering. And I am excited to reunite with a community of artists who have been influenced by Audre Lorde and her mentees for decades. I am grateful that Audre Lorde lives in the part of each of us that believes we can reach each other across anything.

In a moment where politics seem more divisive than ever and yet we face urgent problems that require all of us to show up, I am honored to have created a portal through which you too can learn from the deep-rooted diasporic Black feminist poet who taught me how to travel across oceans without leaving my room.