My hero:

Audre Lorde

by Jackie Kay

 

'Lorde was openly lesbian before the gay movement existed. Her wise words often seem eerily prescient'

 

 

BY JACKIE KAY

 

guardian.co.uk, Friday 18 November 2011

Refusal to be defined by single categories: Lorde in 1983. Photograph: Robert Alexander/Getty Images

 

Audre Lorde dropped the y from Audrey when she was still a child so she could be Audre Lorde. She liked the symmetry of the es at the end. She was born in New York City in 1934 to immigrants from Grenada. She didn't talk till she was four and was so short-sighted she was legally blind. She wrote her first poem in eighth grade. The Black Unicorn, her most unified collection of poems, partly describes a tricky relationship with her mother. "My mother had two faces and a frying pot / where she cooked up her daughters / into girls … My mother had two faces / and a broken pot /where she hid out a perfect daughter /who was not me."

Lorde was openly lesbian before the gay movement existed. Her wise words often seem eerily prescient. "Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time and the arena, and the manner of our revolutions, but more usually we must do battle where we are standing." Back in the 70s and 80s Lorde's was an important and singular voice: "I began to ask each time: 'What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?' Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, 'disappeared' or run off the road at night … our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered for ever."

I first met Audre in 1984, when I was 22. She told me her grandfather had been Scottish, and that I didn't need to choose between being Scottish and being black. "You can be both. You can call yourself an Afro Scot," she said in her New York drawl. Lorde was Whitman-like in her refusal to be confined to single categories. She was large. She contained multitudes.

After her mastectomy, she chose not to have prosthesis, opting for asymmetry instead, and wore one dangling earring and one stud for unequal measure. From the little girl who loved those matching es, she'd come not exactly full circle but a revolution and a half.

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Berlinale 2012 Preview

"Audre Lorde -

 

 

Scheduled to make its world premiere in the Panorama Documentary section is Dagmar Shultz's Audre Lorde - The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 is an untold chapter (the Berlin years) of the late writer, poet and activist, Caribbean child of immigrants from Grenada, who died rather young at 58 years old in 1992.

Specifically, the film will focus on...

Audre Lorde's years in Berlin in which she catalyzed the first movement of Black Germans to claim their identity as Afro-Germans with pride. As she was inspiring Afro-Germans she was also encouraging the White German feminists to look at their own racism

The film will serve as a historical document for future generations of Germans, which profiles and highlights, from the roots, the African presence in Germany, and the origins of the anti-racist movement before and after the German reunification, as well as facillitates an analysis and an understanding of present debates on identity and racism in Germany.

The film can be considered a companion piece to the1994 documentary A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde by Ada Gray Griffin and Michelle Parkerson, which also screened at the Berlin Film Festival.

No footage to look at yet though; but it's on my watch list.

 >via: http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/berlinale-2012-preview-audre-lorde-th...