Divine Details: Message Received from/for Audre Lorde
I can already tell that I’m going to have to write about this collage more than once. because the messages keep coming. #audreonthemainline
But since tomorrow we will be diving into the interview “Above the Wind” and writing together about “Audre Lorde and the Idea of the Community Accountable Intellectual,” I’ll start with the detail of a brick wall.
For me the brick wall in this collage (emerging out from under the water and the mosaic) represents Audre Lorde’s relationship to the city and the university. From all accounts, Audre Lorde was never well behaved at school, but she did a lot of it. And her relationship with the City University started with her time as a student at Hunter High School for Girls. And after graduating from Hunter College and Columbia University she worked for the City University of New York in many different capacities. She (along with June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara and Adrienne Rich) worked for the SEEK program, an access program preparing students from under-performing high schools for college level work. She taught teachers at Lehman College, she taught cops at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, she taught poetry at Hunter College. It was at the City University of New York’s Second Sex Conference where she told her racist white feminist colleagues that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” It was a CUNY building where she looked out the 17th floor window and processed her nightmares and the nightmares of her students in one of the first “Blackstudies” courses ever (which she reflects on in the poem “Blackstudies.”) As the first Black faculty member in John Jay’s English Department, she taught their first courses on institutionalized racism, to student cops with loaded weapons in full uniforms and co-taught their first women’s studies classes. I think about the brick wall in relationship to the pillows at the bottom of the collage, and what June Jordan describes in her memorial tribute to Audre Lorde as their shared support of students of color protesting for open admissions and relevant Black and Puerto Rican curriculum at City University. They brought food and blankets, comfort and teach-ins to those students determined to transform the brick walls of their university, their city. And one day Hunter College would name their women’s poetry center after Audre Lorde. And yet, when she proposed a teaching schedule that would keep her from cold New York winters so she could better fight the cancer in her body, she was denied. It was Audre Lorde herself who said “our labor has become more important than our silence” in her poem “A Song for Many Movements,” and indeed despite her singular voice, the university where she had offered decades of transformation to generations of students in multiple fields, required more labor than her body could give. So ultimately she left the City University and the city itself and moved to St. Croix where she created the community accountable practice we’ll be studying tomorrow night. Sometimes, institutionally, you come up against a brick wall. And then what? For me, part of the ceremony of this collage is to operationalize Lorde’s typewriter, envelopes, breathing into the actualization of portals beyond the brick walls of her life. And for me, part of my commitment is to live and support others to live based on the lessons Audre Lorde learned at a very high cost, sometimes a brick wall is a brick wall. Message received. We are inventing ways to live otherwise.
There are still a few spots left in tomorrow’s webinar Audre Lorde and the Idea of the Community Accountable Intellectual/Artist you can sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/audre-lorde-and-the-idea-of-the-community-accountable-intellectualartist-tickets-82879963201
And check out next month’s online weekend writing intensive My Words Will Be There: Audre Lorde, Black Feminism and Ancestral Listening. Info here: http://brillianceremastered.alexispauline.com/2019/11/22/my-words-will-be-there-audre-lorde-black-feminism-and-ancestral-listening/
(P.S. I’m happy to share that prints of “Message Received” my collage for Audre Lorde and my other ancestral collages are available for online purchase in multiple sizes. All proceeds go towards the ongoing work of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind.)
