Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Allen Lane, £35

SOME TIME in the 1970s, probably at an event in the San Francisco Bay Area, I heard Audre Lorde read a poem. I don’t remember the poem, but do remember her reading of it demanded my attention.  

I was slightly familiar with her work up to then, mostly because of my female friends, gay and straight, whose bookshelves often included a couple of her books. In addition, the Kitchen Table Press, which she helped found, was an inspiration to my friends and I who hoped to write and publish something ourselves someday.  

I read From a Land Where Other People Live and New York Head Shop and Museum — the former was nominated for a National Book Award and the second had an intriguing title with poems that demanded both an intellectual and emotional response.

Lorde’s place in the annals of US letters was long ago assured. Lorde wasn’t just black, she was also a woman who defined herself as a lesbian; all of this at a time when being black was still reason enough for academia and the world of writers and publishers to shut one out.  

However the power of her work and its ultimately universal nature guaranteed that her prominent place would not be denied.  

God forbid one also came out as a gay person of any gender. The latter identity caused waves and created anger among quite a few of her black male colleagues, whose understanding of gender and sexuality did not include lesbians at the time.

Lorde’s new biography is out, titled Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, it is by no means a conventional biography. Yes, Lorde’s life — from her childhood that began in Harlem in 1934 to her death in St Croix (one of the US Virgin Islands, in the Caribbean) in 1992 — is chronicled, albeit not in a linear or even traditional sense.  

The author, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, is a poet, author and (as she writes in her bio at the book’s end) a queer black feminist love evangelist.  

The text itself combines those impulses and lifework with Lorde’s life work, thereby creating a piece of poetic prose that brings to life Lorde’s vitality, creative spirit, love of the planet Earth and its inhabitants. It is also a description of her anger at those who would destroy those things and her approach to dealing with those phenomena and the humans behind them.

As the title suggests, the text is also about Lorde’s approach and attitude towards survival: as a black woman, as a lesbian, as an anti-war and anti-racist and on a very personal level, as a person with cancer.

The “eternal life” of the title is a reference to that life almost every human aspires: to be remembered after one leaves their physical body. That is a reason we have children, whether we are conscious of that fact at the moment of birth or not.  

It is certainly the reason artists create art, musicians create music and writers write — all in the slight hope some part of what we create will carry on into history.

Ideally, the works we create will do more than be a mark of time or a notation. In addition, one hopes they will effect the human consciousness going forward.  

It is this reviewer’s understanding of this biography that Gumbs believes Lorde has done (and continues to do) this very thing.

Lorde’s father who was distant, died when Audre was 19 and uncertain how to express his love. Her mother, whose sternness was her means of survival, was a librarian in the public library branch in Harlem and she mentored and encouraged Audre’s reading and writing when she was young.

Her successes and frustrations, from the first science fiction story published in Seventeen magazine, while she was still in high school, to the difficulties being published in the white-dominated world of New York’s public Hunter College and beyond.  

Gumbs’ contemplations of Lorde’s works and her emotions are accompanied by insights drawn from Gumbs’ own life and understanding. The images she draws are reminiscent of an impressionist painting filled with light that force the viewer to perceive the shadows — shadows that seem to make the light possible.

Survival is a Promise is a work of prosaic prowess, poetic in its sensibilities. It tells a tale of a life, a time, a heart, a mind and a soul. As I read it, I entered into a reality of surroundings and books of Lorde; it was also something that included her love of the Earth’s mysteries, her hopes and fears for humanity and her determination to survive the obstacles we exist with. Reading it was a sublime experience.

This is a slightly abridge version of a review that appeared in Conterpunch.org. Ron Jacobs is the author of several books, including Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies published by CounterPunch Books. His latest book, titled Nowhere Land: Journeys Through a Broken Nation, is now available. He lives in Vermont. He can be reached at: [email protected].