Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

A bold, innovative biography that offers a new understanding of the life, work, and enduring impact of Audre Lorde.

We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde’s teachings on “the creative power of difference” may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today.

Lorde’s understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or being resilient in the face of cancer. It was about the total stakes of what it means to be in relationship with a planet in transformation. Possibly the focus on Lorde’s quotable essays, to the neglect of her complex poems, has led us to ignore her deep engagement with the natural world, the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. For her, ecological images are not simply metaphors but rather literal guides to how to be of earth on earth, and how to survive―to live the ethics that a Black feminist lesbian warrior poetics demands.

In Survival Is a Promise , Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the first researcher to explore the full depths of Lorde’s manuscript archives, illuminates the eternal life of Lorde. Her life and work become more than a sound bite; they become a cosmic force, teaching us the grand contingency of life together on earth.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Feminism, Poetry, History, Queer, LGBT

528 pages, Hardcover

Published August 20, 2024

About the author

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity and coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines and the Founder and Director of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, an educational program based in Durham, North Carolina.

Reviews

[Amber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gifted by the publisher

How am I ever going to read another biography knowing they will never be as good as this one 🤯🤯🤯

[Lois · Rating 5 out of 5]

This audiobook was made available for me to listen to and review by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Macmillan Audio, and NetGalley.

The narrator of this audiobook is the author Alexis Pauline Gumbs. She does a wonderful job as narrator. I like that her passion, excitement, respect and inquisitiveness can be heard as the text is narrated. Its a wonderful opportunity for the audiobook listener.

I can not stress enough how much the woman I am today was formed by reading Audre Lorde. I discovered Ms. Lorde's poetry in high school. I was a precocious kid, I read The Color Purple in the 5th grade; My mom set it down, purple was my favorite color and I liked the cover.🤷🏾‍♀️
I was a baby Black feminist by middle school, lol. Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Maya Angelou, June Jordan and later Toni Morrison & Angela Davis pretty much guaranteed I would become who I am today.
Audre Lorde who studied Ifa religion enough to have herself identified as a whirlwind child of Oya, indeed embodied the spirit of a warrior. I am in her awe. I am because she is.

This is an excellent and unique look at the life of the late great Ms. Lorde. Starting with her somewhat slightly privileged upbringing as far as access to educational opportunities. Her story is well known to her stans but this offers her up to a new generation. It invites the reader to get to know her beyond her essays and more by her poetry, which mirrored her creative soul. It's just a stunningly beautiful introduction to not just her factual history but her environment: culturally, politically, etc. Its modern in that it acknowledges her families access to light skin or passing privilege. Also invaluable insight into how Audre's own place as the darkest in her family marked her treatment from her mother and possibly contributed to her rebellious spirit. As a society we understand so much more about the generational impact of trauma. The US was hostile to both Black folks and immigrants, so being both during The Great Depression must've been fraught with danger for her parents. A few of their struggles are highlighted but how that informed their parental qualities is guess work.
Audre's rebellious, truth telling courageous spirit did have limits though. Her treatment of June Jordan over Lorde's silence on Palestine was brutal and cowardly.
I absolutely loved this biography. Its easily accessible, interesting and extremely informative.

Thank you to Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Macmillan Audio, and NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to and review this audiobook. All opinions and viewpoints expressed in this review are my own.

[Gayatri Sethi Desi Book Aunty · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is essential study for anyone who reads Audre Lorde. It is especially essential reading, for plentiful correctives, for any self-professed feminists who quote Audre Lorde on self care and speaking, without clarity on her life and survival.

This book is an extraordinary feat that defies explanation. With awe inspiring depths researched from extensive archival study, this book illuminates and uplifts in ways be can’t fully fathom.

I’m beyond grateful for my gifted copy courtesy of the publisher.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning.

[Patricia]

This was a most unusual biography. Gumbs clearly started from an academic place by diving deeply into Lorde's archives to which she had comprehensive access. But then Gumbs delves into her own poetic expansion, imagining scenes she could not have known and describing places she visited where Lorde lived or spent time. She included intricate scientific interludes in many chapters that served as embellishing metaphors for situational aspects of Lorde's life and were also ways to reveal Lorde's personal connection to the natural world. The narrative did not move chronologically, exactly, though it extended from Lorde's childhood in NYC to her death in St. Croix, but aspects of her adulthood are addressed from the very beginning. Also, whole chapters are given to specific friendships and what they meant to both parties in Grumbs' estimation.

I don't think this very long book is for everyone, but for those who appreciate biography AND inventive writing, this is an exceptional example.

[Jesse Hassinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Survival is a Promise" is a key to time travel.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs presents us with some ways to read her biography-in-name-only of Audre Lorde: one of which is to read from start to finish - as one does - and enjoy the accumulation of semi-chronological stories about the life of Audre Lorde. To read in this manner is to quickly find that there is so much more to Gumbs writing than a simple biography - an accomplished biography of Audre Lorde has already been written, after all. Which is why Gumbs has written for us a new type of biography, one where the reader can open the book to any of the 58 chapters at random and appreciate a living metaphor about the themes of one part of Audre's life. Read just one chapter or the whole book, Gumbs weaves metaphors throughout this book the way Audre herself wove stones and shells into bracelets and necklaces for loved ones at the end of her life.

Open, for instance, to chapter 48, "the house of yemaya", and one is taken deep into the ocean to be regaled by the sonorous conversations of the Atlantic Gray Whales. Gumbs writes: "Gray whales are the mammals that migrate the farthest. Their reach? 19,000 kilometers. One and a half times the diameter of the Earth. If we were listening, gray whales could teach us that the whole planet is home. Home is not a small or separate thing." Home was a difficult aspect of Audre's life, so the metaphor here about the gray whales being able to travel world-wide and calling it all home is fitting.

Like the Atlantic Gray Whale, Audre Lorde traveled the globe creating home for the Black feminist lesbian socialist activists that she continually sought out in Britain, Germany, St. Croix, Boston, Spelman College, Hawai'i, and wherever she found herself otherwise. One aspect of her life's work was to create spaces of home for the multiple-marginalized groups that in growing up, herself a Black feminist lesbian socialist activist, there were no spaces that welcomed her in.

The Atlantic Gray Whales were considered extinct in the mid-18th century, hunted for their blubber for oil; many slave ships that transported enslaved African people would then hunt gray whales on their eastbound trips, trading human bodies for whale parts within their hull. The colonial white supremacist capitalist mentality not distinguishing between the mammals that brought the ships owners wealth and what, ultimately, happened to them. The species of gray whale is the same as those now found in the Pacific, but the Atlantic home waters have become uninhabitable for them, so they left. According to the New England Aquarium there have been five sightings of the gray whale in the Atlantic in the past fifteen years, two of which were in December 2023 off the coast of Florida and March 2024 off the coast of Nantucket. The gray whale has never been extinct, and that only recently they decided to reemerge in the Atlantic is telling. Perhaps climate change is to thank (blame?); perhaps the Pacific is becoming untenable for them; or perhaps enough generations have passed that the Atlantic is no longer the known murder grounds that it once was.

Gumbs metaphor of the Atlantic Gray Whale and Audre Lorde is astute, as are all of the other ways in which she demonstrates Lorde's connection to the natural world. In "Survival is a Promise" Lorde is also a hurricane (which she shares with her father), a lightning strike, graphite, obsidian, tectonic plates, light refracting through diamonds or water or the air at dawn or dusk, and a multitude of others. Ultimately, and this is where the book becomes the key to time travel, Gumbs makes Lorde's life a star that burns bright, attracts all kinds of satellites, and, ultimately, becomes a black hole whereby time and space rupture to create an everything everywhere all at once moment where Lorde is simultaneously creating Kitchen Table Press with Barbara Smith; accepting the appreciation of a lifetime in 1990 at the Boston I Am Your Sister Cele-conference; mentoring generations of lesbian and gay Black writers in person before acceptance was much more than a dream, and through her words after death when queer acceptance has made stuttering inroads... Lorde has touched so many people throughout her life and so many more since her passing that she can not be anywhere but everywhere.

Through her words, Gumbs has been able to make readers feel that they have shared experiences with Audre Lorde, have gotten to know some aspects of her, have been fortunate enough to be on the front lines fighting for freedom in multiple forms, as well as experiencing her set-backs throughout childhood at home, through the publishing industry, and late in her life succumbing to cancer.

This brilliant biography recharges the energy that Audre Lorde has left us with and refracts it back through the diamond that is her writing and reflects it off the obsidian that was her life for us to welcome in with open hearts and sharpened tongues (untied).

[Priya Prabhakar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gumbs' writing reminds me of Saidiya's Hartman's 'critical fabulation' with this innovative biography on Audre Lorde. As someone who has read little of Lorde's work, it was amazing to be fully immersed and locked into the several enclaves of Lorde's life, beautifully incorporating lessons of the natural world with excerpts of their poetry. I loved reading about Lorde's relations with her contemporaries in poetry and organizing, figures that I also admire. I recognize what a labor of love this was.

[Renaissance Alexandre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. So comprehensive. So enlightening.

[Jacquie J · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I first picked up this book, I'll admit I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. I knew Audre Lorde was an acclaimed poet and activist, but beyond that, my knowledge was limited. What I encountered in Gumbs' biography was a complex, multi-layered work that is both informative and insightful.

From the introductory pages, it's clear that Gumbs is in awe of Lorde, and it's only right that she has been granted access to Lorde's archive and is the perfect person to write this biography. Gumbs digs deep into Lorde's experiences, from her childhood struggles to her activism and her battle with cancer. She weaves Lorde's writing into the text and presents her life, struggles, love, and inconsistencies in a fair light. In this "A Litany for survival" she uses words from one of a sample of Audre Lorde's students during the years that she taught poetry at Hunter College to describe Audre and she (presumably) and others thought about her.

"The first thing she did was put everyone in a circle.
She said, come on in and be my guest. Well, I almost died.
My heart was beating outside of my chest, I am sure.
She took my face in her hands.
I wanted her words to heal/hold me.
A whole world opened up.
I had not had a teacher like that before. She didn't show off she was just PRESENT.
It was the first time I'd ever been in a class where I felt like the teacher brought a full person to their classroom.
Lots of women got into the elevator and they were so excited and so I asked, where were you? What class were you in, and that's how I found her.
She loved to laugh.
My god, she had an aura.
And all the women had a crush on her, including myself."

It's a substantial work, and because of the way it's written, I found it quite challenging at times. It is structured almost like a collection of poems, which makes it a unique and immersive read. So immersive is it that it is sometimes difficult to tell where Lorde ended and where Gumbs started.

The chapters are thematically structured, with each one connecting to a specific event or issue that was important to Lorde. Notably, the writing style varies across the chapters, adding to the work's stylistic cohesion. The chapter In the House of Yemaya opens with a passage that draws a parallel between Lorde's voice and the behaviour of gray whale mothers. The author describes the whales' "rhythmic sounds" and "vibrations" used to guide and nurture their young, evoking the power of Lorde's own language.

“I don't know if Audre Lorde ever heard recordings of gray whales speech. Those underwater poems, rhythmic sounds that gray whale mothers make to lead and nurture generations. The belches, the deep croaks, the vibrations at low frequencies. The sounds they stop making when slave ships or whaling boats come close.".

As the narrative shifts to Lorde's experiences in Germany, the author continues to weave in this whale imagery, exploring how the behaviour of Lorde's friends and colleagues mirrored the social dynamics of the gray whales.

"How big is the prayer of a gray whale? Big enough to travel across the whole planet. A prayer that holds within it both extinction and mothering, loss and return. Gray whales often make the sound of conga drums when they call to each other. The sound of gray whales finding each other is like the drums musicians play behind May Ayim as she performed her poems in South Africa, acting on the transnationalism Audre encouraged, celebrating the deep cross-ocean resonance between her poetry and the dub poetry of Jamaica. The free spirited artist Corazon played drums at many of the Berlin events where Audrey danced with other women. One day, she would bring those same Congas to play at Audre's memorial service. Gray whales use sound to become visible to each other when they can't see across the distance, or sediment"

What's particularly striking is the way the writing style adapts to match the themes of each chapter, ranging from poetic rumination to more analytical prose. This fluidity allows the work to capture the multifaceted nature of Lorde's legacy.

Gumbs' writing is beautiful and powerful, and it is this that motivated me to finish the book. Otherwise, I wasn't as awed by Audre Lorde and I struggled to empathise with her. Survival is a Promise is not an easy read, if you are willing to put in the effort, it offers a rich, immersive exploration of one of the 20th century's influential voices. Gumbs has crafted a beautiful, ambitious tribute to Audre Lorde.

With great thanks to Penguin Classics for the ARC.

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

This provided me with a good introduction to the poet, activist, and scholar, although it doesn’t provide almost any critical analysis of her ideas or poetry.

[Tara ☆ Tarasbookshelf]

DNF
While very interesting, detailed and descriptive, it ultimately just wasn't for me at this time. It's evident this work is a labour of tremendous love and dedication and will be a major gift of capturing in one place so much of the embodied life, history and interwoven relationships of Audre Lorde.

[lu · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book nourishes. Audre has entered my life in a burst of light at exactly the time I needed her, and I will be a student of her work my whole life. APG fashions a dextrous celebration of her enormous life, need to read more of her work.

Notes

The scale of the life of the poet is the scale of the universe.

Earth is a relationship.

From an early journal:
All poets are afraid of meeting themselves in the dark.

From “Brother Alvin”
so even now
all these years of death later
I search through the index
of each new book
on magic
hoping to find some new spelling
of your name. []

A book could feed you. Or at least clarify your hunger.

Writes 14 year old Audre:
I want to know the beauty of my own house… I want to have the knowledge that when my life on Earth is done / that I have left something behind / for others to carry on.

From “The Brown Menace”
Call me
your deepest urge
toward survival. []

A kind of knowing and a kind of contempt.

She was learning to be infinite on the scale of a human life by honoring the landscape of her own soul.

Writes teenage Audre:
I want to be. I don’t want simply to exist, then parish in a brief burst of light one dark night unnoticed-unappreciated by anyone… []

From “Eternity”
One thing I know of us
Death has for us no name
Our end shall come with the earth. Our life
Our love and the earth are the same

And in the brief moment that is today
Wild hope this dreamer jars
For I have heard in whispers-Talk
Of life beyond stars

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
From “Strange Other Lands Are Calling”
Some other lands to call me
With alien songs I heed
I shall destroy my anchors
Now that I know my need.
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

She saw all of it as crucial to her emotional and political growth, her increased capacity to know herself and impact the world.

From an Author Bio:
I was not born on a farm or in a forest, but in the centre of the largest city in the world— a member of the human race hemmed in by stone, away from earth and sunlight. But what is in my blood and skin of richness, of brown earth and noon-sun, and the strength to love them, comes the roundabout journey from Africa through sun islands to a stony coast and these are the gifts through which I sing, through which I see. This is the knowledge of sun, and of how to love even where there is no sunlight. []

Frances’s skills as a psychologist were valuable to Audre relationally. Here was a partner who would not shrug off her desire to process the complexity of their emotional lives.

From a Mother’s Day card by Elizabeth:
I know this last year had been one of rough decisions for you. I just want you to know your feet have moved sure and rightly and that’s wonderful to see. []

In considering the main traditions of Ewe poets, namely funeral poetry and a battle-rap precursor called Halo used to mediate and transform conflict, (Kofi) Awoonor argued that the role of poets in a community was intimately concerned with death and conflict. In his observa-tion, poets were necessary to the community but also isolated. They had to carry the grief of others in addition to their own.

[Audre] researched gender-nonconforming lives across the African continent, arming herself with this knowledge as she moved through spaces shaped by homophobia. All of these practices were part of how Audre created herself as timeless and timely, mythic and real, authentically Black and transformatively lesbian feminist.

[Audre] bridges cosmologies and continents, becoming a multigenerational healing force. Now it is Audre who knows the healing function of every stone, who finds the warrior love call in the worst of the daily news. This is Audre as we know her, hybrid dancer, ancient avatar, portal icon, altar smoke.
^!!!!!!!!!^

She believed that the art of being together as Black women could quite literally save lives.

When Audre said "the love of women healed me," she meant the care and the food and the support in her healing journey. She meant the gratitude and intellectual affirmation she found in women's community and cultural spaces. But she also meant the erotic thrill and sensual excitement she felt about the women in her life. Those who were lovers, and those who were not. Audre believed fully in the healing power of the erotic, in her own power as a healer, and in the possibility of being healed by touch. She didn't separate the physical experience of desire from the theoretical work of Black feminism.

We do not survive as individuals.

Quote by Pratibha Parmar:
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. []
^!^!^!^!

Encouraging your congresspeople to press for a peaceful solution in the Middle East, and for the recognition of the rights of the Palestinian people, is not altruism: it is survival.

There was an intimacy to her care.

When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid.
So it is better to speak.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning work – this is a celebration of and tribute to Audre Lorde that is simultaneously scholarly, poetic, thoughtful, playful, and deeply deeply rooted in the writings of queer Black feminisms. I am grateful for the opportunity to read Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ work every time. Highly recommend.

Content warnings: discussions of sexism, homophobia, racism, classism, war, natural disaster, terminal illness

[Charley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This biography is dripping with wisdom and granular details of the life and work of Audre Lorde. It’s unlike any other biography I’ve read in its poetry, creative prose and non-linearity, which was appreciated. I only wish that some of the more thorny or contentious issues were teased out further — particularly the fallout between Lorde and June Jordan

[Renita Weems · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you're not already familiar with Audre Lorde, her work and her contribution, this is not the book to read. The book’s poetic, nonlinear, idiosyncratic structure makes it difficult to follow and difficult to grasp Lorde's importance. Gumbs organizes Lorde’s life thematically, often using metaphors from nature and science to explore her experiences and legacy. Reads more an exercise in myth-making than a grounded account of Lorde’s life

[isabella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moved - again and again and again.

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved, loved this book, a wonderful empathic biography of Audre Lorde that helps you understand the historical, social and geographical context of this important author. Reading this book not only gives you a better understanding of Lorde as a person, especially how she navigated her sexuality in those tricky times, which in turn shines a whole new wonderful light on her work. With short chapters that make the book easy to absorb and beautiful layout this book is just an absolute joy.

Another fabulous Gays the Word book of the year 2024. Highly, highly recommended.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who was only vaguely aware of Audre Lorde’s literary significance, Survival is a Promise served as a compelling introduction to her life and work. I listened to the audiobook during a particularly tumultuous time, which made the experience all the more visceral and profound. Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ writing style is distinct—perhaps not for everyone—but I found it immersive and deeply moving. This book has not only given me a greater appreciation for Lorde but has also inspired me to add her works to my TBR.

Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced copy of this audiobook.

[Jen Bracken-Hull · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was so incredibly beautiful. A woman who salvaged everything she could out of the world she inherited, composted it into poetry and action, and made her life a magic spell so gorgeously bottled into this biography. Audre’s life continues to be a gift reverberating through this world.

I borrowed this audiobook through the Queer Liberation Library (thank you!) a wonderful project that benefits greatly from donations. Consider donating and joining today ❤️ https://www.queerliberationlibrary.org

[bridget · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned that to confront the life of Audre Lorde is to confront both the cosmic and the atomic. She is/was, all at once, earthly and eternal. 

Survival is a Promise takes readers on a labyrinthine adventure through Lorde's personhood and life-defining relationships, but it is also a lesson in time-travel and astral projection. Alexis Pauline Gumbs answers this call seriously and playfully, and the result is a miraculous portrait of a poet, a woman, a category 6 force of nature. Read slowly over the course of 7 months, I consumed the bulk of the work suspended in clouds, travelling on two separate trips during two separate but sibling eclipses. This book proved the right companion for periods of purgatory in what turned out to be a pivotal year, its weight something like comfort or hope. I dogeared every other page, would copy and paste whole chapters in this review if I could. This book moved me deeply. Its pages revealed, much like the legacy of Lorde’s poetry or her juvenile near-blindness before glasses, a clearer lens or portal through which we can (should?) make meaning of our universe, of ourselves in it. 

TLDR; required reading. Only poets should be allowed to write biographies / kidding (?)

"I mean none of us is going to move the earth one millimeter from its axis. But if we do what we need to be doing then we will leave something that continues beyond ourselves. And that is survival." Audre Lorde, WBAI radio, 1982. 

[Christina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I was expecting a bit more of a traditional biography. Ironically because it was so poetic and deeply analytical of of Lordes writings I struggled with it and had to return to it a few times. Dr. Alexis care and deep commitment to to examining Lorde is very evident. I appreciated this work but not as much as I thought I would. 3.5

[Ifat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truely loved the book, so glad I had the opportunity to read it

[Michael Sasson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author is an amazing researcher and writer (prose and poetry too).

P14. Identifying less as an individual than as a possibility, Audre offered multiple versions of her life as a map. […] a rigorous commitment to bequeath future generations the possibilities we deserve.
P21. […] within her lifetime the ratio of military to civilian deaths flipped from nine military deaths per one civilian death during war to one military death for every nine civilian deaths at war.
22 […] activist soldiers in the loving, silence-breaking army of the Lorde […]
P58. […] “The Listeners.” A poem holding space for what she had learned in the years between her childhood wondering, “Is there anybody there?” and her experience of finding and cultivating community. Identifying with the seeker in the poem she emphasized, “he has a feeling that there really is somebody in there.”
P65. “I am tired of writing memorials to black men / whom I was on the brink of knowing,” […]
P78. Not asking questions was a form of respect for the unending labor of keeping you ungrateful children alive. But a Hunter girl was supposed to speak her mind, ask for what she needed. […] Perfect the art of the clarifying question.
P89. But the snub of not becoming editor in chief [of high school journal], when she strongly believed she should be, was only one of many glass-ceiling moments. Even for a smart and magical Black girl, merit and hard work were not enough in the face of forms of popularity that eluded her.
P97. “Bu survival I do not mean mere existence, which is the province of the walking wounded and the walking dead, but an active quality of living.”
P101. Her mother’s violent offense was her misinterpretation of who Audre was and her misleading guidance on the best way to navigate the world in which she lived. Her infringements were against Audre’s craving for privacy at one turn and affection at another. […] Who could they be in this world that they longed to know in a different way than their mothers could teach it?
P103. […] And clutch / A tiny bit of infinity / And with that piece / Of never dying flame, / Light up the path / Of his friends forsaken way. [alternatively in a different writing: “his friend-forsaken way.”]
P116. I shall destroy my anchors / Now that I know my need.
P142-3. Later she would tell Adrienne Rich that she had a turning point in her poetry while she was in the Mexican countryside, a shift from poetry as a way to create beauty through language to poetry as a way to celebrate the existing beauty of life on Earth. […] She […] embraced her poetic role as a witness in conversation with the dynamics of the planet itself.
P146. “I knew I was a lesbian before I was twenty, and I swaggered in my knowledge even though it left me terribly alone.”
P147. Audre cultivated a porous boundary between friendship and romance […] She presented her gender differently in different settings […] She saw all of it as crucial to her emotional and political growth, her increased capacity to know herself and impact the world.
P148. […] “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger,” where she outlines the ways that Black women turn their own internalized oppression against each other. The essay depicts the particular harm of Black women’s outsized expectations and criticisms when they see their own fears expressed in one another.
P149. “I have the capacity for loving.”
P157. “The decision for survival is not something you make once, you make it over and over again.”
P166. And that is what she taught them to do with their poetry: be who you are, act on your love. […] Audre fell in love with her students.
P178. Audre’s Black lesbian feminism included a self-assigned mandate to raise her children differently than her parents raised her. “A piece of the price we paid for learning survival was our childhood,” she wrote in notes for what became her essay, “Eye to Eye.” How could her children be children while she prepared them for war/
P179. She had to show them her love and still help them be strong. She believed that “if they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive.”
P182. […] Audre also taught her children to do their own emotional work, especially her son. As she wrote in her essay, “Manchild,” patriarchy teaches men to outsource their emotional labor to women, starting with their mothers: “Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them,” she warned. “In this way also men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear.” <P183. “My responsibility to my children, women and men is to teach them how to survive, how to love, and how to let go.”
194. Audre wonders how to raise a feminist son when separatist spaces already see him as a threat.
Ancestor Audre remembers the Coniagui ritual by which children choose their mothers and then choose themselves.
195. Or, as Robert Stepto wrote in his review for Parnassus, “The success of The Black Unicorn may be seen in the fact that when the poet declares ‘I will eat the last signs of my weakness, remove the scars of old childhood wars and dare to enter the forest whistling’ we believe her.”
199. […] “The Day they Eulogized Mahalia.”
200. These were the forms of violence populating Audre’s nightmares. Children. Burning to death at day care. Shot in the street. Abused at home.
201. […] a desperate white masculinity that turns the pretense of protecting white women into continual harm for everyone.
[…] Audre was grateful to be part of a network of people who cared about one another and cared about what happened in the world.
221 {READ} essay “Th Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.”
231. I can’t write of the disappointment of the NOW convention, but it bruised me. These women spread me thin. / They slip through the cracks in their vision / That were laid in wait before they were born.
234 She was suggesting that if gatherings like the Black Feminist Retreats had existed decades earlier, Genevieve might not have died by suicide. She believed that the act of being together as Black women could quite literally save lives. The poem brings together Lorde’s adolescent longing and her responsibility to an emerging feminist community.
238 […] their [with Adrienne Rich] shared belief in the function of poetry to excavate the politics of submerged feelings.
245. […] favorite Morrison novel, Sula […] “Oh, they’ll love me, all right. It will take time but they’ll love me.”
247. <>
248. Or as the Jamaican lesbian feminist wrote Michelle Cliff wrote in a letter to Audre, “Kitchen Table is the answer to someone’s dream.” <>
249. <>
252. The surviving participants in the revolution maintain that overthrowing a violent dictator required a small close-knit group acting by consensus in secret. […] not sustainable […] They were definitely exhausted.
254. <>
258. Audre said, “From my mother I learned that you live passionately inside and secret, but you have to be careful because the world’s waiting to really knock you down.”
But Audre never accepted the mandate to keep her emotions under the surface. That was why she “courted punishment …. I just swam into it.”
260. We were to destroy ourselves but our mothers forbade it and imcomplete and painfully as they did, they saw to it we survived.
265. […] stood her ground and enunciated every word of the poem “Power.” […] because the nightmare that inspired the poem was more important than the nightmare of standing up in public to speak it.
275. What do we do with the sparks of friction where our fragile armor meets?
318. How do sisters disagree? Can they come back from mutually perceived betrayals?
319. As Sanchez said in her interview for the film A Litany for Survival: “Because she was a lesbian and I was a Muslim, it didn’t make us different. It made us sisters.”
324. On the anniversary of Audre Lorde’s birthday in 1993, June [Jordan] wrote a tribute; “At different points our lives diverged as did our chosen paths for struggle. But we did not ever fully disentangle from joined combat against hatred and the annihilation of all bigotry.”
326. Gray whales are the mammals that migrate the farthest. Their reach? Nineteen thousand kilometers. One and a half times the diameter of the earth. If we were listening, gray whales could teach us that the whole planet is home. Home is not a small or separate thing.
329. “The struggle is the ritual.”
331. As an adult, Ika’s white half-sister denied that they were sisters to a group of white friends while Ika was sitting right there. It meant everything to Ika that Audre would actively choose her as family.
332. In Audre, they [Afro-German women] found the opposite of what they had come to expect: someone who passionately, devotedly celebrated their existence, who wanted them to survive and to be known around the world.
337. For Audre that meant “community compliance and silent assent” to mass violence even among those who “totally deplore and wish to disassociate themselves from the malevolent inaction of their elders during Nationalist Socialist times.”
346. The impossible thing she wanted? A home that didn’t activate her flight reflex. Full acceptance from her sisters and her mother as exactly who she was. To be a free Black woman, fully loved and seen by the Black women directly around her.
360. MIT may still not be checking for it, but Audre Lorde and the attendees and organizers of “I Am Your Sister” saw their gathering as a technological advance. A turning point in a time of burnout. A solution to a movement energy crisis. They believed that the erotic energy, the gratitude, even the anger and conflict in the space would help the collective propel themselves into a transformed future.
379. The key is that she can be herself. “I find I have a lot more energy than I used to have, simply because I spend a lot less energy trying to decide whether I’m correct or not.”
380. [Joseph Beam] “I cannot go home as who I am and that hurts me deeply,” he wrote. Audre was one of the people who made him believe that home was possible.
387. […] “because this is the function of any art, to make us more who we wish to be.”
401. “Diaspora” technically means the scattering of seeds.
417. He repeated the mantra his mother had intoned in countless speeches: “My mother was a Black lesbian feminist poet warrior woman doing her work.” In the same breath he added, “Now it is time for us to do ours.”
437. Our future attempts to make home in one body at one time are in shambles too. What’s left?
Audre Lorde wanted us, the people who would live after her, to study her life. But not to hold her up in praise as an example of how life should be lived. In the backyard in St. Croix, in a recorded conversation with Gloria Joseph, she insisted that she really wanted people to learn from her mistakes, and more importantly, to learn how to learn from our own mistakes, our contradictions, our terrors, our destructive relationships. She thought insight into the practice of gaining wisdom from all the damage we survived and inflicted was her lasting gift to those who would come along.

[Emmaby Barton Grace]

so so excited to read this!!

two interesting articles i read about it ! found out about these/this book in this substack i'm pretty sure

- The Afterlives of Audre Lorde - more a review about the book/gumbs' relationship with lorde - LOVED this quote:

“She wrote stanzas on packing tape and pasted them all over her bedroom. “They weren’t resonant because I knew what she was saying,” she told me, but “I was able to grow into them — and I’m still growing into them, actually.”

- Moving Towards Life - looking at june jordan and lorde's (and rich's) relationships - especially re. june and her views on palestine

[Laura Hoffman Brauman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Survival Is A Promise is a genre bending look at the life and impact of Audre Lorde. Gumbs captures the biographic essentials about her life and the impact of her work, but she accomplished so much more in the way she ties together the moments in her life with her works. It's unusual to read a biography that feels lyrical - but this one did. The seamless flow between her writing and the exploration of Lorde's life was so engaging. You not only get a sense of the importance of her work but also the way the choices she made in how she lived her life influenced others. You get the big moments and decisions as well as the intimate ones - a letter, a sponsorship, an outreach of support. This might be the best biography I've read (and I recommend the audio). I want to go back now and revisit Lorde's work with the perspective I've gained from this account of her life. it's a masterpiece.

[Sasha Panaram · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love this "quantum biography" of the poet, teacher, and activist Audre Lorde. Appreciate the attention given to Lorde's Caribbean heritage and her ongoing relationship with the earth. There is also a strong call from Gumbs to return to Lorde's poetry (even though we have a wealth of speeches and essays) - each of the chapters are named after a poem by Audre Lorde.

[Ashley · Rating 2 out of 5]

very very very preachy, this seemed more like a passion project rather than an educational text

not really a biography, but talks about the people in Lorde’s life rather than her own

very poorly organized and hard to follow in terms of chronology

metaphors are irrelevant and poorly explained

[Janejellyroll · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a beautiful and illuminating biographical project.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

My new favorite nonfiction book… ever.

[Donna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inspiring, Science-y, and Heartbreaking. 4.5 Stars.

I had purchased Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde last August at an event where Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Nikky Finney were discussing it. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a local Black Queer writer in Durham, NC, but this was my first time hearing of her. Even still, her identities align with mine, and I felt connected. And she signed my copy! Also, I had attended an event in college that Nikky Finney (also Black and Queer) spoke at, and I have some of her poetry collections. It was good to see her again, though I doubt that she remembered me when I talked to her. 😅

I was already going to read this in April for Earth Day. And it happened to qualify for the Goodreads bookmark for Her Story. Though it is 437+ pages, the chapters are often really short. This made it easier for me to get through, and I finished it in 11 days. (Wanted that bookmark!)

In Survival Is a Promise, Gumbs writes a biography on Audre Lorde in relation to the science and climate change that was happening around Audre: the Windward Islands hurricane that occurred in Barbados in 1898 when her father was a baby (pg. 24); Hurricane Hugo in St. Croix “that flooded the home she shared with Gloria Joseph” in 1989 (pg. 163); the factory she worked at (Keystone Electronics), where she was exposed to radiation through X-Rays and where she put “carbon tetrachloride-washed crystals in her mouth and then spit them out in the bathroom…” (pgs. 136–138), which most likely played a role in her developing breast cancer; and the cancer radiation treatments she eventually needed (pg. 412).

The book does get repetitive from time to time, but this is because the book is designed so that the reader can read it in any order they chose. I just read it from front to back, but I put asterisks in the Table of Contents next to my favorite chapters and may read them again at a later time. I loved the chapters that were more science-y. I am and always have been an English/Writing girlie in school, but I also loved science. Mainly Astronomy, Biology, and Psychology. But I did not wish to pursue jobs in these fields and have random facts that I will not use in real life, so I just use them in my poetry. I have actually been working on some scientific poems since before I read this, but they were not the first ones I’ve done. Nevertheless, I feel like this book will provide inspiration for me.

Oh, Audre! I had read Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (a biomythography) by Lorde in 2021. Though I loved reading about her identity as a Black lesbian in both of these books, I preferred Sister Outsider. These books were my first introduction to Audre Lorde. I hate that she died from breast cancer a year before I was born. While I am still getting to know her, she is Auntie Audre to me now. Some of what Gumbs presented in the book was review for me, and some of it was new information. Reading about what happened to Audre’s friend Genevieve was no less heartbreaking the second time around. Throughout the book, Gumbs includes excerpts from Audre’s poetry, which is very beautifully written. I have a book of her poems that I hope to get around to reading later on this year. I would also like to read The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde (though I know it will be emotionally wrecking for me) and Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis De Veaux (the other Alexis) at some point.

I got emotional reading this book at times. 😢 Especially in the aftermath of Nikki Giovanni’s passing, as she was another Black lesbian poet. Like Finney, Nikki Giovanni had also come to my college, but I had too much anxiety to go to the event and probably had some shame about not having read her poetry yet. I miss both Audre Lorde and Nikki Giovanni, as they have paved the way for me to exist as a Black, bisexual woman. Yet I know that their words will always be there for me.

Thank you Alexis Pauline Gumbs for writing about the life and legacy of Auntie Audre. The photos of Audre near the middle of the book was a nice touch. All and all, I found this book to be inspiring, science-terrific (yes, I just made this a hyphenated word), and oftentimes heartbreaking. A lot of Audre Lorde’s friends, cohorts, and loved ones died before and after she did. I hope that she has reunited with them all in the afterlife. 🥲