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THE SPIRITED RESOLVE OF *AUDRE* *LORDE*
Boston Globe (BG) - FRIDAY, November 20, 1992
By: Renee Graham, Globe Staff
Edition: THIRD  Section: LIVING  Page: 33
Word Count: 698

MEMO:
Appreciation

TEXT:
Of  the  cancer which finally claimed her life, *Audre* *Lorde* once wrote,
"It  is  only  another face of that continuing battle of self-determination
and survival that Black women fight daily, often in triumph."

   Cancer,  which dogged *Audre* *Lorde* for more than a decade, proved the
only  force that could still the acclaimed poet, feminist and essayist, who
died  Tuesday  at age 58 in St. Croix. She succumbed to the disease after a
14-year  battle,  but never blinked nor bent beneath the racism, sexism and
homophobia  she  chronicled  and  faced  as an African American, a woman, a
laureate  of  New  York state. A onetime librarian, she wrote such books as
"Cables  to  Rage,"  "A  Burst  of Light," "Our Dead Behind Us," "The Black
Unicorn" and "Sister Outsider." Her 1973 collection of poetry, "From a Land
Where Other People Live," was nominated for a National Book Award.

  In  1980,  she  published  "The Cancer Journals," her memoir of the first
stages of breast cancer.

  This  was  how Audre Lorde lived. She took her frailties and misfortunes,
her  strengths  and  passions,  and  forged  them  into  sometimes searing,
sometimes startling, always stirring verse. Her words pranced with cadence,
full  of  their  own rhythms, all punctuated resolve and spirit. With words
spun  into  light,  she  could weep like Billie Holiday, chuckle like Dizzy
Gillespie or bark bad like John Coltrane.

  In  "A Burst of Light," she again wrote about living with cancer, damning
its  spreading  hold on her, yet refusing to "slip or fall into any kind of
resignation. I am not going to go gently into anybody's damn good night!"

  She never did.
  Born  nearly  blind  in  New York to West Indian parents during the Great
Depression,  the  third of three daughters, she was an unruly, chubby child
whom  her mother encouraged the nuns to spank whenever necessary. At 5, she
began  dropping  the  "y"  from  her  first  name  because it disturbed the
evenness of "AUDRE LORDE" on her blue-lined notebook paper.

  Lorde  detailed  her  upbringing  in her 1982 autobiography, "Zami: A New
Spelling of My Name," which she described as "A Biomythography." Never were
her  words more eloquent, more tinged with blue than when she spoke of what
it meant to be young and black and gay.

  "We,  young and Black and fine and gay, sweated out our first heartbreaks
with  no  school or office chums to share that confidence over lunch hour,"
she  wrote.  "We  discovered  and  explored  our  attention to women alone,
sometimes  in  secret,  sometimes  in defiance, sometimes in little pockets
that  almost touched, but always alone, against a greater aloneness. We did
it  cold  turkey, and although it resulted in some pretty imaginative tough
women when we survived, too many of us did not survive at all."

  Many  of  us, born black and lesbian, survived because Audre Lorde pushed
breath  into  our  stifled  throats  and gave us voice. Hers was a precious
soliloquy  to  those  doubly oppressed in a society where we were taught to
drape our heads and shroud our sexuality.

  With  Audre,  we  found  our herstory in small, smoky women's bars -- the
"gay-girl"  clubs as she would have called them -- with odd names like Pony
Stable,  Swing  Rendezvous  and  Page Three, where women closed their eyes,
wound  their  hips,  grew  drunk  on the voices of Harry Belafonte, Frankie
Lymon and the Teen-agers and Frank Sinatra, and dared to dream of love.

  She  proclaimed  her  beauty  as a black woman who loved other women, and
demanded  recognition  in a world where acceptance means being straight and
white  and  male.  She  challenged  African  Americans to embrace her black
lesbian  sisters and gay brothers because we can ill afford to waste anyone
in the incessant struggle for racial equality. She called on women to shake
free  the  shackles of sexism, to better themselves and the world for their
daughters.

  She  took  her pains and made them power, her power and ours. And because
of  Audre  Lorde, we -- as African Americans, as women, as lesbians -- will
never again go gently into anybody's damn good night.

GRAHAM;11/19         NIGRO ;11/20,11:12    LORDE20
CAPTION:
PHOTO

                Copyright Globe Newspaper Company 1992

DESCRIPTORS:  NAME-LORDE; BIOGRPAHY-LORDE