Like her prose, Lorde’s poetry is a performance of the embodied self. Just as many of her essays were originally speeches, so, too, her poetry emerges from an oral impulse. As Lorde composes poetry, both speaking it and hearing it are essential to her. As she explains in the documentary A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde, toward the end of her life when her voice weakens and cracks, she is hard-pressed to continue writing poetry. She depends on speaking the words; hearing them connects with the feeling she is trying to embody in those words. This process, she says, is part of her structure and technique. Reading or hearing her poetry brings one back to Braidotti’s concept of the body as “situated at the intersection of the biological and the symbolic.” Lorde connects her poetry to her body through its oral quality and through patterns of statements and imagery that give concrete form to the issues discussed above: race, gender, sexual identity, the erotic, and mortality. A distillation of these issues can be found in Lorde’s poem “A Woman Speaks” from The Black Unicorn.
The title of the poem, “A Woman Speaks,” and the last three lines, “I am /woman/ and not white” claim the authority to speak that has customarily been denied to the oppressed. In addition, since the title mentions “A Woman,” only later specified as a woman of color, the woman of color becomes the representative or norm. “A Woman Speaks” and “I am /woman/ and not white” create a frame for the rest of the poem that, along with the rest of the poem, is related to Lorde’s image of the “Black mother within each of us — the poet.” (Margaret Kissam)
A WOMAN SPEAKS
by Audre Lorde
Moon marked and touched by sun
my magic is unwritten
but when the sea turns back
it will leave my shape behind.
I seek no favor
untouched by blood
unrelenting as the curse of love
permanent as my errors
or my pride
I do not mix
love with pity
nor hate with scorn
and if you would know me
look into the entrails of Uranus
where the restless oceans pound.
I do not dwell
within my birth nor my divinities
who am ageless and half-grown
and still seeking
my sisters
witches in Dahomey
wear me inside their coiled cloths
as our mother did
mourning.
I have been woman
for a long time
beware my smile
I am treacherous with old magic
and the noon’s new fury
with all your wide futures
promised
I am
woman
and not white.
Audre Lorde, “A Woman Speaks” from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde, 1997.