The Audre Lorde School of Owning Your Power
I named myself after my zodiac sign. My interest and belief in astrology has waxed and waned through my life, but even during my Evangelical upbringing, when interest in astrology was a one-way path to the Devil, I was deeply drawn to the image of Leo. A lion with a mane of fire like the corona of the sun. A regal wildcat ruled over by the fire that gives life to the entire solar system. What cosmic power to be associated with, just from a birthdate.
Throughout my life, I’ve been told I am a textbook Leo. Creative and theatrical, loyal and generous, self-centered, headstrong, and confident. That last trait has always given me some imposter syndrome: I’ve been told I project confidence, but I rarely feel it inside. I think people mistake my autistic frankness for a self-assuredness that, in actuality, continuously eludes me.
Here’s a secret: there’s one Leo trait I identify with most strongly of all, and it’s also the one I’m most ashamed of. It’s a cluster of ambition, attention-seeking, and self-importance. All these little lions nestle together to form, appropriately, (a) pride.
Of course, growing up in the Evangelical church, pride was the ultimate sin. Pride was what got Lucifer cast out of Heaven and what made sinners harden their hearts against salvation. The path to righteousness required that one understand their abject worthlessness and brokenness. During worship, I sang lines like “I’m so unworthy” and “there’s nothing good in me” and I internalized them. Pride was especially dangerous to me as someone who it was assumed would grow into a woman. The first sin had come from a woman challenging what she had been told and satisfying her desires. The assertive Eve had damned humanity, and the submissive Mary– a teenaged girl who yielded to God and allowed Him to use her body– had saved us. I was told that the greatest fulfillment a woman could experience, God’s ideal plan for my entire sex, was a quiet life of staying home, supporting a godly man, and teaching my children to be good Christians.
Yet, paradoxically, I was taught that I had a special, God-ordained destiny, and that Jesus was going to use me to transform the world. I was raised on stories of martyrs and missionaries and theologians, people whose names echoed through history as Great Men of God– and the rare exceptional Great Woman, whose presence in “male” spheres we would never unpack in any depth. Despite my church’s staunch belief that men and women had separate roles, I was exposed to these stories of adventure and accomplishment right alongside the boys, and my youth pastors preached about “godly leadership” to mixed congregations. I even took part in a summer leadership intensive with my youth group. Perhaps I was supposed to understand these leadership talks as preparation for running a Sunday School or a Single Women’s Ministry focused on helping nineteen-year-olds find husbands. The effect, however, was just confusion. I was nothing, I was worthless, my body carried damnation in it, and simultaneously, I was supposed to do something exceptional to show God’s love to the entire world. It was a lot to put on a twelve-year-old.
I don’t know if it’s indoctrination that’s still lodged in my system, or if it's early-2000s self-esteem “You Can Do Anything!” campaigns, or if it’s the sign I was born under, but from my earliest memories, I can identify a drive within me to do something and be something Great. I recall being eight years old, watching the Biography channel, and despairing at the possibility that nobody might remember me after I’m dead. And, for whatever the reason may be, I still carry this expectation with me. It’s what pushes me to work as hard as I do at my art, to spend hundreds of dollars on paid manuscript submissions and contests, to jump at any opportunity for an interview. I don’t know why, but I need people to know that I was here.
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The buzzword du jure in progressive circles at this moment– that is, the theoretical concept that’s being latched onto, tossed around flippantly, used as a panacea for all problems– is to criticize things as “individualistic”. Individualism is one of the fourteen principles of white supremacy culture, as articulated by anti-racist educator Tema Okun. It has a cyclical relationship with capitalism, both creating and being created by this system. As activists, we are increasingly encouraged to think of ourselves not as individuals, but as parts of an interdependent collective. We ought to put our individual needs, wants, and feelings aside for the good of the collective. We are made, as social animals, to live, learn, eat, work, and strive for justice together. As prison abolitionist mariame kaba writes, “Anything worthwhile is done with other people.”
I agree with this basic premise– in fact, I’ve written on this blog about the importance of developing interdependence and interrupting the isolation that capitalism both breeds and is fueled by. But I also deeply struggle with it, if I’m being honest. In Evangelicalism, I was supposed to submit all of my needs, wants, feelings, and in fact my entire sense of identity, to God. I was supposed to let God do what He wanted with my life, for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven– even if that meant trying to evangelize uncontacted peoples and being killed for my efforts, or living an extremely ascetic existence like Catholic saints, or quietly submitting to an abusive husband in the name of being a godly wife.
Jesus was the world-changing Movement I was part of, and I was supposed to give everything of myself to it. Some nights as a teen, I would lay awake imagining what it would feel like to be fully surrendered to God, free of any individual will or pride. I imagined my body becoming a robotic suit powered by the Holy Spirit, who would make all my decisions for me. My own consciousness would be a powerless, dissociated observer. This fantasy would summon feelings of terror, and then an immediate wave of shame for being terrified of what God wanted.
I can’t help feeling the same mixture of fear and shame at kaba’s words. Really, mariame, I want to ask, anything worthwhile is done with other people? I think a warm shower is one of the simple luxuries of life, well worth having– does that need to be done with other people? Haven’t you ever appreciated a solitary walk in nature, or gotten lost in journaling, or masturbated? Are those endeavors not worthwhile because they only involve the individual? If I take kaba’s words literally– which, to be fair, I don’t think she intended me to– I imagine a person with no sense of self, terrified to be alone. I imagine someone lost in The Movement as I was trying to lose myself in God.
The rejection of individual identity is even reflective in the way kaba writes her name. For much of her career, kaba refused to put her name on anything she’d written, and still refuses to be photographed. In eschewing capital letters in her name, she follows a tradition set by groundbreaking feminist author bell hooks, who wanted to direct focus to her ideas rather than herself as an individual. The message in kaba’s name, in hooks’ name, in adrienne maree brown’s name, is that the collective movement should take center stage over any single figurehead. Again, it’s a sentiment that I agree with, but not uncomplicatedly so.
I’m not the first to point out the fact that these activists’ attempts to deflect attention haven't worked. hooks, kaba, and brown are renowned writers who are known, studied, and quoted the world over. hooks’ words especially can be found on coffee mugs and tote bags at any progressive bookstore. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. These brilliant women have changed countless lives with their work. They deserve to be celebrated. In the interview linked above, kaba explains how she came to start putting her name– even a lowercase one– on her work. The shift was prompted by a comment from a white colleague and friend:
I just think it’s funny how you’re willing to erase yourself from history when you’re always recapturing histories of all these black women in your multiple projects, and you’re always talking about how you had to find them in the archives, right? And you’re literally erasing yourself at the moment. Also, it’s interesting that the younger people are seeing you do that.
kaba came to realize that, well-intended as it may have been, in going unattributed she was doing exactly what structural racism had done to generations of Black women before. She was robbing generations of young people of a role model. It doesn’t escape my notice that the people most often shifting focus away from themselves in activist spaces are Black, often queer, women: people who already experience a startling lack of representation and recognition in both life and death. By and large, the people in need of the lesson of focusing on the collective are not the ones practicing it, and the people in need of individual recognition are the ones refusing it. This raises the question: for people who have been systemically devalued, who does it liberate for us to devalue ourselves?
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Enter poet-activist Audre Lorde. On September 17th, I and a group of friends attended an author talk on the new Audre Lorde biography Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, by Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Dr. Gumbs, a small woman with an enormous smile, understands Lorde as a force of personality that transcends the bounds of a single lifetime. In her talk, she described the palpability of Lorde’s presence in both her life and that of previous Lorde biographer Dr. Alexis de Veaux. When Dr. de Veaux got distracted from her writing, Gumbs stated, the ghost of Audre Lorde would shake books off of de Veaux’s shelf in protest.
As a Black lesbian born to immigrant parents in the era of Jim Crow, Lorde lived in a world that profoundly and purposely disempowered her. Her biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name recounts formative experiences of racism at school, in public spaces, and even in the lesbian bars where many white queer women found vital community. As she writes in The Cancer Journals: “Growing up Fat Black Female and almost blind in america requires so much surviving that you have to learn from it or die.” From this furnace, Lorde gifted the world revolutionary insights on feminist power.
Though the word was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, Lorde’s writings on the interaction between her oppressions as woman, a lesbian, a Black person, and a first-generation american (sic, Lorde’s capitalization of choice) are a clear and early articulation of intersectional theory. During the era of lesbian separatism, a movement which called on lesbians to divest themselves as much as possible from interaction with men, Lorde wrote about how her struggle was inescapably tied to the struggle of Black men, how she could not separate or choose between the parts of her identity, and on the necessity of solidarity and coalition-building. She profoundly understood the interconnectedness of all struggles for liberation.
Dr. Gumbs described how Lorde constantly corresponded with friends all over the world, seeking first-hand accounts of current events because she did not trust the american media’s spin. At the same time, she devoured these less-than-trustworthy newspapers late into the night, and called her friends before dawn to inform them on world events. In this practice, the biographer sees Lorde’s enormous capacity and desire for connection. And this connection extended to the more-than-human world as well. Gumbs called attention to Lorde’s deep-seated but often-forgotten environmentalism. As Lorde wrote, “Earth is a relationship.” Indeed, even as her body battled against breast cancer, Gumbs says that Lorde “came to see [this struggle] as connected to every other struggle in the world.”
Certainly, Lorde was devoted to the collective. But what struck me in Dr. Gumb’s talk was Lorde’s devotion to herself. Throughout her talk, Gumbs described her own work as a sacred effort to preserve Lorde’s life and legacy, and to transmit her transformational energy to the next generation. Towards the end, the author made a comment to the effect of, “Audre Lorde wanted people to be talking about her, and here we are.” In researching for this essay, I found the quote, featured in Survival is a Promise, where Lorde states this explicitly. A fourteen-year-old Lorde wrote in her diary: “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.”
I see myself in the words of young Audre Lorde– my eight-year-old self watching the Biography channel, my fourteen-year-old self on the leadership retreat, my current twenty-six-year-old self submitting to every litmag I can find. Lorde, too, believed she had something uniquely powerful to share with the world. Audre Lorde found connection and collectivism in every aspect of her life, but she was also a person who believed in owning her personal power. The word “power” recurs in her writing over and over again: the power of emotion, the power of intuition, the power of anger. She wanted women to lay claim to these powers, and she started with herself. She made herself large and loud, so that her value could never be denied or dismissed again. She did not lose herself in the collective, but found herself there.
Audre Lorde is the source of another buzzword du jure, the concept of “self-care”. Self-care has been co-opted by the mainstream to sell facial masks and drape laser hair removal treatments in feminist language– certainly not what a Marxist like Lorde was advocating for. But I find this term also misunderstood on the left as well. I’ve heard the concept explained as “the maintenance you do on yourself so you can take care of others.” In this dehumanizing model, the individual is a mere tool that needs to be sharpened periodically in order to do its job. The only value of the tool is the job it can do for others, and there is no reason to maintain it unless it will be used. So every night you go to bed early, you had better be doing it so that you can wake up early for a protest. You give to yourself only so that others can take. Under this model, self-care becomes a site of guilt and shame– constantly wondering, have I done enough with and for others to deserve my warm shower and my solitary walk in nature? It is not unlike the guilt and shame of a sinner in the hand of an angry God.
I don’t think this is what Audre Lorde meant when she coined the term. Her writing does not bear the signs of the self-loathing this mindset creates. While Lorde was certainly intentional in her connections to others, there is a difference between intentional cultivation of community and endless striving to be giving “enough”. Lorde saw herself as part of the vast ecosystem of the universe, and the universe does not have to try to be interconnected. It simply is. Whether we try to or not, our lives are already interacting with every other life on the planet. Simply by existing, we are already in community. Our task– a task Lorde accomplished and stewarded in others– is simply to recognize it.
As Dr. Gumbs says, Lorde “committed to her survival by nurturing the survival of all Black women.” The love and strength she gave to others was not at the expense of herself. It was part of her self-care. She was not a mere battery who needed to be recharged in order to keep giving others light. She was a node of a vast mycelial network in which all parties exchanged resources. She received nurturance by giving it, and she gave love to others by cultivating love for herself. She recognized others as extensions of herself, and loved and empowered them as an expression of self-love and self-empowerment.
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When I named myself Leo, I was in a place of profound fear and powerlessness. I was transitioning against most of my family’s wishes, against my own fears of what it would mean for my relationships, under a rising tide of fascism. I was surrendering to a current thundering inside me for years, because I realized swimming against it would kill me. I chose my name as a talisman of strength. The mystical power of the zodiac, the life-giving radiance of the sun, the strength and confidence of a lion, were things I found lacking in my life, which I wanted to lay claim to. I still live in that fear and powerlessness a lot of the time.
As a transmasculine person, it’s somewhat dangerous for me to admit that I want to feel powerful. I fear that in doing so, I am validating transphobic stereotypes of transmasculine people as power-hungry gender traitors who, tired of being oppressed as women, decide to become oppressors themselves. Power, we are taught in progressive circles, is inherently corrosive, oppressive, and dangerous. And it is especially dangerous when attached to masculinity, which can only ever result in violent power over others.
Power-over is a false power, one based in the constant fear that someone stronger will come along and destroy you. I have no interest in it. I want the power of the sun, an uncontainable brightness that fuels all of life on Earth. I don’t want power that destroys, but power that is generative. What I desire to embody of lion-ness is not the status of apex predator, but that elusive self-possession: a comfort in myself that radiates outward and inspires the same confidence in others.
The facilitator for the book talk, an older gentleman with round glasses and a head of grey locs, began the night with a question: who here had learned something from Audre Lorde about being in their power? A flurry of hands, mine included, rose. When Dr. Gumbs began speaking about her work, her eyes sparkled. I felt a confidence and self-love wafting off of her that I knew Lorde had helped her to develop. I saw that same light within many faces in the audience. That solar power, lion power, that I want to possess, is what Audre Lorde has and inspires. It’s the power that continues to rattle through history and shake books off of shelves. It's the power I believe she wants for everyone.
Audre Lorde was a first-gen Black disabled lesbian. She learned to love and care for herself, to trust in her own wisdom, in a world dead-set on withholding her basic human dignity. She learned to see a possible future for herself far greater than the meager reality of oppression she had been given. In doing so, she opened the capacity to extend that love and power to others. In her refusal to make herself small and lesser, thousands of others have begun to unlearn the dehumanizing lies that systemic oppression tells us about ourselves. We would have lost all of that if Lorde had been afraid of her own ego. In elevating this individual, remembering her by name rather than erasing her, the collective prospers.
I am an autistic Jewish trans lesbian. I have, throughout my life, been made to feel less than human for all these reasons. And on my worst days, I believe it’s true. On my darkest days, I believe the best thing I can do for the world is stop taking up space, stop making noise, shrink myself back into the quiet Christian wife I was raised to be. And increasingly, those beliefs come to me in the voices of activists I follow, demanding I surrender my identity and ambition to the greater cause.
But if I truly believe that every human being, every individual life, is precious and valuable, I simply can’t do that. Living my life proudly may unlock the doors to other people’s lives in the way that disappearing never could. When I claim my power– a power based in love and generosity towards myself, rather than a fear of dominate-or-be-dominated– then by virtue of existing in the universal ecosystem, that power radiates to others. I believe that Audre Lorde’s spirit is teaching me not to be afraid of my ambition, my power, my pride. I believe she is teaching me not to be afraid of myself.
“I amthe sun and moon and forever hungry
the sharpened edge
where day and night shall meet
and not be
one.
from “From the House of Yemanjá,”
― Audre Lorde,The Black Unicorn: Poems
