It's summer at last. Because I teach college for a living and still have the same September to June work schedule that structured my life since I was about five years old, I've never lost that dreamy sense of release that comes about the same time that the cottonwood trees start blooming in Chicago, in mid-June.
My toes have been set free, and shoelaces and buckles will be banished until September. I've already cut off at least one pair of jeans into shorts, and even though I don't get to sleep until noon anymore, I will be catching up on my napping and maybe a matinee or two (at least on the days that I have childcare). Summer seems to signal for many of us the time to think younger, to remember how it feels to be unfettered by constraints and shoulds and stories where we already know the answers.
As I get older, it seems like that process of letting go takes more intentionality, and paradoxically, more reflection. Because really what I'm describing is being in the moment, being in the present, and letting my self, and my own story be reshaped by what unexpectedly comes, along with that hot summer sun.
Which is why I love to read and re-read the work of Audre Lorde. As a Black lesbian writer, activist, poet and teacher, Lorde gives us a model for how to be fiercely, bravely open. In essays like "Poetry is not a Luxury," and her biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of my Name, she is committed to risk and being unsettled. She writes in her essay, "Poetry is not a Luxury":
"Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas … . But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves, along with the renewed courage to try them out."
What I keep learning from Audre Lorde is the importance of telling difficult realities, and of being precise in your language, even—especially when it hurts.
In Zami, Lorde captures the experience of being outside among outsiders: of being "fat, black and fine" in a lesbian culture that still praises whiteness, and of claiming a Black childhood that was always already queer.
Storytelling becomes a way to keep company with oneself in loneliness, as well as to connect with like thinkers, to find community; to articulate the contradictions and complexities of life; to seek out justice.
Lorde does so, I think, by linking her own pursuit of freedom to the fight for the freedom and justice of others. Lorde opens Zami with a quest, a commitment to scrutiny, which is also a commitment to community, being present among others. She writes, "To whom do I owe the power behind my voice, what strength I have become, yeasting up like sudden blood from the bruised skin's blister? To whom do I owe the symbols of my survival?"
When I taught Lorde's works in my "Women Writers of Color" class this past Spring, sometimes the distance between my own experiences as a Black and queer woman in my 40s and those of my students felt bigger than ever, and my fear of misunderstanding more daunting. But Lorde is an excellent model for sitting with conflict, and for the ongoing search for individual and community truths that translate across generations.
I am grateful to the students as well as the work of this writer who remind me to embrace the new and the now. To Cindy, who dared to critique Lorde's inaccurate Spanish in Zami, and maybe more importantly, her objectification of the Mexicans she met while travelling to escape U.S. racism. To Vlasta, who earned the trust of her black and brown sisters in the class by listening and then sharing her own distinct truth as a recent white immigrant. To Xavier, the quiet Chicano activist who, when I told him Zami was the book closest to my heart, nodded with knowing.
Lorde is the bridge to our multiple queer histories, across generations: Lorde's renegade self-fashioning bridges the punk spirit of DIY; her struggles to be visible as "kiki" in the butch/femme ruled world of a still racist, still sexist pre-Stonewall Greenwhich Village bridges the search for an LGBTQ home space that many of us still find wanting.
Each time I reread and then share her work with others, I am changed.
So this summer, as you head to the beach, or to your favorite air-conditioned café, take Audre Lorde along with you and "learn to cherish/ the boisterous Black Angel that drives you."
Francesca Royster is a Professor of English at DePaul University, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare, Popular Culture, gender, race, sexuality and performance. Her books include Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (University of Michigan Press, 2013) and Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon (Palgrave, 2003).
