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758 Callaloo 35.3 (2012) 758–777

“WHICH ME WILL SURVIVE”Rethinking Identity, Reclaiming Audre Lorde

by Keith D. Leonard

“which me will survive / all these liberations”—Audre Lorde, “Who Said It Was Simple”

I

Aldon Nielsen and Lauri Ramey understand very well what is not always compre-hended fully in studies of contemporary poetry—that to “make it new” can take on many different faces. They are particularly clear-eyed about the issues that prevent scholars from recognizing fully the practices of formal innovation among African American poets. In their introduction to Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans, they declare that “it would seem unseemly for those of us who read after Langs-ton Hughes to be less capacious and more captious in our criticism than he was, and he was a tireless promoter of even the outer reaches of African American experimentation” (xiv). They cite as one prominent example Hughes’s support of “eccentric experimentalist” Russell Atkins who declared in Free Lance, the little magazine that he edited in the 1950s, that his verse was a mode of “deconstruction” (Nielsen, Integral Music 36). Atkins offered a definition of this term analogous to Jacques Derrida’s right before that philosopher’s ideas came to dominate the US literary academy (Nielsen, Integral Music 36–40). Nielsen and Ramey use this analogy to point out that, unlike most scholars of African American poetics in particular and scholars of contemporary poetry in general, Hughes saw no opposition between the affirmation of ethnic identity in black vernacular poetics like his own on one hand and the emphasis on the materiality of language and the deconstruction of such conventional discourses as “identity” that has come to be called “postmodern” poetic experimentation (like Atkins’s) on the other. They are right to recognize how much less capacious current poetry criticism is in comparison to Hughes, invested as it often is in the allegedly unbridgeable divide between identity politics and language-based poetic experiment. Ramey and Nielsen conclude aptly that “though the plethora of black poetry anthologies of the sixties and seventies had done so much to open the American curricu-lum to black writing, the more adventurous of black lyric was too often silenced” (xix). Resisting “the plain pure surface of identitarian free verse . . . [that has come] to be all of

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that long black song that America could hear singing” (xix), they present the numerous African American poets whose works’ ruffled surfaces complicate this divide.

In this essay, I will follow their lead by clarifying more concretely some of the contours of what they call the adventurous African American lyric using the example of Audre Lorde, an exemplary protest poet who, despite her moderate but distinctive innovations in many of her lyric poems, is not considered an innovative poet and did not make it into their anthology. Endorsing Ramey and Nielsen’s sense that African American poetic innovation has long been effectively bridging the divide between identity and “deconstruction,” I will demonstrate how Lorde’s lyric practice highlights self-contradictory wrinkles in the logic of identity politics by juxtaposing the claim to assert identity transparently on one hand with her self-conscious critique of that language of transparency as hegemonic and exclusionary on the other. Deconstructing the very unitary subjectivity it seems to embody, in other words, Lorde’s lyric “I” becomes one ground upon which African American poetry criticism can bridge this divide in the ways the poets did. Crucially for my purposes, the bridge for Lorde is not primarily a poetic practice of deconstruction, so to speak, as it was for Atkins or, more recently, for Harryette Mullen. Rather, it depends upon a distinctively multifaceted portrait of identity formation that does tear identity down but does so in order to fortify the building. The fact that Ramey and Nielsen’s anthology, otherwise quite capacious, does not include Lorde demonstrates the challenge of identifying this mode of poetic innovation that starts with a critique of subjectivity in order to reconstitute it rather than de-center it. But Lorde’s work allows us to confront head-on the postmodern literary academy’s dominant anxiety about the poetic value of identity-based politics as related to a centralized lyric persona and to relieve some of that anxiety. I am not claiming that Lorde is an experimental poet, then, but rather that her work calls for a more capacious conception of poetic innovation, one broad enough to encompass a trajectory of innova-tive African American lyric practice that she exemplifies.

Lorde’s work can help us to bridge this unnecessary divide between identity and in-novation because her lyric protest was composed in an era of politically motivated cultural innovation and during Lorde’s own alienation from the various identity-based movements of which she was also a part, a combination which led her to as significant a synthesis of innovation and identity as Hughes, Ramey and Nielsen could have advocated. And she offered that combination at the same time that “Language poetics”—that embodiment of the postmodern in poetics—emerged. Seen through the lens of Ramey’s and Nielsen’s elegant formulation, then, Lorde’s practice of lyric protest, especially in her 1978 volume The Black Unicorn, exemplifies what I consider to be a “postmodern” critique of power as manifest in culture and language through a “postmodern” construction of individual and communal subjectivity derived from the “modern” epistemology of identity politics. These postmodern implications of Lorde’s practice emerge in large part from how her lesbian feminism and Black-Nationalist communalism, “postmodern” postures themselves, each sustains a critique of the other and of Lorde’s lyric mode too, destabilizing the sometimes foundationalist assumptions behind each. Lorde’s lyrics about African “witches,” black female political activists, and her autobiographical personae create parallels between Western historical figures and the religious archetypes of the West African Yoruba society in order to juxtapose Western rationality and its monotheism to the communalist emphasis of the West African pantheism often cited by scholars and lay people alike as the likely

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source and root of African American culture. These poems use the fractured continuity (or continuous fragmentation) of diaspora to validate Lorde’s distinctively fractured model of selfhood exemplified by her well-known self-description: “Black lesbian feminist mother warrior poet.” As this phrasing suggests, Lorde’s ideal is predicated on the coexistence and interrelation of discrete selves and, more to the point, on how that selfhood, when expressed, operates as much through juxtaposition, contradiction, and opacity as through the linear logic of Standard English grammar. Depending upon an experience of the si-multaneity of the many facets of subjectivity not unlike West African pantheistic belief in multiple gods and the overlapping of material and spiritual worlds, identity becomes paradoxically the source of certain “deconstructive” effects in Lorde’s practice, its “post-modern” posture that poetic meaning and social transformation depend upon embracing the coexistence of multiple differences within a “self.” Neither the “we” nor the “I” of an Africanist heritage remain entirely unitary, Lorde acknowledges, and she does so in order to articulate the implications of her alienation from and critique of Black Nationalist and feminist coalition politics. Thus, her mode of innovation is rooted in black traditions and queer concerns, and not the philosophies of poetic language inherited from Ezra Pound, the Beat poets, or the Black Mountain school, and fulfills those concerns through distinc-tive avenues of innovation.

In what follows, therefore, I will characterize how we should position Lorde’s lyric on the cusp of several “postmodern” movements—”Language,” lesbian feminism, Black Na-tionalism—that were equally committed at the same moment in time to literary innovation in analogous and overlapping terms of left-leaning and self-conscious political critique. Crediting the overlaps in the terms of these movements as much as their better-known oppositions, I characterize how Lorde translated her concept of multifaceted identity formation into her consequent and characteristic uses of fractured and run-on syntax, incisive lineation, self-contradictory lyric personae, and archetype. I will show how these techniques become the means by which Lorde synthesizes identity formation to such “experimental” priorities as a critique of unitary subjectivity. These techniques constitute what I will call Lorde’s mode of poetic misreading. I will thus be defining and practicing the mode of reading constructed by Lorde’s exemplary reworking of lyric identification.

Thus, I am not arguing for an entirely distinctive black poetic postmodernism, though such an argument has merit, as Nielsen’s recent scholarship demonstrates. Nor am I argu-ing that “black poets are experimentalists too,” as Timothy Yu does with Asian American poets. What I want to do instead is challenge the strange presumption in a great deal of scholarship that the social segregation of poets and their unequal positions of social privilege produced such an entrenched cultural segregation that their works have nothing to say to one another. I join several scholars who have sought to dismantle the opposi-tion typically set up between the “experimental” and the lyric, often through feminism (Kinnahan, Norris), so that I can resist how prominent scholars of poetic experimentalism have asserted how identity politics and its lyric protest fragmented the unified Left and how the lyric is at an impasse because of its resistance to innovation. I also join Nielsen in dismantling the opposition between experimentalism and ethnic poetics in order to resist how African American poetry scholarship generally identifies poetic innovation only as that which elaborates on black vernacular forms, especially jazz and the blues (Baker, Anderson, Bolden, Jones), with postmodernism being framed primarily as various ver-

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sions of vernacular identity formation rather than historical shifts in cultural or aesthetic attitudes (Benston). Instead of replicating how scholars of experimentalism ignore or even disparage ethnic protest poets or how African American studies unwisely cedes certain innovative attitudes towards poetic language to those experimentalists, I want to pursue the historical and aesthetic crosscurrents of thought and practice that usefully link ethnic poetics to their contemporaneous (white) avant-garde practices. This approach will give us a better sense of Lorde’s place within the range of what African American innovative poets have done within, against, and through the bounds of identity politics. And what they have done, generally, as Lorde did so well, is to imagine the intimacy of an empowered community through complex versions of poetic identification without either the tyranny of a bourgeois unified subject or postmodernism’s unity of alienated intellectualism, an approach that should restore some poetic heft to the left-leaning communalism of identity politics. And I will make this case by defending the simple observation that Audre Lorde is an innovative lyric poet.

II

What has struck me most about the critical divide I have identified above is that nei-ther approach can account persuasively for how Lorde’s lyric practice—like that of many African American poets during and since the 1960s—fulfilled the progressive political aims claimed by each side of that divide. On one hand, even though most scholarship on Lorde comes from an identity-politics perspective and is generally interested in validating her complex coalition politics, it usually does so at the expense of examining her poetics.1 This scholarship thus cannot defend her verse against the abiding and persuasive post-modern critique that the lyric’s claim to unified voice is effectively a normative, bourgeois, patriarchal, heterosexist perspective, allegedly unchanged and unchanging and therefore epistemologically unsound and politically retrograde. Indeed, Lorde scholarship often paradoxically endorses that posture. As Laura Kinnahan observes, for example, much feminist protest poetry of Lorde’s era claims to posit a “truth” of an erased or buried yet “unitary ‘I,’ often autobiographical, expressing experience (present to the self) through accessible language” (Kinnahan 4). In other words, scholars of Lorde tend to defend how experience becomes a social authority shared exclusively by the marginalized and con-stitutes their means to “deconstruct” the experiential dynamics of hegemony through a unitary voice of critique. Such scholarship does so without articulating well enough how this urgent attempt to constitute a subject against racist fragmentation both fulfills and fruitfully complicates that subject.

On the other hand, the apt postmodern critique of the lyric is rooted too deeply in its own universalizing implications to recognize aspects of its own critique within the ethnic protest it ignores. As Yu points out, for example, Ron Silliman recognized that he and fellow “Language” originators Charles Bernstein and Ron Perelman had the challenge in founding their journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E of uniting a Left fractured in the late 1970s by identity politics in part by publishing “good” experimental verse, which to them did not likely include ethnic protest. Even as Silliman recognized the potentially whitewash-

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ing universalism implied by such an opposition, he offered a paradoxical poetic practice in which, on one hand, Language is a form of innovation that, he claims, is particular to white men and, on the other, as Yu put it, his “use of the disruptive and paratactic techniques of the ‘new sentence’ seeks to act as a check of the limits of [that ‘white male avant-gardist’] perspective” (Yu 39). The scholars of postmodern poetics rarely acknowl-edge this paradoxical and implicit constitution of postmodern poetics as a white “ethnic poetics” resistant to difference in subject formation. If Yu is right, and I think he is, then these poets were aware that their emphasis on a de-centered subject was nonetheless usu-ally a (white) subject that reinforced as it sought to escape its own whiteness. This elision of the “white” centeredness of the de-centered subject unifies the Pound tradition by the same white, though not always male, avant-gardist perspective as that which Silliman imagined the “new sentence” to resist. If one does not write like Silliman, Perelman, or Bernstein, in other words, one is not experimental. Fair enough, if experiment is meant to identify what Nielsen and Ramey call the “outer reaches.” However, the problem is that “experiment” and “innovation” are too often used synonymously, hence Ramey and Nielsen’s attempt to distinguish them implicitly in their title. After all, with the exception of their anthology, the only African American poet consistently considered “innovative” is Harryette Mullen who openly acknowledges Gertrude Stein as an inspiration and some of whose work looks like that of the Language poets, making her work effectively the exception that proves the rule that white experimentalists (almost) exclusively exemplify innovation. In these terms, Yu justifies his attention on Asian American protest poetry by calling those 1970s poets an “avant garde,” a term he persuasively argues refers more to a community of poets than to poetic practice He thus declares their communal arguments about the nature of verse to be analogous to the arguments of (white) avant garde com-munities. Like most scholars of postmodern experimentalism, therefore, Yu does little to account for the artistry of ethnic protest poetics, though he comes closest.

What both of these approaches miss, then, is the substantive ways in African American poets offered what can be called postmodern critiques of power through their emphasis on identity formation and affirmation, critiques that de-center the white subject while also constituting an empowering ethnic subject. They also miss how this conjunction takes on particularly powerful complexity in and since the Black Arts movement era of the 1960s and 1970s. At the time L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was being formed, in other words, The Black Unicorn was offering its own confrontation with the limits of the lyric and of identity in order to challenge and to unseat the unitary, patriarchal Eurocentric subject in poetry if nowhere else. Unlike theirs, though, Lorde’s critique comes from an acknowledged investment in individuated poetic subjectivity, not an ostensible but misleading rejection of it. Lorde’s most important notion of identity formation—”the house of difference”—consciously manipulates this powerful “postmodern” contradiction in identity politics:

Being women together was not enough. We were different. Being gay-girls together was not enough. We were different. Being Black together was not enough. We were different. Being Black women together was not enough. We were different. Being Black dykes together was not enough. We were different. (Lorde, Zami 226)

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Like her Black Nationalist contemporaries, for whom, for example, “blackness is our ul-timate reality” (Karenga 8), Lorde posits in this description of the community of friends centered around her New York apartment that identity affirmation and togetherness constitute the foundation of resistance. But unlike those nationalists who excluded her due to her lesbianism, Lorde simultaneously asserts the bounded, empowered selfhoods and the limitations to those boundaries, revealing how these differences among “us” are matters of relation, not of absolutes, and thus how each “self” exceeds what the labels claim to capture. There is an extent to which such formulations were typical of identity politics and clearly this is the kind of fragmentation of which the white Left was wary. But Lorde, here and elsewhere, emphasized the instability of these categories more than many of her peers, implying that this instability produced an even more radical unity or whole-ness than the unitary homogeneity that is usually attributed to identity politics, and that would lead Black Nationalists to exclude lesbians. Unlike her well-known and oft-cited conceptions of “the erotic,” which she defines as the “dark and deep” emotional “center” of black women, this formulation posits an interdependence among these fragments as paradoxically the essentialist “center” for which she is well-known (Lorde, Sister Outsider 47). As direct as these lines of prose are, then, they are articulating how difficult it is to read a self, even as it acknowledges an even greater difficulty of inhabiting the multiplicity of social locations that produce this misreading. The “we” does not remain consistent here, nor do the labels for the same self (“gay-girls” versus “dykes,” for instance) as each claim to difference recalibrates who is among the “we.” Thus, Lorde’s friends both are and are not all that this “we” encapsulates or excludes. The anxiety of this passage is that neither inclusion nor exclusion is as certain as folks like nationalists—or Lorde herself—might want to claim. And yet it is this very uncertainty—not, in fact, the unity—that constitutes resistance.

Inspired less by Gertrude Stein than by this experiential reconstitution of multiple differences, even some of Lorde’s otherwise straightforward lyric protest poems garner similarly moderate but still innovative effects when they are read—as they should be—as expressions of this fractured wholeness of the house of difference. For example, the poem “Who Said It Was Simple” opens: “Sitting in Nedicks / the women rally before they march / discussing the problematic girls / they hire to make them free.” In these conventional terms of identity-based coalitions, liberation for (white) “women” depends upon the “problematic” (black) “girls” who, in their position of actual or metaphorical servitude, as either domestic help or unseen menial labor, “free” (bourgeois white) “women” to rally for a community whose ethnic, racial, and sexual diversity those women refuse to acknowledge. “Sitting at Nedicks,” the “women” are more like tourists or trend-followers visiting that then-landmark New York restaurant than true activists. As Lorde put it, “There is a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist” (Sister Outsider 116). For similar reasons, ethnic community-building fails: “An almost white counterman passes / a waiting brother to serve them first / and the ladies neither notice nor reject / the slighter pleasures of their slavery.” Like the women, the waiter “passes” for (a) white (man), ignoring his “waiting brother”—presumably a black man in the parlance of the 1960s activist—in order to serve their hegemonic and enslaving white privilege. He is won over by their claims to homogenous universality which actually compromises rather than facilitates their activism by subordinating him

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and them to their whiteness and alienating him and them from a potential coalition against that enslaving whiteness.

The poem thus critiques the universalizing of “woman” based on white women’s experience even as it calls in response either for a more inclusive definition of “woman” or a homogeneous community of dissident black women. The problem is, of course, that both of these alternative postures require the epistemology of homogeneity that they criti-cize. And both alternatives depend in this poem on what Virginia Jackson aptly criticizes as traditional “lyric reading” in which the poem’s first-person speaker is treated as an ahistorical abstraction expressing universally shared experience the poem has the power simply to declare, a mode of reading that, Jackson points out, is historically contingent rather than necessary (Jackson 10–15). In these terms, the poem seems merely to transfer rather than to unseat homogeneous lyric personhood and its principles of “lyric reading.” Black women are “women” too, it implies, and black lesbian feminist poets can therefore enact the unified lyric self. Such a transfer of authorized subjectivity has genuine power, granting as it does a privileged version of subjectivity to those alleged not to have it. But that power depends upon the erasure of the very difference it claims to affirm. Thus it remains subject to the postmodern critique.

But the poem ultimately resists this trap of its own making through its version of the house of difference. As Lorde’s best lyrics usually do, this poem emphasizes how the speaker’s identity confounds the interpretive priorities and the unitary subjectivity of the “lyric reading” it invites. It does so by implying the failure of any model of unanimity: “But I am bound by my mirror / as well as my bed / see causes in color / as well as sex.” If the (white) women included the speaker in their “sisterhood,” they would only “bind” her more fully to her “color” by ignoring the meaning of race, even as many a black feminist scholar has read such poems as including the speaker in an exclusively black sisterhood based on Lorde’s own concept of the erotic (Alexander, Dhairyam). Each of these instances of homogeneity bind the speaker to her “bed” of domesticity, including the lesbian sexual-ity such “women” often ignore, as well as the maid or nanny service that so many black women—as “girls”—provided for well-to-do white women, a role frequently played by “girls” from Lorde’s native Caribbean. These anxieties of multiple exclusion are summed up in the concluding lines of the poem from which I garner the title of this essay: “which me will survive / all these liberations.” The speaker laments the fragmenting effects on the individual subject of multiple identity-based coalitions whose principles of false homogeneity elide the fact that these alliances are strategic, not natural. To this extent, Lorde shares Silliman’s skepticism about identity politics, negotiating as she always did the tension between her consistent use of the term “coalition” with her commitment to a naturally empowering womanhood. By identifying the exclusions enacted by each coali-tion, including “naturally” empowered womanhood, she acknowledges the challenge of reading her “I” as the unified identity it seems to be claiming for itself. Indeed, the speaker realizes that if only a single self does “survive,” other “me’s” would be bound, and that would hardly be liberation at all.

Unlike Silliman and others in his tradition, though, Lorde (and her tradition) prizes both the coalitions and a unified identity just the same so the poem thus tries to reconsti-tute a version of that subject through “the house of difference.” In order to do so, it must complicate the principles of lyric reading. Lorde’s use of the word “girl,” for example, is

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commensurate with Hortense Spillers’ analysis of how black female subjectivity is con-stituted in a discursive field and thus how this particular poem complicates lyric reading:

Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother,” “Aunty,” “Granny,” God’s “Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,” or “Black Woman at the Podium”: I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented. (Spillers 203)

For Spillers, black female subjectivity has had to inhabit at least this range of racist guises in its function as the fullest reservoir of “investments and privations” against which the national culture articulates itself as coherent. Lorde similarly identifies how, by acknowl-edging the role she is forced to play as a “girl,” the speaker gains the critical perspective to recognize, as Spillers does here, that her social role actually constitutes an aspect of her “self,” thus rendering dubious her preceding notion of a coherent identity. Interest-ingly, Spillers is less ambivalent than Lorde’s speaker—and many black feminists—about how this oppressive rhetorical wealth can nonetheless work toward liberation: “actually claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to ‘name’), which her culture im-poses in blindness, ‘Sapphire’ might rewrite after all a radically different text for female empowerment” (Spillers 229). Spillers is suggesting that by embracing the “treacherous, bitchy, stubborn, and hateful” black woman that is Sapphire (hooks 212), black women can develop the capacity to “name” which is a defining component of discursive power. While Lorde is not so sanguine, her “girl” is nonetheless adapting a posture of critique from her recognition of how the social structure is positioning her to function as “treacherous” to the “women” who expect her only to conform.

This awareness of “girl” as part of a discursive field allows Lorde’s poem to recast ex-perience as a persuasive source of radicalizing knowledge rather than the overstated and unquestioned foundations of a unitary historical narrative upon which identity politics sometimes depends at the expense of a broader analysis of power (Scott). Like Paula Moya, I find experience in identity politics sometimes to work more complexly than critics like Scott or Judith Butler allow. Though I would not call myself a “postpositivist realist” as Moya does, I am persuaded that experience provides one angle of access to one’s social location and that certain protest writers of Lorde’s era operate more or less self-consciously with this idea in mind. They recognize, as we should, in Moya’s words, that “there is an epistemic component to identity that allows for the possibility of error and accuracy” in interpreting experience in its relation to the social order; “that one person’s understand-ing of the same situation may undergo revision over the course of time” in response to experience (41); and that “oppositional struggle is fundamental to our ability to understand the world more accurately” (44). Using Lorde’s Chicana lesbian feminist contemporaries, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, Moya aptly characterizes how models of experience in identity politics do not all and always depend upon a dubious “positivist” notion of its epistemic authority. She demonstrates how their experiences of multiple differences and exclusions produce their “accurate” perspectives on how the problems in activist cultures that led to their exclusions were symptoms of the larger social order’s masking

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of its heteronormative racist patriarchy in mystified universalisms. In the case of this poem, the play on “girl” exemplifies Moya’s implication that the “experience” of social disjuncture constitutes central epistemic value of one’s “self,” an implication Lorde finds in conventional lyric practice and exploits.

In these terms, “Who Said It Was Simple” laments the loss of the wholeness that Lorde often claimed was her ideal as one might expect of such a protest poem. But, crucially, the poem doesn’t reside in that loss. Rather, it implies that, since “girl” and “women” are implications of wholeness or homogeneity at the heart of existing and inadequate priori-ties of hegemony and of theories of liberation, that perhaps wholeness—at least in these terms—is not the ideal. The lyric remains the vehicle to articulate experience “present to the self” in order, paradoxically, to make the reader aware that this experience may be “pres-ent” but is not in fact transparent even as that experience nonetheless provides epistemic value. The poem also implies that the lyric is only adequate either to reinforce oppressive homogeneity or to show in its failed attempts how its unities do not hold. It does so by articulating the lyric subject as a momentary and incomplete indication of the speaker’s multiple social locations. This poem’s lament thus asks us to reside in a multifaceted rather than unitary subject and in a version of experience as circumscribed knowing. It therefore calls for us to become different kinds of lyric readers.

III

And Lorde’s volume The Black Unicorn most fully articulates and rewards this distinc-tive mode of lyric reading for which Lorde’s innovations call. Lorde consistently requested that the poems in the volume be published only in this order, implying that they constitute some form of coherence. The volume’s first of four sections seems to declare an African-ist origin for black women’s voices based on how fully and explicitly the poems in this section adapt the archetypes and epistemology of Yoruba cosmology. The second section seems to place the poet in the “present” writing in response to topical moments of social upheaval and emotional losses while the third section arguably articulates a vision of the nature of the imagination. The last section can be read as portraying growth and change derived from the first three. But there is no consistency of themes in sections or across sections and there is certainly no closure in the last lines of the last poem of the volume, “Solstice”: “May I never remember reasons / for my spirit’s safety / may I never forget / the warning of my woman’s flesh / weeping at the new moon / may I never lose / that terror / that keeps me brave / May I owe nothing / that I cannot repay” (Lorde 118). These lines gesture toward resolution, as menstruation constitutes a warning against the dangers of patriarchal discourses of motherhood, but menstruation continues, as does the trouble associated with it. Rooted in a season’s transition—summer or winter?—this poem is about change, not resolution, unless resolution means emotional commitment rather than completion. Requesting the “resolve” to continue, the poem “may” imply that the “resolution” is thereby gained. But, as in the house of difference litany quoted above, these prayers are conditional and negate each of their assertions. “Never remember,” for example, strikes my ear as more ambivalent than “forget,” especially as its imperative

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case declares the need for being more active in the forgetting. These troubles could linger in our minds, so we must actively push them away. Thus the ostensible coherence of a narrative of affirmation and resistance in identity politics is rendered as an open-ended yearning, one dependent upon the active forgetting of which the speaker may not be capable, which forgetting may not be an ideal in the first place

Lorde’s genius in this volume, then, is in locating her ideal of affirming lyric multiplic-ity in a diasporic context in order to gather to her lyric practice the tensions in the claims to continuities of cultural heritage that must confront and cannot resolve the readily apparent historical ruptures. In fact, the open-ended yearning produced by diasporic dissonance is precisely what “the black unicorn” is, as the volume’s first poem—its title poem—makes clear.

The black unicorn is greedy. The black unicorn is impatient. The black unicorn was mistaken for a shadow or symboland takenthrough a cold country where mist painted mockeries of my fury.It is not on her lap where the horn rests but deep in her moonpit growing.

The black unicorn is restless the black unicorn is unrelenting the black unicorn is not free. (Lorde, The Black Unicorn 3)

As with “Who Said It Was Simple,” on its pure plain surface, “The Black Unicorn” is conventional protest and affirmation. It portrays the emergence of a coherent, magical black feminist heritage that is “greedy” and “impatient” because it “was mistaken / for a shadow or symbol / and taken / through a cold country.” The poem implies that wintry European imperialism reduced the black unicorn of feminist diasporic cultures into this shadow cast by European culture’s sense of itself. Yet, the black unicorn claims its stereo-typed otherness as agency—just as Sapphire might—by identifying a horn of plenty that is located not in the (white) phallus on the head of the traditional male unicorn but “deep in her moonpit / growing.” Evoking the recognizable European image of the unicorn’s head in the maiden’s lap, Lorde’s phrasing makes sexual penetration and gestation, the phallus and the womb, virginity and eroticism, the simultaneous sources of the black unicorn’s alternative magic. Refuting binaries of Western rationalism in the name of a feminist wholeness, this archetypal black female culture suggests that the black woman’s body, with its allegedly distinctive capacity to homogenize sexual pleasure and mother-ing, literally embodies its dissident feminist values. The poem thus posits a familiar and

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empowering narrative of identity politics framed well by Gay Wilentz: “For black women writers . . . one aim has been to explore how women have passed on their cultural heritage to future generations; what folklorist Beverly Stoeltje calls ‘generational continuity’—to look back through our mothers—is the basis for the commonalities between all women of African descent” (Wilentz 389).

As with Lorde’s best lyrics, though, this poem enhances these identitarian poetics by positing a lyric subject that resists the very implications of wholeness that are ostensibly necessary for its empowered existence: “The black unicorn was mistaken / for a shadow or symbol / and taken / through a cold country / where mist painted mockeries / of my fury.” The appearance of the first-person possessive in the midst of this ostensibly third-person poem jarringly implies a first-person subjective positionality distinct from yet confined by the poem’s dominant third-person narration. Moreover, that self-possession, so to speak, contravenes the reification of black women into a single generational continuity. After all, the fury is “mine,” not “ours,” and that possessiveness depends upon being excluded from dominant discourse in particular and upon resisting any homogeneity or continuity in general. Being “possessed” is being objectified, in other words, as in “my fury” being the object of the preposition. But because the prepositional phrase is isolated on a line, the first person possessiveness straddles the objectification enacted by hegemony on one hand and the ways in which it could objectify itself through homogeneity on the other. Instead, it makes possessiveness into dissonance rather than objectified coherence. Here the lyric “subject” is mocked fury, not coherent generational continuity, and its possessiveness is grammatically dispossessed of agency. It is neither the pre-existing “other” to a dominant culture nor a pre-existing possession of any pre-existing marginalized community. It is not a “self” in any conventional sense. Thus this poem is not a lyric in any conventional sense.

Indeed, here is how Lorde most forcefully remakes the lyric subject. This poem reminds us that the lyric “I” does not signify unity but, in Mutlu Blasing’s description, signifies “the divide between the semiotic and the semantic systems” with the effect that “the conceptual gap [between culture and individual, signifier and signified, etc.]” is “intentionalized in its repetition” (Blasing 10). In other words, the “I” ostensibly bridges the absence that obtains between the semantic and the semiotic by making that absence seem like the agency of a social subject. But the lyric “I” can only claim to bridge this gap and only by negating it and masking the negation. This poem calls attention to these dynamics by withholding its “I.” Instead, the possessiveness of “of my fury” animates or “intentionalizes” this poem’s shift from third to first person firmly enough to assert subjective “presence” for the mar-ginalized subject, a subjectivity claiming to bridge this gap with its “self.” That line and its break enact the disjuncture between object of preposition and subject of a sentence, between social death and privileged presence, thereby enacting a version of the “epistemic” implications of experience that Moya captures so well. In other words, Lorde might have claimed that this disjuncture feels more like the subjective dissonance of the dispossessed and misnamed body and mind than any “I” could capture, a feeling by which we know it. Another way to put it is to say that the poem evokes the priorities of “lyric reading” by emphasizing the possessiveness of an emotion while offering a “postmodern” subject by neglecting to provide the unifying and definitive cue of an “I.” This tension becomes the aesthetic “experience” by which this protest poem works its conventional priority on ethnic affirmation, capturing the feeling Lorde is after of trying to say one’s self without

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buying into the existing and exclusionary language and its episteme with which to say it.There are three key implications here. First, the poem’s intriguing lyric posture re-

quires some of the attentive reading practices of such readers of experimentalism as Yu and Marjorie Perloff whose first move is generally detailed description down to the level of sentence structure, a level of analysis not pursued often enough in studies of African American poetry. Consequently, no one has noted, for example, that in this poem the unicorn expresses itself by possessing its mocked fury in the object of a preposition, a contradictory effect available primarily because the prepositional phrase is given a line to itself. It thus achieves a kind of autonomy of the line characteristic of much free-verse poetry, especially in such a spare poem. Even as the break between the last two lines of the poem suggests that the black unicorn does not exist (“is not / free,” emphasis added), the assertion of its lack of freedom contravenes the sense that it “is not.” In effect, then, disbelief is part of the prison. Such analytical techniques—in many ways, simply straightforward close reading, as Perloff might remind us—enhance our sense of how the poem’s lyric subject struggles against voicelessness without giving in to the universalizing of lyric protest. Thus, the second implication is that such lyricism is in fact innovative—if not exactly experimen-tal—because it refuses narrative coherence or the alleged coherence of the lyric subject.

The third key implication is that Lorde was clearly aware of at least some of these “postmodern” effects since she used this poem—by putting it first—to frame the reader’s attention to similar effects in other lyric poems in the volume. Take for example “A Woman Speaks,” the second poem in the volume, which might otherwise be read as simply locat-ing itself in the feminist tradition of finding voice. But attentiveness to the validation of discontinuity in “The Black Unicorn” should lead one to note how this poem’s claim to voice works through analogously de-centering negation: “I seek no favor,” “I do not mix love with pity / nor hate with scorn,” “I do not dwell / within my birth or my divinities / who am ageless and half-grown / and still seeking” and “I am woman / and not white.” By asserting what she “is not” and “is not seeking,” the speaker implies rather than states what readers might conclude is the ideal of the poem, some alternative, pure, and unitary subject that remains unnamed except for the ultimately inadequate “woman” in the title. Even with its dubious calls for purity, though, the poem complicates its associated call for lyric reading through negations that resist any claim to shared consciousness and thus resists what would otherwise be an endorsement of the unitary ideal it does not mention. The woman here is neither particularized enough for autobiography nor abstract enough for symbol, in other words, so the ideal it implies does not homogenize women, only ne-gates that which prevents these “not white” women from self-assertion. Not “the” woman but “a” woman “and not white,” the speaker invites multiple avenues for identification.

Instead of homogeneous sisterhood, in other words, the poem celebrates the speaker’s multiple origins (“my births”) and her worship at multiple altars (“my divinities”). Even as this persona speaks for many allegedly unanimous black women, it also asserts multiple origins that transform that unitary “I” into a “we” that is “half-grown / and still seeking,” as the poem puts it, a selfhood that is constantly morphing to incorporate multiple, com-peting, contrasting, and opposing facets of the speaker’s identity. In fact, negation calls attention to the provisional epistemic value of existing terms of selfhood, including those of identity politics: “I seek no favor / untouched by blood / unrelenting as the curse of love / permanent as my errors.” First, the speaker seeks no “favors” “untouched by blood,”

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acts of pity marred by the false generosity offered through the bloodless privilege of the empowered. No handouts please! Instead, second, the speaker tries to insist through nega-tion that her negation of that false pity would render wholly into lyric form her negated womanness. Instead of in the experience of pitying identification, then, the subject must be manifest in empowering identification with others like her, but that identification can only be expressed in negated non-rational concepts of being (“pure” emotions that are “ageless” and “half-grown”) and otherwise negated pantheistic, presumably non-Western spiritual practices (“my divinities”), a reference to the rupture of diasporic heritage, not another unitary being. These effects obtain because the line breaks misplace modifiers, making it difficult to sustain the centrality of “favor” as the exclusive referent modified by “untouched by blood,” by “unrelenting,” and by “permanent as my errors.” While the “favor” is quite likely what is “untouched by blood,” then, third, the “I” could as likely be what is “unrelenting” or “permanent,” a strange association given how impermanent the “I” seems here, especially since it may be as permanent as errors. The “I” is consistently constituted by wrong. Consequently, lyric reading cannot fully put this “woman” together.

But what can pull her together is a revised model of lyric voice and its attendant lyric misreading predicated on the multiplicity of the house of difference. Varying standard tropes of feminist poetic voice, “A Woman Speaks” effectively confirms Kimberly Ben-ston’s apt sense that “modern” blackness of the Black Arts era operates in a continuum of performativity. Between poles represented by Ralph Ellison and Amiri Baraka, Lorde’s lyric practice, which Benston does not discuss, enacts a performance ethos exemplified by Ellison’s “blackness of blackness” sermon in Invisible Man:

Ellison’s view of blackness as endless beginning suggests that its meaning does not inhere in any ultimate referent but in the rhythmic process of multiplication and substitution generated from perfor-mance to performance. This is not to say in the least that Ellisonian performance is arbitrary or empty, just that it is not abstracted or objectified. Rather, it is a construct of desire, mobilized at the sight of struggle against various forms of ideological closure. (Benston 13)

Lorde’s consistent negations of her own essentialist assertions constitute just such a mul-tiplication and substitution. What’s more and why it is a shame that Benston does not discuss Lorde, her work nonetheless and simultaneously enacts what Benston describes as Amiri Baraka’s pursuit of an “ultimate referent” of blackness at the other pole of this continuum. But as much as “A Woman Speaks” does presume there to be an “ultimate referent” to black (lesbian feminist) womanhood, the poem nonetheless resists the idea, again in Benston’s sense of Baraka, that hegemony has deferred that referent by enforc-ing performance (Benston 15). Rather “A Woman Speaks” invites whoever might identify with the speaker to perform (or “speak”) her own referent for the black (lesbian feminist) identity, each of which performance can substitute for each other in their multiplying defi-nition of the poem’s ideals of spoken “non-white” womanhood. In other words, Lorde’s postmodern lyric exemplifies the crosscurrents within Black Nationalism that, for Benston, constitutes African American modernism.

“A Woman Speaks” is thus a kind of ars poetica for marginalized women (or lesbians) of color, one which unites elements of feminism, Black Nationalist performance, lesbian

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erotics, and lyric unity into an underestimated conception of (lyric) poetic subjectivity and its dynamics of identification. Take for example this oft-cited description from “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”: “The white fathers told us: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ The Black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: ‘I feel, therefore I can be free’” (Lorde, Sister Outsider 38). “Mother” and “poet” ostensibly name the nationalist erotic, that “deeply female and spiritual plane . . . which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge” through its opposition to the Cartesian rationality of the “white fathers” (Lorde, Sister Outsider 36). However, the terms in this passage, like the negations in the poem, also indicate an uncontained non-essentialized desire that “gives birth” to the cre-ativity that paradoxically is the marginalized “self” from which that creativity allegedly comes. In other words, the “poet” creates its own source (is its own “mother”) by writing it(self) into existence. Lorde means to validate a priori nationalist racial identity and gender difference of black women—the ostensible “us” of the essay—as the source of innovative poetry from a “depth” of a black (lesbian) feminist’s feelings that exist in toto. But what her language does (and Lorde had to notice!) is to imply that this “source” is created by itself, with black female poetic identity being a productive tension instantiated by expression rather than and in addition to an extant referent for that expression. “Us” becomes not just black lesbian feminists, then, but all “not white” “poets” who find Cartesian rationalism and its homogenizing objectification of the self to be inadequate to “our” experience of simultaneous emotional essence and social multiplicity. These are the multiple avenues of identification for feminist voice.

Between “A Woman Speaks” and “The Black Unicorn,” then, we can derive an intrigu-ing model for how the articulation of the experience of social disjunction in Lorde’s lyric practice allows a speaking woman to confront and resist all manner of discursive erasure. One only needs to add diasporic multiplicity to get a full sense of the brilliance of this vision. Also in the volume’s first section, “From the House of Yemanjá” recasts feminist voice and Black Nationalist unity into the performative intimacy that is Lorde’s ultimate ideal. The poem starts with ordinary familial relations: “My mother had two faces and a frying pot / where she cooked up her daughters / into girls / before she fixed our dinner” (6). Here, the speaker recognizes and laments painful recipes (“frying pot”) by which her mother “cooked” her daughters, recipes derived from historical expectations of domestic labor that are central to dominant Western and certain African definitions of femininity. The poem evokes the mother’s conflicting Janus “faces” of archetypal maternal nurturance on one hand and hegemonic discipline on the other. Since the mother “hid out a perfect daughter / who was not me” in a “broken pot,” the origin of “a woman” is at least as much in historical conflict as in generational continuity. A kind of “fury” is created as the speaker “bear[s] two women upon my back / one dark and rich and hidden / in the ivory hungers of the other” (6). The poem suggests that identity is formed “upon” the body, which is to say historically and, in our current terms, discursively. The “rich” dark self is thus, on the one hand, the essentialized self-knowledge allegedly protected from social discipline by articulated negation though, on the other hand, that “self” also functions as a commodity of the “ivory hungers” for both the mother and imperialist cultural poach-ers. That rich dark self is thus, even in its ideal form, an object of pursuit, meaning that commodification is as continuous as any cultural tradition and thus as integral to subject formation as heritage passed down through mothers. As a historicized discourse, then, this rich dark “self” may be as much out of Heart of Darkness as This Bridge Called My Back.

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The Yoruba cosmology, for which the volume supplies a glossary, is crucial here because Lorde both does and undoes the role of diasporic heritage as the “mother culture.” She does so in part by revealing how much Yoruba culture contains within it Black Nationalist, patriarchal, and heterosexist narratives that need to be resisted for a “woman” to speak. The title of the poem alludes to the two legends of the Yoruba matriarchal goddess Yemanjá cited in that glossary. In one legend, the goddess flees being raped at the hands of her son and in the other she was teased by her husband for the size of her breasts and then knocked down. Either way, she dissolved into a river and her destruction paradoxically produced her fertility, as the orisha (the deities of the Yoruba pantheon) emerged from her dissolved body. By claiming to be “from” the house of Yemanjá, then, the speaker mimics a belief common among African Americans—from lay Africanists to the Nation of Islam—that black people have authentic and divine cultural origins in West Africa, except that this mother culture is available only and paradoxically through the destruction of the mother. The speaker pleads three times, “mother I need your blackness now,” yearning for better guidance from her biological mother, truer empowerment from a matriarchal African heritage (Yemanjá), and collective support from a maternal ethnic community. But since no one in the poem responds, the fairy tale three wishes end with the deferral of the un-defined authenticating blackness the three mothers presumably possess and yet withhold much like certain nationalist radicals withheld blackness from lesbians. This absence of maternal response to the speaker’s call negates any simple homologies of black mother and black community. This negation implies what Brent Edwards might call the “prosthetic” blackness of diaspora at the “twoness of the joint” between African and African American cultures where definitions of blackness “can be ‘mobilized’ for a variety of purposes but can never be definitive” (Edwards 14). Alluding to her well-known, career-long explorations of tensions between mothers and daughters, Lorde here places difference and contradiction at the heart of cultural inheritance, calling for the multiplication and substitution of the house of difference rather than the unilateral dictates of any mother culture.

Heritage matters, of course, but only when it is understood as a set of norms and nar-ratives whose crosscurrents contribute to the experience of social dissonance from which emerges the expressivity that actively constitutes the black-unicorn “self.” Not a whole blackness, then, the speaker finds in examining her “mother culture” what Satya Mohanty would call “nonrelativist insights about the political moorings of knowledge” available in the “postpositivist realist” conception of experience as incomplete epistemology, an alternative to the relativist implications of poststructuralist thought and to the static impli-cations of nationalist heritage (Mohanty 41). The poem closes its second verse paragraph with the speaker asserting that the mother’s breasts are “huge exciting anchors / in the midnight storm” which tempt the speaker to be multiply rooted in compromised mater-nal nurturance, authenticating heritage and conventional claims of origin and descent. The speaker uses allegorical language—”All of this has been before”—and “time has no sense”—in order to acknowledge how the conflict among multiple origins and heritages constitutes a long history in social struggle, the realization of which should change this rootedness, though it has not yet done so (Lorde 6). Thus, neither the archetypal nor the biological mother is entirely nourishing because each “breast” remains static in these historical narratives. Such nourishment is thus effectively withheld: “I am the sun and the moon and forever hungry / for her eyes.” The daughter yearns first to see her mother

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look at her properly and identify with her, second, to see through her mother’s eyes and, finally, perhaps like Oedipus, to tear out (and devour?) those offending organs for their lack of (in)sight. Sustaining generational continuity as an alternative to patriarchal Oedipal rupture still means accepting an other’s expectations at the expense of self-determination, which means accepting a mystification of racial, gender, and sexual relations, including those imbedded in traditional lyric voice and identification. The speaker recognizes how both Oedipal conflict and certain feminist alternatives of identity formation reside in social discipline, in the interpellation of subjects into the capitalist, imperialist social order through a well-run domesticity. The speaker’s recognition of the historicity of such conflicts becomes the foundation of identity formation as resistance and lyric practice as a different kind of affirmation.

Since neither Black Nationalist authenticity nor (white) feminist lyric identification will do, the poem enacts in its syntactical and linear arrangements another model of lyric subject formation, voice, and identification.

I amthe sun and moon and forever hungrythe sharpened edge where day and night shall meetand not beone. (Lorde, The Black Unicorn 9)

The speaker is, first of all, as the line break emphasizes, but the “I’s” existence is none-theless metaphorically deferred as the dialectical “meaning” implied by the opposition between sun and moon—the multiple archetypal associations we can substitute for them—is thwarted by the third term of the undefined hunger. Whether read as metaphor or metonymy, these terms multiply and substitute as Lorde not only refuses to mask these gaps in binary opposition through the “I” but calls attention to the tyrannical desire for order they evoke. I am reminded of Lorde’s poem “Coal” from the volume of that name, which begins, “I / is the total black” (Coal 81, emphasis added). In this case, the “I” “is” a non-dualistic product of the tripartite mothers’ two-faced raising that refuses to fit neatly into allegorical or archetypal dialectics.

It seems to me, then, that Lorde recognizes that reading is almost by definition mis-reading (by which I mean open-ended rereading) even in self-definition, a desire for order that must be both fulfilled and thwarted for feminist voice and lesbian feminist unity to obtain. Her lyrics thus offer a moderate version of what Juliana Spahr would describe in Stein, Mullen, and others as “works that recognize reading’s dangers, its potential exclu-sions, and work to make this relationship more productive,” doing so by “rewarding readers’ responsive involvement and awareness of their limitations” (Spahr 5, 6). First of all, these lines from the poem echo the end of the first verse paragraph, except that the speaker is no longer hungry for her mother’s eyes as at the beginning of the poem—she is just hungry, an obvious indication of desire not yet satiated. The Oedipal figurative dismemberment is complete, too, meaning that that way of reading is inadequate in its fated conclusiveness. This effect allows the speaker, as Moya might have put it, to revise

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her understanding of the same relation to her mother as before in light of experience. It also puts the reader potentially in the role of the now-discredited mother, a posture in which we are challenged not to reside in static reading of heritage. Instead of yearning to be identified (with) by her mother, including us, the speaker hungers to identify (with) herself with and through that alienation from mother and mother culture. Consequently, the sun and the moon are no longer associated directly with the orbs of the mother’s eyes or the archetypal Yoruba mother’s disparaged breasts; they are fully revealed as indefinite in their meaning and allow even as they defy the reader’s attempts to fix them. Moreover, the speaker’s claims to “be” the sun and the moon, with their opposed associations of masculine and feminine, and with the hunger now “forever” without object, more fully reveal that such oppositions as male and female, mother and father, light and dark, cannot be sustained. Indeed, Yemanjá herself is associated with the ocean, the nourishing flows rather than static or linear continuity, and with being submerged rather than being a fixed source. These juxtapositions affirm that identity is not identical, “is” in fact the “sharpened edge” where these three aspects—sun, moon, and hunger—do not meet. There is actually no “one” at the end of the poem. And any reader trying to find it will only bind it to the bed of something.

Consequently, Lorde’s lyric misreading rereads lyric identification and self-declaration into a fairly explicit call for a mutually constituting intimacy among reader, poet, and poem. The intimacy alleged to be available in identity-based coalitions explodes its own boundaries by confronting and revising what Lauren Berlant called the “narrative of ‘a life,’” the presupposed privacy and fulfillment of controlled relations, as “Recreation” from the volume’s third section suggests: “you create me against your thighs / hilly with images / moving through our word countries / my body / writes into your flesh / the poem / you make of me” (81). Rather than distant eyes or preconceived recipes, the “life” that Berlant aptly declares is defeated by intimacy, the poem validates a loving touch which “creates,” rewriting traditional family values of heterosexual fidelity and private domestic intimacy into a promiscuous interaction among at least three. Here, the body’s contours are “hilly” like natural landscapes and thus inspire each lover to imagine “im-ages” that come to constitute, in a kind of sensual landscape painting, “our” unarticulated “word countries.” Physical contact “writes” these “word countries” on the body of the other which first had to create the poem that is “me” in the first place. Poets and readers are impressive lovers indeed, utterly interdependent and inextricable in their mutual constitution, much like “mother” and “poet,” with their writing constantly being deferred through metaphorical substitution. Consequently, writing on the body through touch is more important for these lesbian “poets” than traditional writing implements because this deferred and mutual writing defies the masculinist public sphere, heteronormative capitalism, and phallocentric logos rooted in homogenizing abstraction associated with those implements: “paper and pen / neither care nor profit / whether we write or not” (81). This rejection of unilateral writing points readers to an intimacy that may be possible beyond the written word but available only through that word. By instantiating such an undisciplined intimacy, it reminds us, as Berlant might have, how intimacy as a discourse and an experience bridges private and public and defies the boundaries meant to contain it, rewriting the narrative of “a life” to defiant open-endedness. And Lorde embraces this open-endedness as destabilizing, as Berlant suggests, but also as formative of strategic

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coalition in a way that Berlant might not. With the voyeurism of this poem, then, readers are brought into the activist’s artistic imagination by being the strangely necessary third party to a twosome, the reader that validates this alternative kind of writing, its strategi-cally natural coalition of bodily intimacy in the words of a poem.

In fact, this commitment to a liberating intimacy constitutes the very interesting limit of Lorde’s innovation, an epistemic conventionality that makes her postmodernism all the more compelling to me. And I think Hughes would have approved. At the end of the day, in other words, Lorde wants the unitary presence of the lyric “I” no matter how much she complicates it, and effectively if dubiously claims to reconstitute it through those compli-cations. As with “of my fury,” juxtaposition through lineation in “Recreation” is meant to feel like an authoritative “I.” The technique is the Greek apo koinu, which is the placing of one line in two different syntactical positions in relation to the preceding and succeeding lines. As Amitai Avi-Ram puts it, the effect is “to suspend us in a white—blank—space” between “two opposing categories in order to lead the reader to dwell in [that] vacant space between the two” (Avi-ram 195, 198). Many of Lorde’s poems offer this suspension with the implication that the speaking “I” traverses it without negating or masking it. The characters in “Recreation” traverse it instead through a “we”: they are “moving through our word countries / my body / writes into your flesh / the poem / you make of me.” This suspension makes the word “body” simultaneously a synonym for “word countries,” and thus the object of the preposition, and the agent writing word countries into the flesh of the other. Thus the body becomes a locus of subjective presence, both made and mak-ing, that the poem posits as its ideal of the lyric subject. Not quite essentialized, though, this empowered “lyric” body becomes that onto which Lorde displaces the discredited lyric “I” only when that body is in mutually constituting interaction with another body. And this strategy is necessarily misreading, since there is no absolutely correct way to read these lines, and in fact there are two simultaneously correct, contrasting ways to read any moment of apo koinu. Thus, as in the line break and prepositional phrase of “of my fury,” that presence thus becomes what a “woman speaks” through dissonant negation, a postmodern dissonant and dissident return to an old-fashioned lyric posture that, to my mind at least, nonetheless remains largely impervious to postmodern critique because of how it is constituted so multiply and intimately.

In the end, then, Lorde’s lyric innovations—when noticed properly as part of a post-modern moment—participate fully in the recasting of the lyric for the sake of nationalist and feminist activism by casting it through “postmodern” poetic de-centering of the lyric self she nonetheless centers. Lorde is of her postmodern time both in her investment in identity and in her commitment to even her moderate innovations of form in order to critique hegemonic notions of identity, including her own. Readers of Lorde have rendered her a poet of straightforward affirmation of the desire for and possibility of black lesbian feminist wholeness. And she is. But she is also the poet of subjectivity as subordinated possessiveness, the poet of house-of-difference multiplicity and the poet of the consequent versions of communalist intimacy, all of which derives from how she both is and is not the poet of conventional lyric protest. As Ramey and Nielsen teach us, detaching “innova-tive” from “experimental” opens up ways of seeing poetic newness in slightly or vastly different places than we have been accustomed to. Moreover, it urges scholars of African American poetics in particular to see a relation between “vernacular” and “innovative”

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traditions that will not so fully silence the “adventurous black lyric” because this work is directly in line with our communalist, vernacular tradition. Thus, Lorde need not be justified in the terms of “white” postmodern innovation in order for those terms to help us to illuminate a distinctive black lesbian feminist practice of the lyric. In his time, Langston Hughes saw something like this coming and, in his advocacy, remains at the vanguard. Let us do as Ramey and Nielsen say and join him there.

NOTE

1. This neglect is primarily in Lorde scholarship, which discusses Lorde’s poems individually and not in terms of genre. More to the point, most scholarship on Lorde focuses on her prose, always the essays in Sister Outsider, often Zami: A Brand New Spelling of My Name and sometimes The Cancer Journals. See for example Alexander; Carr; Keating; Wright. There is, to my knowledge, no discussion of Lorde among the best-known and best-respected scholars of poetics and / or the avant-garde.

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Baker, Houston. Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.Benston, Kimberly. Performing Blackness: Enactments of African American Modernism. New Jersey: Routledge,

2000.Berlant, Lauren. Spec. issue of Critical Inquiry 24.2 (1998): 281–640.Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007.Bolden, Tony. Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture. U of Illinois P, 2004.Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.Carr, Brenda. “’A Woman Speaks . . . I am Woman and Not White’: Politics of Voice, Tactical Essentialism,

and Cultural Intervention in Audre Lorde’s Activist Poetics and Practice.” College Literature 20.2 (1993): 133–153.

Dhairyam, Sagri. “’Artifacts for Survival’: Remapping the Contours of Poetry with Audre Lorde.” Feminist Studies 18.2 (1992): 229–56.

Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003.

hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, 1981. Jackson, Virginia. Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005.Jones, Meta DuEwa. “Jazz Prosodies: Orality and Textuality.” Callaloo 25.1 (2002): 66–91.Karenga, Ron. The Quotable Karenga. Los Angeles: US Organization, 1967.Keating, AnaLouise. Women Reading, Women Writing: Self Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldǔa and

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