Audre Lorde’s Privacy

Audre Lorde was living on St. Croix in 1989 when the island was struck by Hurricane Hugo, a massive tropical cyclone that nearly swept it underneath the ocean. Ninety percent of the buildings on St. Croix were damaged or destroyed, supply lines were disrupted throughout the Caribbean, and basic infrastructure like power and water were offline for months. Lorde wasn’t harmed, but her house was badly damaged and she spent months living off a generator, and her only means of communication with the outside world were handwritten letters. 

One of the people that Audre Lorde wrote letters to was Dagmar Schultz, who at the time was a professor of sociology at the Freie Universität Berlin. Schultz had invited Lorde to visit the university as a guest lecturer in 1984, and the two women maintained a friendship and correspondence ever since. Lorde returned to Berlin many times over the last eight years of her life, as a lecturer, then for her own readings and publications, and finally to receive an experimental form of cancer therapy. 

Two years after Hurricane Hugo, while sitting in Dagmar Schultz’s kitchen, Audre Lorde began to write the poem “Restoration: A Memorial – 9/18/91”. In the poem, she reflects on life in the aftermath of the hurricane – the destruction of her house, the devastation of the landscape, the slow process of rebuilding, the moments of joy – and on what it means to think back on this time and place from somewhere very different. 

The letters that Adure Lorde wrote to Dagmar Schultz, as well as a trove of other materials from her many visits to Berlin, are now kept at the Audre Lorde Archive at the Freie Universität Berlin. The FU Review received the rights to publish a selection of these works in our tenth issue. These include several letters that Lorde wrote to Schultz from St. Croix after Hurricane Hugo and an early draft of the “Restoration” poem, which shows edits that Lorde made in pen.

On its own, the annotated version of “Restoration” provides a fascinating window into Lorde’s creative process. You can see stanzas that have been crossed out, lines that are eliminated or moved to a different part of the poem, and minute adjustments to the orders of words. When taken alongside the letters that Lorde wrote from St. Croix, though, something perhaps even more astonishing happens: an entire system of private symbols and references becomes visible and viscerally real. 

Consider the following lines from the poem:  quite a bit of the house is left / our bedroom spared / except for the ankle deep water / and terrible stench. In her first letter to Dagmar Schultz after the hurricane, Lorde writes: “The house is half gone, & the roof and both porches & all the plate glass doors. My studio held, except for the flooding.” In another letter: “Life is very elemental now, & goodies help. But cooking on a fire where the hibiscus hedge used to be in front of the door is quite nice when it doesn’t rain.” And again from the poem: Your red shirt / hung out on a bush to dry / is the only flower for weeks. 

There are layers that exist outside of the text as well. While we were discussing the poem with Dagmar Schultz, for example, she pointed to a series of lines in the first stanza: Death like a burnt star / perched on the rime of my tea cup / flaming the honey drips from my spoon / sunlight flouncing off the gargoyles opposite. These gargoyles, Schultz explained, are visible from the kitchen window of her apartment in Schoneberg. Lorde would have been sitting at the table next to the window, drinking tea, watching the play of the light. 

What do we do with the knowledge that Lorde’s images are often so grounded in a personal reality that it is impossible for the reader to understand? One argument is that this approach rejects the idea that poetry needs to be a confessional space, that the reader needs to understand exactly what is going on, that the poet needs to make themselves known. The poems, after all, belong to Audre Lorde. Here, we may hear her say, is something of mine, for me and those that I love. 

The problem with having this be our only reading is that this poem was at some point intended for publication. So clearly Lorde did believe that there was some value to communicating these particular images to a public that would not fully understand the reality they were grounded in. In fact, this may have been the point all along – to develop a form of public existence that honored her privacy and that of those around her. It doesn’t seem to be too far of a stretch to imagine that, for Lorde, the rejection of the exposed and public nature of labor was itself a valuable, even necessary, act. 

When we were developing Issue 10 of the FU Review, the question of privacy was one that we wrestled with. If Lorde intended for her imagery to retain a certain opaqueness, is there something violative about opening this process up to the public? The poetry that she published was of course something that she prepared for the public to read, but what about her private letters, what about the lines of her poems that she crossed out? We spent several months in discussions about whether to move forward with the project, and then how to go about doing it the right way. Ultimately, though, Audre Lorde isn’t around to tell us how to approach the project, so the question of her approval will have to remain open. 

So what, then, is there to be gained from pulling back this particular curtain? For one thing, we see Audre Lorde in a very particular form of her humanity. At this point, Lorde has reached a sort of towering status in the minds of her many readers. In her letters from St. Croix, we see her complaining about the quality of a pair of glasses frames that she bought from a german optometrist. At one point, she asks Dagmar Schultz to go to the 3rd floor of the KaDeWe to buy an asian snack mix and some sheets of seaweed paper. She complains about the smell of wet carpets, the struggles of trying to work at night when the generator goes out. Seeing all of this, and to see how she later transmutes it into her poetry, is a revelation in its own right. 

For all this talk of uncovering, though, perhaps the most valuable thing about these texts is that they remind us of how much of Lorde’s work continues to remain private, how much is still unknown, how much will necessarily stay unknown. Even after working with “Restoration” for almost a year, there are still things that we don’t know about it. And this is where we’ll end – with the last lines of Lorde’s poem, which reference another set of letters, which we have not seen.

In this alien and temporary haven / my poisoned fingers slowly return to normal / I read your letter dreaming / the perspective of a bluefish / or a fugitive parrot / watch the chemicals leaving my nails / as my skin takes back its weakness. / Learning to laugh again. 

Written by: Elif Çakmak and Moses Hubbard

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